As Armenia and Azerbaijan trade deadly blows in a battle that has taken a heavy toll on the warring parties’ armor, experts contacted by Military Times say it is too early to sound the death knell for tanks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some 95 people have been killed \u2013 11 of them civilians \u2013 since the fighting broke out, Deutsche Welle reported<\/a>. <\/b>This comes only a few short months after at least 17 people were killed during conflict in July.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Located in western Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh is populated mostly by Armenians, who control the region and seek independence from Azerbaijan and reunification with Armenia<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The decades-old dispute over the province of Nagorno-Karabakh erupted on Sunday with both sides posting videos to their social media channels showing aerial footage of tank kills and other destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The videos show the carnage, a death from above dispatched by drones on the slow-moving Soviet-era armored vehicles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the armor experts contacted by Military Times say the issues are more a tactical training failure than a signal that tanks are obsolete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because of the diverse terrain, the U.S. Army uses the region in classroom training scenarios, said Nicholas Moran, a major in the Texas National Guard who\u2019s been working with tanks for some 20 years and is a tank historian by trade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cArmy personnel are very familiar with the Caucasus Region,\u201d Moran told Military Times on Wednesday. \u201cIt\u2019s a very messy area with a whole bunch of different players, some of whom are in NATO, some of whom aren\u2019t, some are aligned with the Soviets, the Russians. It\u2019s all sorts of bizarre terrain combinations. There\u2019s isolated water, there\u2019s water you can access with big ships, mountains, there\u2019s flat space, oil \u2013 there\u2019s lots of oil.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The number of scenarios the Army can create using the Caucasus Region as an example is endless, Moran said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You can have anything from low-intensity exercises to \u2018OK, we\u2019re going to send a full on armored corps and take on whoever comes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moran\u2019s takeaways from the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict is that there\u2019s a serious lack of air defense in each side\u2019s combined arms system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere\u2019s nothing you can do as a tank, per se, to defend yourself against a weapon specifically designed to kill armored vehicles from above,\u201d Moran said. \u201cThis has been going on for years. The loitering munitions, even, is like a 30-year-old concept. It\u2019s the first time it\u2019s being used on a large scale. Most modern armies are aware of the threat and they\u2019re developing equipment to counter it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The visuals<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n The beginning of one video from Armenian Ministry of Defense\u2019s \u201cArms Media\u201d purportedly shows an Azerbaijani tank rolling point in a column of three and being destroyed by Armenian artillery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A little past the halfway mark of the video, another tank is shown rolling in front of two other tanks with a group of seven or eight people walking nearby in the same direction. The tank is engulfed in a fireball and the people appear to continue walking undeterred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Armenia claims its military destroyed 137 of its neighbors tanks, according to Armenak Minasyants, an Armenian official. Azerbaijan has denied many of these claims, and likewise, Armenia has denied claims of battle victory made by Azerbaijan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In another video, Azerbaijan\u2019s Ministry of Defense claims to have destroyed two Armenian tanks<\/a>. As of Wednesday, Azerbaijan claims to have destroyed 130 Armenian tanks and amphibious combat vehicles in addition to 2,300 of its military personnel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOverkills by airpower has been around since World War II,” said Moran, speaking of inflated <\/b>battle damage assessments. “Hundreds killed, no, I strongly doubt both sides have killed hundreds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The video evidence published by both sides certainly doesn\u2019t support the claims, Moran said. And not for a lack of current battlefield capability, but neither side has done a good job of shooting down the other\u2019s drones if so many of their vehicles are being destroyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNot only do you see footage of UASs destroying armored vehicles \u2014 and I do know that they\u2019re paying particular attention to anti-aircraft vehicles. There have been a number of SA-8s that have been destroyed. But you also can find footage of the air defenses shooting the drones down,” Moran said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What can the U.S. military learn from this conflict? In both videos, the tanks were either rolling or stationary in the open without cover and in close proximity to one another. Is this simply faulty training on the part of Azerbaijani and Armenian military commanders or are tanks generally vulnerable on the modern-day battlefield?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is modern warfare<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer is a little of both, if you ask Thomas Spoehr, director of Heritage Foundation\u2019s Center for National Defense and a retired Army lieutenant general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cModern warfare is complex,\u201d Spoehr told Military Times. \u201cIt\u2019s just like armor brigade combat teams learn at the National Training Center, you can\u2019t send a company, a platoon of tanks on their own across an open plateau or plain in modern warfare and expect to come out good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Part of Army Forces Command, the Army\u2019s National Training Center at Fort Irwin offers units a simulated battlefield and an opposing force in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cArmor brigades and armor battalions learn that at the NTC the hard way, they send out tanks ahead of time and they haven\u2019t suppressed ATGMs (anti-tank guided missiles), they haven\u2019t sent out infantry ahead of time and they just get rolled up,\u201d Spoehr said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t practice this stuff like the Azerbaijanis \u2014 and probably the Armenians, as well \u2014 haven\u2019t done, modern warfare is really quick and very lethal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither Desert Storm nor Iraqi Freedom provided good training for the kind of high-tech overhead warfare of today. It\u2019s not the conflicts America\u2019s military has engaged in that have prepared it to properly set the conditions under which protect their high-value assets on the battlefield. It\u2019s the training acquired from the NTC, Spoehr said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marines divest from tanks<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Marine Corps doesn\u2019t find tanks to be obsolete, but last year it decided to stop investing in the heavy armor after a series of wargames<\/a> concluded they were at a strategic disadvantage against precision strikes like the one supposedly carried out in the fight for Nagorno-Karabakh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n