Powerful Missiles Make The Ride Irrelelvant

What Was

World War II was the last hurrah of the cannons and heavy armor. 

Heavily armored tanks in large numbers with big guns took each other on directly. 

Howitzers that were the culmination of cannon ball hurlers from the 19th century were aimed with guess work informed by forward observers with binoculars, fired heavy shells beyond the line of sight on a path determined by trigonometry and Newtonian mechanics. 

Battleships with thick iron hulls fired eight and sixteen inch diameter shells from giant naval guns at each other within a line of sight with the alpha predators of the sea in that era. Now, there is just one battleship left in service in all of the navies of the world combined (Russia's 28,000 ton Kirov class battle cruiser) and even it relies more on guided missiles than big naval guns - it has one 130mm twin naval gun firing shells a bit more than 5 inches in diameter (slightly larger than the largest U.S. naval naval guns found on U.S. destroyers).

There are still modern paramilitary ships like Coast Guard cutters which are being built with only direct fire cannons (25mm) rather than anti-ship missiles, but those ships are designed for maritime law enforcement against civilian ships and smugglers, not as naval surface combatants against warships.

Air to air combat accompanying the Dunkirk evacuation was typical, with fighters shooting large bullets at each other at close range. Anti-aircraft weapons were basically large caliber machine guns.

What Is

Sophisticated guided missiles have changed the calculus of war. Now, pretty much any vehicle large enough to carry a guided missile, even a bicycle, is adequate, since all of the offensive capabilities are in the largely self-contained missile and the missiles are fired from beyond the range of opposing military forces, if possible.

Ground Forces

On the ground, not even the heaviest tank's armor can withstand a modern guided anti-tank missile. 

U.S. military officials estimate that at least 1000 Russian tanks, and perhaps half as many Ukrainian tanks have been destroyed in the last 100 days of the Ukrainian war, 

But, there is not a single news report of a decisive battle there in which main tank guns have played an important part. Tanks main guns have been used against targets like civilian apartment buildings after other forces cleared the way for them to get close enough to fight.

The U.S. Marine Corps is in the process of divesting itself of its last tanks. It is trading them out for lighter trucks mounted with anti-ship missiles. Ukrainian Army forces used something similar earlier this year to destroy the largest warship in Russia's Black Sea fleet.

Instead, Ukrainian forces are deploying them on unarmored vehicles as feeble as buggies and bicycles that are cheaper, better at stealth attacks, and more nimble.

A Ukrainian military buggy a.k.a. all-terrain vehicles, with a domestically made Stugna-P anti-tank guided missile mounted on top of it.

A Ukrainian military buggy carrying Ukrainian-made Corsar anti-tank missiles.

Ukrainian forces have deployed large batteries of U.K.-made Brimstone anti-tank missiles by simply depositing the missile launchers on the back of a civilian flatbed truck.

A Ukrainian soldier with an E-Bike deploying with a U.S.-made Javelin anti-tank missile. E-Bikes are also being used for reconnaissance and courier missions by the Ukrainian military since they are silent, cheap, and easily hidden, but faster than walking and capable of carrying loads as heavy as an overburdened infantryman.

U.S. Delta Forces sometimes deploy with dirt bikes by parachute, and then call in air strikes as forward observers, or direct military air traffic from near the front lines acting as air traffic controllers for primitive field airstrips to which troops and military gear are delivered by C-130 transport planes.

Aircraft

In Vietnam, U.S. Forces converted C-130 transport aircraft into AC-130 gunships by mounting 105mm howitzers or 25-40 mm auto-cannons pointing out their sides. Now, the MC-130W gunships are C-130 transport aircraft mounted with 4 Hellfire anti-tank guided missiles originally designed for use on attack helicopters and 10 smaller guided Griffin missiles on them.

Similarly, the Air Force has developed the capacity to deploy cruise missiles from the cargo bay of a C-17, its intermediate sized long range transport aircraft, transferring a mission previous reserved for large, long range bomber aircraft to aircraft previously reserved for freight transport duty.

The sequel to the movie "Top Gun" featuring a naval aviation school teaching U.S. military pilots the aerial aerobatic tactics needed in these kinds of fights is now in a movie theater near you. But, air to air combat between fighter jets was extremely rare, at least before the Ukraine War, that has seen a number of instances of it. Air to air combat has become rare, and you can count on your fingers air-to-air dog fight fought with direct fire weapons not involving a "one shot-one kill" scenario in the last forty years. As one account notes:

While hundreds of fighter pilots became aces (someone who has shot down at least five aircraft) during World War II, aces have been increasingly rare ever since. There were some during the thirty years after World War II ended in 1945. Mostly during the few wars that did get fought. The last pilot, of any air force, to qualify as an ace was Jalal Zandi of the Iranian Air Force, who shot down 14 Iraqi aircraft in the late 1980s, while flying a U.S. made F-14. . . .

While there have been few aces since the 1940s, there have been several thousand air-to-air encounters by jet fighters. There’s enough data on nearly 2,000 of these encounters to do some analysis. What this has shown is a very clear trend in which electronics and long range missiles are becoming more important while aircraft speed and maneuverability is much less of a factor. Thus the growing appeal to upgrade older aircraft (including F-5s, F-4s and MiG-21s) with modern electronics that make them capable to using long range air-to-air missile (like the radar guided American AMRAAM or the Israeli Derby). 

AC-208 image from here.

Since 2014, the Iraqi Air Force has been using a base of civilian Cessna general aviation aircraft fitted with Hellfire guided missiles (originally designed for use as anti-tank weapons on American attack helicopters) and related targeting systems, a model called the AC-208, for air to ground attack missions. This has been used by military forces in Afghanistan, Argentina, Honduras, Kenya, Lebanon, Mauritania, Niger, and Yemen.

Naval Forces

Iran has taken this trend to the sea, outfitting ordinary speedboats with small anti-ship missiles and small torpedoes. While small, cheap, are comparatively primitive, this missile boats are at the core of an Iranian naval that has become a force to be reckoned with in the Persian Gulf. 

Since Iran can afford buy a lot of them and deploy them in "swarms" it has forced major naval powers operating in the region with warships optimized to respond to a small number of large conventional warships to try to develop new weapons to strike many small targets in short succession to respond to swarm attacks.

Forbes magazine discusses how Ukraine could easily add ad hoc armaments to commercial ships to create a commerce raider navy:

Tugs, fishing-boats, and even barges can be modified easily to hide all kinds of improvisational armament, endowing almost any platform with the delightful capability to scare, harass, and even sink Russian vessels—almost anywhere in the world. Those countries that have the most to lose from Russia’s illegal attack upon the world’s breadbasket should rush to quietly slip Ukrainian volunteers the floating assets necessary to discomfit Russia’s maritime presence.

In time, no Russian fishing boat, oil tanker, or intelligence trawler should cruise any sea without at least some measure of concern.

It doesn’t take much. A few basic anti-ship missiles or loitering suicide drones launched from an ersatz workboat-like “combatant” can seriously complicate life for any Slava-class cruiser that might otherwise be enjoying a balmy Mediterranean cruise or Atlantic transit. Russia would be hard-pressed to respond as their attackers either disappeared into nearby maritime traffic or scuttled themselves, with the crew vanishing into the Black Sea littorals, the Mediterranean, the English Channel or elsewhere aboard high-speed craft.

This type of conflict could even play out in the Black Sea. Turkey doesn’t spend much effort searching civilian craft that pass through the Bosporus and Dardanelles, and, with regional Black Sea smuggling an already vibrant enterprise, it should be relatively easy for a skilled operator on the Ukrainian payroll to hide even a big, conventional anti-ship missile from an unmotivated Turkish inspector or channel pilot. With big conventional anti-ship missiles clocking in at about 1/3rd the weight of a Ford F-150 pickup, there’s room for talented smugglers to demonstrate their skill set in hiding, running-out a missile, and firing on a Russian vessel of opportunity.

The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, is considering arming its transport ships to increase the number of surface combatants it has available to it, and to make them more survivable.