Anti-Tank Warfare And Attrition In Ukraine

Tanks really only make sense against adversaries who don't have anti-tank weapons, and they aren't very useful as anti-tank weapons themselves. 

Heavy armored formations and mechanized units engineered for dispersed, yet “linear” attacks to penetrate and hold enemy territory are not likely disappearing anytime soon as a critical element of modern Combined Army Maneuver, yet there is little question that the warfare in Ukraine is re-defining certain key ground-war tactics in favor of lightweight, de-centralized, agile and ground-fired anti-tank weapons used by dispersed, dismounted forces and fast, light tactical vehicles. When combined with precise overhead surveillance, unmanned systems and some measure of effective networking, Ukrainians armed with shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons continue to exact a devastating toll upon Russian assault platforms.

A significant Army Intelligence Report called the “The Operational Environment 2024-2034 Large-Scale Combat Operations.” (US Army Training and Doctrine Command, G2) says that Russia’s entire active duty tank force has been destroyed in its war with Ukraine.

“Ukrainian Armed Forces have used vast quantities of man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS), antitank guided missiles, and FPV UAS—combined with fires—to great effect. As of July 2024, Russia has lost 3,197 main battle tanks—more than its entire active-duty inventory at the outset of conflict—and 6,160 armored fighting vehicles, forcing them to pull increasingly obsolescent systems from storage,” the text of the report from 2024 states.

From Warrior Maven.

As I noted in a previous post, Russia has lost more than 2/3 of its major military systems and is on track to have lost about 3/4 of them by the third anniversary of the war on February 24, 2025. 

Ukraine has the clear advantage when it comes to replacing major military systems. The U.S. and other NATO countries are giving Ukraine large amounts of modern major military systems. Russia has only feeble domestic industrial capacity to build such systems in quantity, in contrast, and is pretty much limited to what it can buy from Iran and what North Korea will give it. China hasn't shut out Russia entirely but isn't arming it either. Ukraine's domestic war production has also been impressive. For example, it has built and used at least 1.2 million armed drones.

As many of 750,000 Russian troops (including their North Korean allies) may have died, been injured, or captured by that time, a number which already exceeds 600,000. Russia's active duty military personnel at the start of the war numbered 900,000, of which 300,000 to 500,000 were navy and air force personnel. Russian casualties equal or exceed the total number of ground forces that it had at the outset of the war.

The best estimates are that 11,000-12,000 North Korean troops have joined the fight. But multiple thousands of them are already casualties in their first few weeks in action. Apparently, North Korean troops are being used as cannon fodder in mass human wave attacks reminiscent of World War I and the Russo-Japanese War - tactics that were discredited a century ago.

Russia has the advantage when it comes to replacing casualties with new conscripts and forces like mercenaries and North Korean soldiers, because it has a much larger population than Ukraine and Ukraine's allies are not yet lending it troops. But neither combatant has any significant capacity to replace seasoned military officers who are lost in the conflict in the short term.