Russia will already have lost about 580 tanks. There’s a design reason that makes them more vulnerable and Ukrainians know it. This is called the “clown jump” effect.
Russia’s tanks in Ukraine have a “clown jump” design flaw. And the West has known it since the Gulf War
Blownoff Russian tanks are just the latest sign that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not going according to plan.
Hundreds of Russian tanks are said to have been destroyed since Moscow’s offensive began. This Monday, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace estimated that Russia will have lost up to 580.
Moscow’s problems go beyond the large number of tanks lost. Experts say battlefield footage shows Russian tanks suffer from a defect that Western militaries have known for decades as the “clown jump effect.” [tradução possível de “jackinthebox”, brinquedo em que um boneco palhaço salta de surpresa de uma caixa fechada quando se lhe abre a tampa]. Moscow, they say, should have seen this problem coming.
The problem is related to the way the tank’s ammo is stored. Unlike modern Western tanks, the Russians carry multiple shells in their artillery turrets. This makes them very vulnerable, even an indirect hit can set off a chain reaction that explodes the entire ammo supply of up to 40 projectiles.
The resulting shockwave could be enough to blow up the tank’s turret as tall as a twostory building.
“What we’re seeing with Russian tanks is a design flaw,” says Sam Bendett, advisor to CNA’s Russian Studies Program and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
“Each successful attack…quickly ignites the ammo, causing a massive explosion and the turret literally explodes.”
That flaw means the tank’s crew usually two men in the turret and a third at the top is an easy target, explains Nicholas Drummond, a defense industry analyst specializing in land warfare and a former British Army officer: “If you don’t go in the first second you’re fried.”
The “jackinthebox” effect
Drummond says the munitions blasts are causing problems for nearly every armored vehicle deployed by Russia in Ukraine. And he cites the example of the BMD4 infantry fighting vehicle, which is normally manned by up to three crew members and can transport an additional five soldiers. Drummond says the BMD4 is a “moving coffin” that will “simply be obliterated” if hit by a missile.
The design flaw in the tanks must have been particularly irritating to Moscow, as the problems became widely publicized.
These problems came to the attention of the Western military during the Gulf Wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, when large numbers of the Iraqi Army’s Russianmade T72 tanks suffered the same fate gun turrets protruding from the roofs of the tanks in defense exploded tank missile attacks.
Drummond believes that Russia has not learned the lessons of Iraq and as a result many of its tanks in Ukraine have similar design flaws in their selfloading missile systems.
When the T90 series the successor to the T72 entered service in 1992, its armor was upgraded, but the missile loading system remained similar to its predecessor, leaving it just as vulnerable, Drummond explains. The T80, another Russian tank used in the invasion of Ukraine, has a similar missile loading system.
This system has some advantages. Bendett of the Center for a New American Security says Russia chose this system to save space and give the tanks a lower profile, making them harder to hit in combat.
However, the Western military was motivated to act by knowledge of the T72’s fate in Iraq. “[Os militares ocidentais] They all learned from the Gulf War, when they saw tanks ‘dying’, that you have to compartmentalize the ammunition,” says Drummond, referring to the US Army’s Stryker infantry fighting vehicles, which were developed after the first war in Iraq.
“They have a turret on top of the tank, and that turret doesn’t fit in the crew compartment. It’s just up there and all the ammo is in that turret,” he explains. “So if the tower gets hit and explodes, the crew below is still safe. It’s a very clever design.”
Other western tanks, like the M1 Abrams used by the US and some allied armies, are larger and don’t have a carousel. On the Abrams, a fourth crew member retrieves projectiles from a sealed compartment and transfers them to the gun for firing.
The compartment has a door that the crew member opens and closes between each tank fire, meaning that if the tank is hit, only one shell is exposed in the turret. “An accurate hit can damage the tank, but not necessarily kill the crew,” explains Bendett. According to Drummond, projectiles used by Western armed forces sometimes burn under the high heat generated by a missile but do not explode.
difficult to replace
It is not easy to determine how many Russian tanks were destroyed in Ukraine. Opensource intelligence surveillance website Oryx said April 28 that at least 300 Russian tanks had been destroyed and 279 others damaged, abandoned or captured. However, the website only counts cases where there is visual evidence, so Russian casualties could be much higher.
These losses are not just related to the equipment. When Wallace, the British Defense Secretary, gave the House of Commons an estimate of 580 tanks lost, he also claimed that more than 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed during the invasion.
It’s hard to know how many tank crews there would be, but there’s no doubt that crews aren’t easy to replace.
Training a tank crew can take at least several months, even 12 months can be considered fast, says Aleksi Roinila, a former tank crew member in the Finnish Armed Forces. It would be a difficult task for Russia to replace hundreds of crew members at this point in the war especially when the tanks they use have so many flaws.