By Ankit Panda
Why Asia’s militaries will hang on (to) tanks, even as the United States moves on.
In a helpful article last week, my Flashpoints colleague Franz-Stefan Gady makes the compelling case that, contrary to trends in the U.S. military, the armed forces of Asia-Pacific states will continue to build their main battle tank (MBT) arsenal. Across the region, from South Asia to Northeast Asia, MBT counts are on the rise, either through new procurement programs or through scheduled upgrades of existing inventories. Combined, the two largest Asian land armies, India and China, field nearly 10,000 MBTs. As Franz demonstrated, Asian militaries don’t buy that tanks are junk.
Franz’s conclusion that the “MBT will be part of Asian-Pacific military arsenals for a while” is well supported. There is an interesting corollary to the Asia-Pacific’s tank proliferation that helps, in part, answer the question of why Asian states remain interested in acquiring armor: tanks actually will help stabilize escalation and grant strategic malleability to state responses should a conflict arise, particularly between nuclear-armed states. Additionally, Asian states will likely be able to moderate the main weaknesses of the MBT in their expected conflict scenarios.
The MBT is a highly versatile machine of warfare that has historically provided heavy direct fire for armies, allowing infantry and other land forces to gain territorial control in offense scenarios or repel attackers in defensive scenarios. The onset of the armored unit in land warfare created an important step in battlefield escalation that prevented an immediate escalatory leap to more damaging and less discriminate tools of warfare, including nuclear weapons and other heavy ordnance including artillery and aerial bombings.
Read the full story at The Diplomat