But Moscow’s problems outweigh the huge number of tanks it has lost. Experts say the images on the battlefield show that Russian tanks are suffering from a defect known to Western armies for decades and refer to it as a “jack-in-the-box effect”. Moscow, they say, should see the problem come. The problem is with how the ammunition is stored in the tanks. Unlike modern western tanks, the Russians carry multiple shells in their turrets. This makes them extremely vulnerable as even an indirect blow can trigger a chain reaction that explodes their entire stockpile of ammunition with up to 40 shells. The resulting shock wave may be enough to blow up the tank turret as high as a two-story building, as seen in a recent social media video. “What we’re seeing with Russian tanks is a design flaw,” said Sam Bendett, a consultant with the Russian Studies Program at the Center for New American Security. “Any successful blow … quickly ignites the ammunition causing a huge explosion and the turret literally explodes.” The defect means the tank crew – usually two men in the turret and a third leading – are sitting ducks, said Nicholas Dramont, a defense analyst specializing in land warfare and a former British Army officer. “If you do not go out within the first second, you are toast.”
The “jack-in-the-box” effect.
Drummond said the explosive munitions were causing problems for almost all of the armored vehicles used by Russia in Ukraine. He gave the example of the BMD-4 infantry fighting vehicle, which is usually manned by up to three crews and can carry five other soldiers. He said the BMD-4 was a “mobile coffin” that “just disappeared” when hit by a rocket. But the design flaw with its tanks should be particularly painful for Moscow, as the problems have been telegraphed so widely. They came to the attention of Western troops during the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, when large numbers of Russian-made Iraqi Army T-72 tanks had the same fate – turrets were fired from their bodies with anti-tank missile strikes. Drummond said Russia had not learned its lessons from Iraq and that, as a result, many of its tanks in Ukraine had design flaws similar to those of self-loading missiles. When the T-90 series – the successor to the T-72 – was launched in 1992, its armor was upgraded but its missile loading system remained similar to that of its predecessor, leaving it just as vulnerable, Drummond said. The T-80, another Russian tank seen in action in the invasion of Ukraine, has a similar missile loading system. There are some benefits to such a system. Bendett, at the Center for New American Security, said Russia had chosen this system to save space and give the tanks a lower profile, making them harder to hit in battle. The Western armies, however, were motivated by action from the T-72 squadron in Iraq. “(Western armies) all learned from the Gulf War and seeing tanks being killed during this period, that you have to part with ammunition,” Drummond said. It showed the US Army Stryker infantry fighting vehicles developed after the first war in Iraq. “It has a turret sitting at the top and that turret does not fit into the crew compartment. It sits cleanly at the top and all the ammunition is inside this turret,” he said. “So if the turret is hit and thrown, the crew is still safe underneath. This is a very clever plan.” Other western tanks, such as the M1 Abrams used by the US and some Allied armies, are larger and have no carousel. In Abrams, a quarter of the crew in the tank pulls shells out of a sealed compartment and carries them to the gun for firing. The apartment has a door that the crew member opens and closes between each shot fired by the tank, which means that if the tank is hit, only one shell is likely to be exposed to the turret. “An accurate hit can damage the tank, but not necessarily kill the crew,” Bendett said. And Drummond said the shells used by Western armies sometimes burn under the high heat generated by an incoming rocket, but do not explode.
Hard to replace
There is no easy way to know how many Russian tanks have been destroyed in Ukraine. The open source information monitoring site Oryx reported on April 28 that at least 300 Russian tanks had been destroyed, while another 279 had been destroyed, abandoned or taken prisoner. However, the site only counts cases where it has visuals, so the Russian losses could be much greater. And these losses are not just about equipment. When Wallace, the British Secretary of Defense, gave his estimate of 580 tanks lost in the House of Commons, he also said that more than 15,000 Russian soldiers had been killed during the invasion. It is difficult to know how many of these are tank crews, but what is not disputed is that crews are not easy to replace. The training of a tank crew can take up to 12 months, said Aleski Roinila, a former tank crew member in the Finnish Defense Forces, “and this is considered fast.” And for Russia to replace hundreds of crew members at this point in the war would be a big order – especially when the tanks they are expected to use are so defective.
