The World of Saint Javelin

摘要

History has shown that 'kill' claims are often inaccurate, and TV pundits have suggested that Ukrainian claims for numbers of enemy soldiers killed, and enemy tanks knocked out should be sharply scaled back. Yet if the Ukrainian claim that Russia had lost around 3,300 tanks in just under a year is scaled back by two thirds, the revised total would still rival the losses that the German armoured forces suffered during the Battle of Kursk in 1943 -the biggest tank battle in history, and one which tilted the military balance on the Eastern front and allowed the Red Army to begin an unstoppable advance westwards. The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) recently estimated that Russia has lost around half of its pre-war fleet of modern T-72B3 and T-72B3M tanks, so is having to replace these with older tanks that had been in storage. Many of these losses are likely to have been inflicted by Javelin missiles provided by the US and Saab Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon (NLAW) missiles delivered by the UK. If the benevolence of a saint can traditionally be thought as descending from above, the same can be said for the destructive effects of many modern anti-tank missiles. Until the early 1990s most operated in direct-attack mode, relying on a forward-firing warhead intended to penetrate the armour of an enemy tank. The efficacy of this approach was downgraded by the introduction of composite armour and explosive reactive armour (ERA), so some missile designers opted to create weapons that would overfly the target and detonate a downward-firing warhead, or would make a diving attack. Both approaches were intended to attack the upper surfaces of a tank's turret or hull, areas that were considerably less well-protected than the vehicle's frontal arc.