Those Old T-55 Tanks Russia Is Pulling Out Of Storage? They’re Going To Get Wrecked In Night Fighting.

Desperate to make good the loss of around 2,000 tanks in the first year of its wider war on Ukraine, Russia has begun pulling out of long-term storage 70-year-old T-54 and T-55 tanks.

The tanks are hopelessly obsolete. “Expendable,” according to one Russian expert. That should be most apparent at night, where the T-54/55 is at a massive disadvantage in a battle with Ukraine’s more modern armored vehicles.

The problem comes down to optics. The crew of a Ukrainian T-64, T-72 or T-80 tank—to say nothing of a Challenger 2, Leopard 1 or 2 or M-1—can see at night without betraying its position.

The crew of an early-model T-54/55 can’t.

When the T-54/55 was a new design, in the late 1950s, the standard night-fighting technology was a combination of infrared-sensitive optics and an infrared spotlight.

While an improvement over a white spotlight, which would be visible to anyone on the battlefield and thus immediately give away a tank’s position, an infrared spotlight still is visible to well-equipped enemy forces. “Night-vision devices can be used to detect the enemy’s use of infrared light,” the U.S. Army explained in the 1978 edition of its Field Manual 31-36.

The T-54/55 crew could switch off its searchlight and disappear into the darkness, but then it would struggle to spot targets. A T-54/55 can hide at night, but only if it doesn’t fight.

No Ukrainian tank suffers the same limitation. Every tank and most of the fighting vehicles in front-line use with Ukrainian forces have passive night-vision. Infrared or image-intensification sights that can see in the dark without the help of a spotlight.

Now to be clear, later T-54/55s—those the Soviet army upgraded in the 1970s and ’80s—might have the TKN-1SM or some other passive night sight.

But it’s apparent, from videos that have circulated online, that many of the T-54/55s the Russians recently have pulled out of storage lack passive night vision. Their L-2G infrared spotlights plainly are visible atop their turrets.

Don’t expect the Russians to upgrade those old tanks with modern sights. After all, the whole reason the Kremlin is reactivating T-54/55s is that Russian industry currently lacks the components—optics and ball bearings, in particular—to build new T-90Ms and T-72B3s or even restore older T-72s and T-80s.

“The T-55 in this sense is a resource-saver and an opportunity to buy time,” a Kremlin source told Volya Media.

So the old tanks likely will roll into battle with the same guns, fire-controls and armor they had 70 years ago. And the same night-fighting systems, too: spotlights that give away their positions.