The Third World War: The Untold Story

All of the three types of Soviet main battle tank which would chiefly be encountered in the war weighed round about 40 tons. Higher weights were to be found among those of the Western allies. As for ranges, NATO tank armaments were capable of engaging targets out to 4,000 metres. There had long been argument as to whether this long range was really an advantage and whether it would not have been better to sacrifice some of it to secure other advantages. Certainly the ranges of Soviet tank guns were nothing like as great. The theory behind Western tank design was that Warsaw Pact opponents could be expected to concentrate tanks in high numerical superiority, given choice in time and place of attack and given also the greater number of tanks they had in the theatre. This meant that the attrition of the armoured enemy had to begin as soon as possible to diminish the probability of being overwhelmed by numbers when the enemy got closer in, and it therefore had to begin at the furthest range. It is true that the fullest exploitation of such long ranges, out to 3,000 and 4,000 metres, depended much on visibility and also on the openness of terrain. In poor weather, mist or smoke, or in close country, it was never easy and often impossible to acquire targets at anything like these ranges. The tactical handling of tanks with the longest ranges, like the Chieftain, came more and more to be dominated by the search for suitable firing positions giving the furthest range of vision. Allied fire control systems, with laser range-finding and sighting equipment, ensured a high probability of first-round hits. Thermal imaging sights, such as those used in the US Abrams, and other sighting equipment for use in very poor visibility did much to extend the usefulness of the main armaments of Allied tanks.

In the need for the earliest possible attrition of the enemy’s tank numbers, surveillance of the battlefield was of the highest importance. There were still regrettable gaps in NATO in the availability of adequate equipment for this purpose. The British, for example, had had a project, known as Supervisor, or under the ungainly title of the medium-range unmanned aerial surveillance and target acquisition system (shortened into the mouth-cracking acronym MRUASTAS), which had been cancelled in 1980. A new system, Phoenix, which would fill this gap in the British capability for effective indirect fire, was just coming into service, however. New munitions were being developed to kill tanks at ranges of up to 30 kilometres but the means of acquiring targets for them had fallen behind. Drones, or what were more precisely described as remotely-piloted vehicles (RPV) (such as the Franco-Canadian-German Drone CL-289) were, within their limitations, of considerable use in the acquisition of hard targets in depth. The most consistently reliable means available up to the outbreak of war was still that of observation by men on the ground with sensors which were simple and robust but not, of course, as flexible or controllable as other systems would have been. They also made heavy demands on the men carrying out the observation.

What was known as sideways-looking airborne radar also had a useful role to play. It could indicate from an aircraft the location of tank concentrations which could then be plotted and attacked with area weapons. The acquisition of hard targets in depth, however, still had a long way to go.

There was an interesting and promising heliborne system in the United States forces known as SOTAS (stand-off target acquisition system) with a moving-target indicator radar. This had just begun to come into service by mid-1985. The few aircraft that had this capability when war broke out were to prove of high value in tracking the movement of enemy vehicles and providing divisional commanders with adequate information to permit them to attack second echelon forces with mass fire power as the prelude to planned counterattacks. Attack upon the second echelon, or follow-up forces, had long been seen to be one of the most important ways of diminishing the forward momentum of the Soviet attack. Anything that could contribute here was valuable. Another sensor system, the remotely-monitored battlefield sonar system (or REMBASS, in the uncouth language of technical acronyms which military equipment seems to spawn so freely) was expected to come into NATO service in 1983 or 1984, but this was another of those battlefield aids of the highest importance that had been held up in the pipeline.