Chinese researchers are analyzing the impact of hypervelocity kinetic energy weapons against US tank armor, tests informed by lessons learned from the Ukraine war and with an eye on Taiwan’s US-supplied armored forces.
This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that Chinese scientists have conducted simulations to determine the damage capability of kinetic energy weapons against US military armor.
The Chinese team supposedly found that a solid sphere weighing 20 kilograms and traveling four times the speed of sound can cause significant damage to advanced tanks built under US military standards, the SCMP report said.
The kinetic energy carried by such a projectile is around 25 megajoules, which is less than seven-kilowatt hours when converted into electrical energy. The Chinese team also claimed that while a targeted tank might appear unscathed on the outside, its inner workings were irreparably damaged in the simulations.
Led by Huang Jie of the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center’s Hypervelocity Aerodynamic Institute, the research team published their findings in the peer-reviewed Equipment Environmental Engineering journal.
SCMP mentions that the team found that specific locations in the armored target have a high probability of failure due to overload damage as their impact response spectrum lines exceed the safety limits recommended by NATO MIL-STD-810, which relates to the tailoring of military equipment’s environmental design and test limits to the conditions expected to be encountered during its service life.
Hypersonic weapons were initially designed to target high-value assets like large military installations or aircraft carriers. Still, with technological advancements and cost reductions, China and others are considering using the cutting-edge, high-speed weaponry in a broader range of scenarios.
SCMP says that assessing the damage caused by kinetic projectiles is more difficult than evaluating the impact of conventional armor-piercing rounds, as the shock wave generated by the former travels through the entire vehicle in a highly complex manner, causing stress to concentrate in areas like bolts that cause distortion or fracture.
China has closely monitored the Ukraine war and has likely followed technological developments and failures in tank warfare, focusing on the arms race between tank armor and anti-tank weapons.
While Russian tanks in Ukraine were decimated during the early months of the conflict, Russia has improved its tanks to such an extent that it may have nullified the early decisive impact of Western-supplied anti-tank weapons, according to some assessments.
For instance, in December 2023, Army Recognition reported that several Russian T-90M tanks in Ukraine now sport armor upgrades consisting of cage armor and Kontakt-1 explosive reactive armor (ERA) bricks to defeat top-attack weapons such as loitering munitions, Javelin fire-and-forget missiles and Next-Generation Anti-Tank Weapons (NLAWs).
Army Recognition notes that traditional tank protection schemes that focus on the front and side armor are increasingly inadequate against these new threats and show Russia’s fast adaptations to the new dynamics of armored warfare.
Armada Magazine reported in December 2023 that Russia had fitted its Volnorez electronic warfare system on its T-80BVM tanks in Ukraine. The system is designed to defeat first-person view (FPV) suicide drones by transmitting at a frequency range of 900 to 2000 MHz to disrupt drone control signals up to 600 meters away.
The report also says Volnorez is an element of a larger counter-drone protection package that includes overhead reactive armor.
While information on the effectiveness of these upgrades is scarce, it is highly likely that they have degraded the performance of Ukraine’s Western-supplied anti-tank missiles and FPV drones and may be a significant factor in the UK’s decision to send depleted uranium (DU) armor-piercing ammunition to Kiev.
Such adaptations will likely be noticed by Taiwan, which is upgrading its aging armored forces in anticipation of a possible Chinese invasion.
In December 2023, Asia Times reported that Taiwan will receive 38 M1A2T Abrams tanks in 2024, part of a 108-unit order that will be delivered in four batches through 2026. The purchase aims to modernize Taiwan’s increasingly obsolete tank force, consisting of upgraded Cold War-era M60 and M48 tanks.
The M1A2T and older tanks are envisioned to be the lynchpin of a Taiwanese counterattack to defeat Chinese attempts to break out of their beachheads in the event of a successful landing operation. While Taiwan’s M1A2T tank purchase has been criticized as a vanity buy, tanks are still vital for tactical and operational-level counterattacks.
The M1A2T is based on the M1A2 System Enhancement Package Version 3 (SEPv3) and may be equipped with the Trophy Active Protection System (APS), which includes search radars to detect, identify and track incoming threats and destroy them with hard-kill projectiles, with the tank’s armor expected to absorb fragmentation after a successful intercept.
Against advanced defensive systems, Markus Graswald and other writers mentioned in the 2019 Hypervelocity Impact Symposium that improved kinetic energy projectiles or hypervelocity penetrators, such as the one demonstrated by China’s research team, can penetrate these defenses.
Such velocities described by the Chinese researchers can be achieved through railgun technology. However, the technology is still in its infancy and has yet to overcome technical challenges such as high energy requirements, bulky power sources, intense firing heat and short rail life.
Those limitations restrict railguns to large, stable firing platforms like surface ships. However, China may have solved some railgun technology challenges.
In December 2023, SCMP reported that Chinese engineers from the National Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Energy at the Naval University of Engineering have developed a railgun that can quickly fire multiple projectiles without sustaining damage.
The SCMP report says that the Chinese researchers used a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) diagnostic system to assess swiftly whether the weapon could continue firing and spot potential trouble spots before catastrophic failure.
Given the present limitations of railgun technology, Graswald and others propose alternative means to defeat increasingly advanced tank protection.
These include supplementing kinetic energy penetrators with a precursor explosive charge to detonate ERA bricks before penetrating armor and a mobile high-power electromagnetic (HPEM) effector integrated into an anti-tank missile to defeat APS sensors. The writers assess such a weapon would allow for follow-up attacks using other anti-tank weapons.
Abrams fires it’s rod mach 4.5 for comparison.