LIght-arms tactics against TANK Warfare

The Russians trained dogs to run under tanks with explosive strapped to their backs. There are recorded instances where it was successful.

Hard to believe, but true. Even harder to believe they only stopped training anti tank suicide dogs in the 90s.

I wonder if given the armour of a modern MBT enough plastic explosive could be strapped to a dog to do the same today.

reply to post by justwokeup


I do think that we mankind had progressed beyond using man and domesticated animals as suicidal weapons of war. It does seem brutal...it is brutal, at this stage of our civilisational evolution from the jungles...

So far, for lightly armed troops fighting against tanks, - IEDs, molotav cocktails thrown from built up areas with escape routes seems to work well. As the flame spreads from the thrown bottle, it seeps into the tank and the crew with have to fight the fire or bail out, compromising their positions to being exposed to bullets from hidden enclaves, achieving the objective to stop the tank.

There will come a time when the foolish tank commanders realizes it had been a prideful show of might, ego and a monumental mistake to inhumanely sacrifice tanks and crews to fight in built up areas, more so when those tanks are used brutally to slaughter even the civilian population.

The tanks will then be massed on the outskirts, as a fire support base, ineffective as they will be blocked by the built up areas..

And the next foolish move into the built up area will be to use mortar weapons and recoiless guns to bombard the areas.

Mortar warfare is only good in open areas, but in built up areas, those ammo have limited range, blocked by buildings and very seldom would hit targets. It is just blind bombings.

Worse, those mortar teams only exposed themselves, for they need to be in the open, and time to set up the base with perimeter security, within the fighters' terroritories.

From various buildings as strategic hidden observation points, with communications, fighters will know their arrival and locations easily. Flanking mass attacks or driving them into a 'kill zone' will wipe them all out.

It's senseless. Such battles should end and never have been started at all. We are all living in a modern age where every tactic are already well known and counterable. Only HumanSlayers are insane to insist on continued barbaric stupidity which suffering humans will reply in kind.

If you are engaging a tank near a city chances are they will have infantry checking out the said building you will be hiding in. Also if you attempt getting close to a tank to deploy one of your many ideas some infantry man will put a few ones in you. Even if you do succeed you are dead.

You also have to think of the fitness and skill you would need to perform the tasks your ideas call for. Most of you would probably be winded by the time you get to the tank because you are both out of shape and your adrenaline would be pumping. Even if you do manage to get to the tank chances are you will become all thumbs since you have not practiced over and over again what you are supposed to do once there.

To top it off you will have to have the mental toughness and focus to deal with the fear of getting killed. that alone is enough to drain your energy.

You all make it sound so simple. Those who have tried and continue to try your ideas are laughed at and mocked every time they try over and over again in iraq or afghanistan. Not so much because they fail but because when they have succeeded they have been countered by aircraft that quickly dispatches them. How many videos can you not find on the net of people with small arms and explosives preparing to attack infantry or armored vehicles only to get destroyed before they can even get their plan off the ground.

You can pinpoint the weakness of every military component.. but the fact of the matter is that these components do not operate individually they operate as a team to overcome their weaknesses and to enhance their strengths.

You also have to think of the fitness and skill you would need to perform the tasks your ideas call for.

Also if you attempt getting close to a tank to deploy one of your many ideas some infantry man will put a few ones in you. Even if you do succeed you are dead.

reply to post by votan


My idea doesn't involve running up to tanks and doing anything risky at all. By placing tires or half empty sandbags along the roads you will successfully disable many tracked vehicles.

EXAMPLE: Two months ago in the field my vehicle(an M270A1) ran over a couple of tires. I knew we had hit them and got out to see the status of the track on that side. One of the tires was hit on the edge which caused it to 'bend' up into the track, and there it was ran over by the road wheels all the way to the rear, at that point seperating the track from the vehicle. Another tracked vehicle from my platoon had a sandbag almost do the same thing, but we were able to catch it before it got as stuck as the tire did.

Steal some Javelin's, AT4s, and TOWIIs.....

Otherwise, stay away from armor.

How about beating the tanks with your fists? That method is as good as any and allows a ghost of a chance for sympathy and a better chance at living.

Originally posted by SeekerofTruth101

Taking out a tank is no mean task, and not just any explosive round can take it out with just one shot. It needs special ammo and espacially certain angles to make a clean clear destructive shot, such as on the angular and advanced angular profiled Sherman and Israeli Merkava tanks.

The best hope of taking out tanks are the tracks. Destroy it and it is rendered ineffective, out of action, if it is part of a drive. One less tank and ammos to deal with.

My father was 2ed armored division 41th armored infantry during WW2

first you have to get the target tank buttoned up where they are using the viewing ports and can not see very good.
then you knock a track off under cover of smoke that impairs the crews vision even more, Pipe or they were trained that a M1 -Garand stuck in the tracks would derail the tracks.(my father never tried that as the instructors never explained what he was going to use to fight with after stopping the tank..)

They did capture a German tank and crew in Sicily by getting it in a narrow street where the turret could not turn and blinding it with smoke while a couple guys stuck pipes in the tracks.

these ideas are crazy, might have worked on WWII tanks, I am sure it did. Tanks today are impervious to molotov cocktails even on the engine. I have no doubt that all of these ideas you have were thought out before the modern tank was even produced. no army is going to make a tank nowadays that someone can destroy with a bottle of gasoline. The armor is 16-20 inches thick in vulnerable places, all the important areas (motors, air vents, and the like) have been designed to defeat the very ideas you are proposing. I too have thought about the prospect of having to defeat a tank were we to end up in a civil war with the gov and the DHS troops. I don;t have a clue how to do that, but I would not get close enough to that monster to throw gas on it, and if you did you could watch the useless fire burn while you died.

Personally I don;t know how I could beat a tank, I am sure I would try and probably use the very things you all talked about. I am also sure that I would be dead in short order. the best way to defeat a tank is to not give it something to shoot at. and the only way to hurt it with a normal persons limited arsenal is to shoot the crew if they ever try to leave the tank, even that would be hard. they travel 45 miles an hour and can easily just leave the area and drive 20 miles away to a safe area and disembark. tanks and planes will be our hardest things to defeat if we ever have to get in a fight.

my idea, streal another tank or an artillery piece. I do not know if the old recoiless rifle will even hurt the new tanks, but no small arm will, even a 40 mm grenade launcher will just piss them off. maybe someone will come up with a way should we free people ever need it.

as to pipe in the tracks, it will need to be a thick pipe, or better yet a piece of Railroad Track.or old car or truck axles . there is a US Army Anti-Armor manual out there 1974 i think.infantry supporting Armour will have to be dealt with before any attempt to defeat Amour.put 20 pounds of C-4 in to a drainage ditch that Tank is going over and detonate,directly under tank , and it should bust tank in half, i remember the PLO doing it to the new Merkava israeli tank when it first came out ,and blew the tank in half, killing all inside.if you can stop the tank by taking out the tread, then bring up a mobile 40MM anti aircraft gun on the back of a truck and fire into turret with enough HE or AP rounds would penetrate turret.the A-10 warthog does that with a 30mm gun.the explosive formed projectile method described in the afore mentioned US military manual ,will punch a hole in any tank if you use enough explosive and a thick enough steel plate, problem is aiming it, you dont want to be anywhere near it when its fired, and its short range.if part of turret is exposed a explosive charge can be attached to turret and denonated, it doesnt have to penetrate to kill, the charge, if powerfull enough can break loose metal pieces of turret and send them flying around inside turret like shrapnel.

gum up the treads with the bodies of your comrades. Do you think someone would actually tell you how to take out a tank if they knew how to? For all I know you're a bunch of eighth graders, terrorists, and intel/psyop/counterintel/trolls. This thread was great for the luls though.

night vision and attack at 3AM .... you might live .... I think it would be easier to taint the fuel than disable the tank itself...
in response to the Suicide Dogs - the russians had a problem - they trained the dogs using Russian Tanks - not german tanks - so the dogs went for the russian tanks not the germans they didnt smell right....
I'm not sure the post is all that accurate.

reply to post by 1BornPatriot


You'd have better luck with a paint-ball gun.

Look one unarmed civilian man can beat a bunch of tanks easy as pie. See....

This topic is funny...Id love to see someone try to get close to an Abrams. You people think a tank will be alone? Hell no! Theres no possible way you could even think about getting close to a tank to damage it without someones machine gun in the convoy intervening. For some reason, a civil war was going on and tanks were going through your city or town, Im 100% sure its gonna be a convoy...of Tanks, MATV's, LVS's and MRAP's etc..., all vehicles that could be outfitted with Machine guns on top...but all that is WORST case scenario.

This topic should be named Light-arms tactics against MRAP warfare.
Dont think it would be much safer to try, but it would be more practical....

Naked chicks outside the tank. Soldiers dig naked chicks.

Why not fill up a car with C4 explosives and drive up flat out behind the tank, bail out just before and time it so the car is right alongside it and detonate the C4 - BF3 style .

True. they trained them until 1996 but they found it was just plain inneffective and were not used tactically after 1942.

Originally posted by justwokeup
The Russians trained dogs to run under tanks with explosive strapped to their backs. There are recorded instances where it was successful.

Hard to believe, but true. Even harder to believe they only stopped training anti tank suicide dogs in the 90s.

I wonder if given the armour of a modern MBT enough plastic explosive could be strapped to a dog to do the same today.

Originally posted by 1BornPatriot
night vision and attack at 3AM .... you might live .... I think it would be easier to taint the fuel than disable the tank itself...
in response to the Suicide Dogs - the russians had a problem - they trained the dogs using Russian Tanks - not german tanks - so the dogs went for the russian tanks not the germans they didnt smell right....
I'm not sure the post is all that accurate.

Fuel and oil were different, so yeah, dogs were able to tell the difference.

Also, one point about bomb-dogs: Even if you're cool with it, and you think it's going to work once It Kicks Off, you're lacking the key thing the Red Army had in order to train the dogs in the first place:

A tank to run under.

Also, one point about bomb-dogs: Even if you're cool with it, and you think it's going to work once It Kicks Off, you're lacking the key thing the Red Army had in order to train the dogs in the first place:

A tank to run under.

I am guessing you have your tongue firmly planted in cheek? Otherwise, silly statement.

Interesting read overall, but as others have said most of this is kinda old. The idea that tanks couldn't operate in cities was realized pretty early on in WW2. It wasn't until the Germans got bogged down in Russian cities that it really started to grind away Germany's reserves. In France, and Poland, the victories were so swift that any tanks that did get caught in an urban setting, didn't fight there too long. Those early tanks for Germany were built for speed and flanking anyway, and weren't even up to taking on most of the armor produced around the world at the time (Pz I, Pz II). Their best tank in France was actually the Czech built Pz. 38t. France had some very heavy tanks, that easily outclassed the German panzers, by weight/armor, and also in most cases cannon caliber. The Germans, as I said, just easily outmaneuvered them, and for the most part chose to not engage them, thereby cutting them off and isolating them from their supply lines.

Anyway, most modern tanks have many advanced systems to defend themselves these days. Optics, cameras, anti-personnel devices, etc., mean they are not easy to contend with, and are definitely still king of the land battle.

Just watched some program on the tv last night about how tanks are being equipped with "self-healing" coating that seals up bullet "wounds". Showed a tank getting shot so that the gasoline would leak out (and become a fireball) and the same tank with "bullet-proof" coating that prevent any gas leak at all. You could barely even see a bullet hole in it. It was instantaneous too.