‘Rise of the Robo-Tank’ as chilling new war machines evolve to blitz killer drones

‘Rise of the Robo-Tank’ as chilling new war machines evolve to blitz killer drones

[Music] our tanks dead American Abram tanks are being pulled off the front line in Ukraine because they are too vulnerable to cheap Russian drones is this as some suggest the final death nail of the main battle tank I’m Jerome starky and this is World at War my guest today is General Sir Richard Barons one of Britain’s foremost military mines and a former joint chief of Britain’s Armed Forces General Baron thank you for joining us today are tanks dead have they got a future yeah of course tanks are are not dead if you’re on a battlefield and people are dropping bombs on you firing artillery at you using machine guns and mines you’re going to want an armored vehicle you’re going to want an armored vehicle with tracks on it so you can travel across country with any without any inhibitions and you’re going to want to take a big gun and some very effective sites with you into the fight but the tanks are going to change because they are at risk from drones so we’re going to see an evolution of armored vehicles and very soon they will turn up with counter drone capab capability on them and it’ll all be more in Balance again so so this technology leap frogging itself I I would not want to be in a tank in Ukraine at the moment I mean the number of videos we’ve seen of these fpv drones seeking them out you know dropping through the turrets or or hitting them in the tracks destroying them they they appear incredibly vulnerable at the moment well tanks have always been vulnerable to people who can get close to them in the air or on the ground so so what we need to see is an evolution of equipment and tactics so uh we need to talk about the orchestra of RA a fusion of what the tank can do but also infantry and artillery and other sorts of capability in the in the air and it’s the blend of those things that makes you effective on the battlefield and and when we talk about first person view drones yes they’re having a significant effect in some cases that’s because Ukraine hasn’t got enough artillery ammunition and in in other cases it’s a short in in in tactics but roughly speaking only one in 10 drones makes it through the electronic interference that it has to find its uh path through and and that means they’re not as effective as they sometimes appear I am I spent some time with the Challenger Squadron in Ukraine so I think we donated 14 and a couple of what handful being used for training but it was really interesting and I went there expecting to hear stories about how amazing these tanks have been we hear so much about how formidable the Challenger tank is you know and you know what it can achieve but actually it was a much more nuanced picture they were saying that they felt the tank was underpowered it kept on getting stuck in the terrain in fact when I was with it it got stuck one of the tanks I was with got stuck in the mud and they had to pull up another one and drag it out I mean is that a challenger problem is that a tank problem is that Terrain in Ukraine what what’s going on so UK gave Ukraine 14 Challenger 2 tanks these are this is 199 90s vintage equipment and the crews that Ukraine have trained on those tanks are inexperienced and I would say that a much more experienced UK crew would be savier about where they drove how they got there and and how they fought the tank so there’s bound to be an experienced deficit but the fact is the Challenger two is an old tank and therefore it is going to struggle against some Modern equipment but there aren’t new tanks I mean the leopard 2 is an old tank the Abrams is is an old tank I mean the appears perhaps only it’s it’s the armata the Russian armata but they’re not really bringing that into battle I mean this is a war of old tanks fighting old tanks um yes it is uh but there are new tanks so the UK is buying the Challenger 3 so that’ll be more powerful it’ll have a different and better gun and upgrated armor and other systems that were protected Against drones so we should recognize the tank is in a state of evolution but the key point for me here is you can’t just give someone a tank it’s a really complicated machine and expect them to brilliant with it they have got to learn and be trained and get experience and that’s going to take a season or two one of the messages that came through in Ukraine was that um NATO tanks are tank killing tanks they’re designed to shoot and Destroy other tanks whereas the soldiers who were using them the ukrainians had grown up on Soviet era equipment they’ grown up on uh t-72s t8s th those tanks were used differently is that your understanding of the sort of doctrines is there a difference so if you go back to the Cold War which finished in 1989 the heart of the land battle there was a battle between tanks between the Challenger 2 and the t72 and the and and the T90 that dominated the battlefield things are different now for two big reasons the the one is the battlefield has become transparent from the sky and from other sources of of data so you can’t move a tank at night and hope not to be spotted or hide it in a wood it’s much more difficult but more than that the Advent of precision weapons from the sky and from from the ground means if you can see a tank you can kill it at really large ranges so it’s finding a different place in this Orchestra of War but I come back to the point I made at the start on a battlefield full of shrap and bullets you are going to need an armored vehicle and you’re going to want a big gun have you noticed them playing a significant role in the Israel Gaza campaign we have seen we have seen tanks there but again uh you know different threat picture and yet they don’t even there they don’t appear to have been a sort of defining weapon of the conflict so in in in a scenario like Gaza you’d expect the tank to be used differently it’s clearly not um going to find uh Hamas tanks to fire at but it’s a really good way of dominating particularly open ground it’s not a good thing to fight in an urban area unless you were really sure that the enemy is kept some distance away from you but if you need to knock a building down then you’ll use a tank and in terms of the evolution of where these weapons are going uh you mentioned that Britain’s upgrading its Fleet to Challenger 3es but at the same time it’s going down from 227 28 I think down to about 150 just under 150 are is the increase in capability that these tanks are going to have going to compensate for the fact we’re going to have 80 fewer of them ABS absolutely not in in one key regard which is most European armed forces the UK included have the armies that they ended up with at the end of about 30 years of postc Cold War Decline and hollowing out so right now we have the Army the postc Cold War era left us with when we need an army fit for the pre-war world that our own government says that we need to face up to so we’re going to need bigger and more effective armies however there is one huge play coming which is right now most of our tanks or all of our tanks are crewed by people but what’s coming is a mix of tanks crewed by people and autonomous tanks that follow them and are effectively their loyal wingmen just as we see in in the sky and this Advent of autonomous capability like tanks and artillery and infantry Vehicles is going to be a different way of making armies bigger and more effective this is Robo tanks this is Robo tanks and and how quickly are they going to come in these these vehicles all already exist for example there’s a South koreen firm called Hana that makes a really good 155 mm self-propelled artillery gun about 3 years from now you can buy one with a crew on it and two that just follow it around with no people on it at all that’s where this is going and it’s going to look like a tank it’s going to sound like a tank I mean you know well there’ll be a big difference in that if you make a vehicle that’s never going to have people in it you’re not going to give it seats and the space for a human to maneuver and you may even protect it differently so I’d expect them to be lower faster cheaper and of course if it’s a machine it doesn’t need to train like a human so they’ll be cheaper to buy cheaper to operate you won’t care if you lose them so it’s the whole new recipe in in what is part of the biggest transformation of how you make an army navy and Air Force for about 150 years why is it taken so long why hasn’t it happened already mean the technology exists we’ve seen it with the drones you mentioned Hana making it an sorry an autonomous self-propelled gun why do you think this hasn’t happened already with tanks well it’s not happened because the the the urgency the necessity this is an expensive thing perhaps wasn’t there before the war in Ukraine but actually what we’re seeing here is the application of Technology that’s being developed in the Civil sector so autonomous cars um from Google and many other people are are producing the technology at tens of billions of dollars that will then be applied into the military Arena so to some degree you’ve got to wait for the Civil sector to crack it and then pass it across to the military it’s the absolute reverse of innovation the Second World War General Richard Baron tanks are not dead but perhaps tanks as we know them might be the future Robo tanks autonomous tanks driven by Google and self-driving cars thank you very much for joining us I’m Jerome starky and this is World at War if you’re watching on YouTube and you have any questions please ask them in the comments below and we will do our best to answer them next week

‘Rise of the Robo-Tank’ as chilling new war machines evolve to blitz killer drones.

Sir Richard Barrons spoke to The Sun’s Defence Editor Jerome Starkey on The Sun’s brand new show ‘World at War’ to discuss the biggest innovations and challenges facing tanks since the emergence of drones.

– Contents of video –
00:00 – 00:19 – World at War introduction
00:19 – 02:14 – Are tanks dead?
02:14 – 03:41 – Ukraine’s fight with old tanks
03:41 – 04:46 – Britain’s new Challenger 3 tanks
04:46 – 05:22 – Drones blitz Russian tanks on frontlines
05:22 – 06:03 – Israeli tanks in Gaza
06:03 – 06:48 – Britain’s depleted forces
06:48 – 08:55 – Rise of the ‘Robo-Tank’
08:55 – 09:20 – Final comments
ENDS

Read more:
Blitz Russian heartlands, arm the people & pump in weapons…general reveals what’s needed NOW for Ukraine to smash Putin
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/27914580/strike-russia-ukraine-smash-putin/

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