Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

The Chieftain Nicholas Moran talks about the pros and cons of autoloaders, a subject we’ve touched on before, especially in relation to the Russian T-14 Armata.

The point about autoloaders providing better crew safety through thicker ammunition storage bulkheads is a good one, as is the immediate capacity advantage of immediately accessible ammunition.

He comes down on the side of yes, autoloaders are the wave of the future, but no, we should try to retrofit the M1 Abrhams for them.

A couple of mild caveats on his assertion that an autoloader won’t be any more prone to malfunction than other tank mechanical components:

1. Other tank components have undergone a century of evolutionary pressure in actual combat environments. Autoloaders are bootstrapping on decades of civilian factory automation innovations, but those happened outside the chaotic, dust-and-debris filled atmosphere of a moving combat platform. Experience as to how autoloaders break down in actual high-intensity conflict is scarce, with the possible exception of Russian tanks. (Lots of things went wrong with Russia’s invasion of Chechnya, and I get the impression that autoloader issues did not loom significant among them. And T-64s and T-72s were so badly outmatched in Desert Storm that I doubt much useful information got back to Russia about their field performance. Hard to get after-action reports on autoloader failure modes when your tanks start blowing up before getting off a shot…)
2. Current turret confines probably provide sufficient space for autoloader maintenance and troubleshooting. But if turrets shrink to reduce weight/increase armor in absence of a loader crew, that’s probably going to reduce maintainability. In which case a significant number cannon issues will probably go from crew-fixable to depot maintenance.