The tough task of recognising Armoured Fighting Vehicles

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Hello and Happy Thursday. Two weeks ago I wrote about the complexity of main battle tanks (and why James Bond’s iconic tank chase through St. Petersburg was ridiculous, albeit fun). A briefly mentioned the distinction between “tanks” and “not tanks,” a dichotomy which I’ve covered previously in these pages.

Having titillated you with the joys of “AFV recognition” twice already, I figured it was time to dive right in and deal with this meaty topic head-on. An AFV, by the way, is an “Armoured Fighting Vehicle,” but of course you knew that.

The word “tank” is a military shibboleth. Its use—or, more often, misuse—can instantly mark you out as a “Walter Mitty,” a.k.a. a clueless civvy who thinks they know a lot more than they do. This includes Hollywood directors who should know better: Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland in Warfare and Katherine Bigelow in The Hurt Locker:

For the record (and the TL;DR to this article), here’s how armoured vehicles are classified:

Because I know you’re all a bunch of unrepentant nerds like me, I’m going to go into much greater detail on each of these categories. I’m going to start with the smallest guns and work my way up. First, I’m going to talk about armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles. There’s a difference? You bet. Then I’ll discuss self-propelled guns, before moving onto things that have tracks and a direct fire gun and no dismounts but still aren’t tanks, or at least main battle tanks (MBTs). I won’t discuss MBTs in detail because I did this two weeks ago.

I’ll wrap up by telling you why it’s important, besides the obvious: giving me an excuse to snort derisively and say “That’s not a tank” to my wife, siblings, co-workers, and anyone else legally or contractually obligated to put up with me¹.

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1. “Battle Taxis” vs. “War Rigs”: APCs and IFVs

Just like when I classified firearms that one time, I’m organising AFVs according to their function. The diagram in the section above shows how there are crossovers between tracked and wheeled vehicles, so I’m not going to use vehicle drive as the main differentiator.

It’s still important, of course. Tracked vehicles are far more mobile than wheeled ones, but at the cost of reduced speed on roads and much greater maintenance (for both the tracked vehicle and the road itself).

There are two types of armoured vehicle whose job it is to transport troops, protect them from external threats, and fight back with a gun on top. Both of these categories come in wheeled and tracked variants—so what’s the difference?

An infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) is designed to bring troops into combat and provide fire support once they’re dismounted. It needs to protect the troops when they’re inside with armour, quickly bring them to where they’re needed, and protect them with a big(ish) gun once they get out.

The IFV will bring troops right up on top of the enemy, so that most of the hard work is (hopefully) done by the time they dismount.

An IFV represents many difficult design compromises. In terms of the classic “Protection, Mobility, Firepower” trade-off, it sits firmly in the middle as a Jack-of-all-trades (and master of none):

This difficulty is represented in the excellent 1998 HBO TV movie The Pentagon Wars (full version available on YouTube and highly recommended). This dark comedy follows the development of the US Bradley IFV.

For a more recent (and real) example of how IFVs are hard to get right, look no further than the British Army’s ongoing debacle with the Ajax.

An armoured personnel carrier (APC) also has protection, mobility, and firepower. It can also be tracked or wheeled. The big difference with the APC is that it sacrifices firepower and protection for better mobility.

The APC lets its troops out at the start line, making the poor devils fight the whole way up to and over the enemy’s position. The APC might give some covering fire with its heavy weapon, but don’t count on it. It’s a taxi to bring the soldiers from one battlefield to the next as quickly as possible.

What if we lean all the way toward firepower and neglected mobility and protection? I’m glad you asked, because that brings me to the next section.

2. Self-propelled guns and indirect vs. direct fire

A tank has a big gun on top of it. But it’s not all about the big gun. A self-propelled gun, on the other hand (and as the name suggests) is all about the gun.

Below are a bunch of definitely-not-tanks. Note how big the barrels are, and how the turret is often larger and set toward the back of vehicle. These are self-propelled guns (SPGs).

If SPGs have tracks, and a small crew, and thick armour, and a big f***-off gun, then why are they not considered to be tanks?

Look at the pictures above. The guns are enormous. Some of them have little bipods supporting their weight, and the layout of the barrel mounts suggest that they can fire high into the sky.

This, in fact, is the single crucial difference between main battle tanks and self-propelled guns. The former are direct fire platforms; the latter are for indirect fire.

Put simply, direct fire means you need to see your enemy (and run the risk of being seen by him). With indirect fire you don’t need to see the enemy, but having someone available who can see them and can call in adjustments to the firing is a definite plus.

3. Recce tanks, tank destroyers, and other also-rans

When is a tank not a tank? When it has wheels, for starters. The Cenatauro AFV has a great big direct fire gun on top but lacks the tracks necessary to classify it as a tank.

Which may be a loophole which allowed the Italians to deploy it on a Chapter VI peacekeeping mission:

Technically it is a “tank destroyer,” another category to remember. I’m never too comfortable with giving “tank destroyer” its own billing, however, since main battle tanks are also, almost by definition, tank destroyers. It’s a useful bucket when you have something with wheels, however.

The Scorpion FV101 AFV has tracks and a big(ish)² gun which fires directly. Is it a tank?

Unfortunately not. It’s just too small. It has the catchy designation of (wait for it) “Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked)” or CVR(T).

The Scorpion was one of the fastest tanks ever built. It reached over 80 km/hr (50 mph) on a test track in 2002. This is something to do with its light weight: about 8 tonnes (barely three pickup trucks, compared to the 27 which a typical main battle tank clocks in at).

This light weight, distributed all over the tracks, meant that the Scorpion had an extremely low ground pressure. I’m told (although I never tested it) that getting your foot run over by it was no worse than someone stepping on your toes.

And then there are armoured engineering vehicles. Suffice to say that they exist and do a lot of hard work. This includes building bridges and clearing minefields using methods ranging from the merely cool…

…to the utterly shit-hot:

There you are. Plenty of non-tanks, each with their own distinctive role. Now, back to why we care about all this.

Conclusion: Why it matters

Many years ago, as a young officer, I sat through many lessons on AFV recognition. I studied grainy, smoke-obscured slides and had a few seconds to figure out what category of AFV I was looking at as well as its designation. When I passed that test I moved onto the 3D models. I sat in a tiered classroom and looked through binoculars at a piece of terrain model with about dozens of 1:285 die-cast lead scale models of various AFVs.

It was a difficult course, despite being objectively ridiculous. Although the subject matter was simple enough, the pass rate was set at a very challenging 100%. The library of AFVs was frozen at some stage in the mid-1980s, with not a single Chinese example.

We learned some useful cheats, like how to tell the difference between a Soviet/Russian BMP-1 and BMD-1. It turns out that pictures of the latter nearly always show it overloaded with soldiers sitting on top rather than inside the cramped compartment.

Or how to recognise a Sherman tank. That was an easy one: the photo was usually black and white and obviously from WWII. I don’t care about the “steeply sloping glacis plate” or “paired road wheels,” this is obviously a tank from fifty years ago.

Still, it was effective. To this day I can remember ridiculous miscellany like the wheel layout of a T-54/55 (four-gap-one) or the fume extractor shape on a Leclerc (tubular and smooth along the barrel length).

Wherefore this technical knowledge? Arguably, as a junior officer, I should bloody well know this and that’s the end of the discussion. I had to teach this same course to young soldiers in later years, and this was a harder sell.

Surely (the gripe goes) you’ll know what to shoot at, or not shoot at, depending on the operational theatre? If you’re on peacekeeping duties in the Middle East, for example, you should learn about Russian and Israeli (and, to a lesser extent, American) AFVs. In Eastern Europe it should be Russian and the smorgasbord of European AFVs. And so on.

The Army’s insistence on beating AFV recognition into us³ was perhaps an enlightened example of “mission command.” As I’ve discussed here before, this is the idea of empowering junior commanders with the knowledge, confidence, skills, and authority to make their own plans once they align with the commander’s overall intent.

I think that mission command, though preached widely, is often not practised. I’ve seen far more examples of micro-management than of mission command in my time, but perhaps that’s more a symptom of a peacetime army.

In any case, AFV recognition supports mission command in two important ways:

• Junior leaders on the ground will know what their own side’s AFVs look like and won’t shoot them,
• They will also recognise what type of target they are facing and whether or not they have the tools to attack it. For example, a small anti-tank weapon will not, despite its name, destroy a main battle tank. It will, however, be effective against most APCs. Since an MBT which was hit but not destroyed would almost certainly respond with a rapid rain of death, you can see how it’s important to be able to tell the difference.

That, plus it gave me the tools to be the most insufferable nerd for decades afterward.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading and please remember, if you haven’t already, to subscribe using the link below.

If you enjoyed dipping your toes into AFV recognition (a.k.a. “tanks and non-tanks”), then you should definitely check out Frank Tank Rants, particularly his So, What is a tank? article.

Please also share this article with a friend and help me broaden my reach. Every little helps! See you next week, where I’ll have a surprise treat for you all.

Cover picture: t-90 thank flying through the air and firing main cannon, The_Svele_Guy, via Reddit. All other images, unless specified, from Wikipedia.

1. My wife insists that I’m a constant delight. ↩︎
2. Compared to a 120 mm cannon, its 76 mm gun is not big. Compared to small arms, it is. ↩︎
3. Metaphorically, I should add, not literally. ↩︎