The Russians Are Using Their Old T-54 Tanks As Pillboxes

A trainload of six-decade-old T-54 and T-55 tanks, trundling from Russian-occupied Crimea toward the front line in southern Ukraine, is a stark reminder of the sheer violence of Russia’s 16-month-old wider war on Ukraine.

The Russians need those ancient tanks because they’ve lost more than 2,000 modern tanks—and no longer have the luxury of only deploying the best armored vehicles. They must make do.

But that’s not to say the Russian army expects the units receiving the 1950s- and ‘60s-vintage T-54 and T-55s to send the aged vehicles into direct combat with more sophisticated Ukrainian tanks. Challenger 2s. Leopard 2s. M-1A1s, eventually.

No, there’s evidence the Russians are using their oldest tanks mostly as crude artillery. There also is evidence that, as artillery, the tanks aren’t totally useless.

Russian and allied forces widened the war in Ukraine in February 2022 with around 3,000 front-line tanks, including hundreds of the best T-72B3s, T-90Ms and T-80BVMs.

Over the following year the Russians lost around 150 tanks every month to Ukrainian forces. To put that into perspective: the entire British Army has—you guessed it—150 tanks.

Russian industry long ago shed the vast capacity that allowed it to build a thousand or more new tanks every year. Today, Russia’s two tank factories between them annually can assemble just a few hundred T-72B3s and T-90Ms while also upgrading old T-80s into modern T-80BVMs

Desperate to make good its losses and struggling to ramp up new production, the Kremlin in mid-2022 began reaching into its open-air vehicle parks and pulling out hundreds of T-62s that were built in the 1960s, modernized in the ‘80s and put into storage around the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But even those T-62s weren’t enough. Nine months later this spring, the Russians also began recovering T-55s and T-54s that rolled off the factory floor starting in the mid-1950s.

As tanks, the T-62, T-55 and T-54 are obsolete. They lack the autoloader that’s been standard on Soviet and Russian tanks since the 1970s. Their fire-controls are crude. Their night-sights require an infrared spotlight that gives away the tank’s position.

But the T-62 does have a reasonably powerful 115-millimeter smoothbore cannon and a hundred millimeters of steel armor. A T-62 wouldn’t last long in a direct fight with, say, a modernized Ukrainian T-64BV. But as a mobile howitzer, it can lob shells out to a distance of a mile or two and change firing positions under its own power.

A T-54 or T-55 has a less powerful rifled 100-millimeter gun and thinner armor, but it too can work as mobile artillery. Used correctly, the old tanks are a firepower expedient.

Since their aiming recticles are calibrated for direct fire out to a range of a few thousand yards, they lack accuracy over longer ranges. “They make for an inefficient form of artillery,” Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds explained in a recent study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“Nevertheless, these engagements can often be made from positions that would not be viable for artillery, because of the tanks’ greater protection and thus reduced vulnerability to counterbattery fire,” Watling and Reynolds added.

It wasn’t long before we began to see photos and videos depicting the T-62s, T-55s and T-54s in action. While some Russian bloggers claim the tanks-turned-mobile-guns have three-person crews—one fewer than they had when they actually functioned as tanks—at least one video seems to depict a T-55 with a single soldier in the turret, loading and firing the main gun all on his own.

If a local commander determines the threat from Ukrainian anti-tank missiles is low and thus doesn’t expect his old tanks to move on short notice, a solitary loader-gunner-commander might actually be the only person crewing each of the tanks: no driver necessary.

In that case, the tank is less a do-it-yourself howitzer than it is a DIY pillbox. A bit of protection wrapped around a big gun. Unmoving. Disposable.

A T-54, T-55 or T-62 is better than nothing when nothing really is the main alternative. In a pinch, Russian commanders could deploy thinly-armored and lightly-armed infantry fighting vehicles for local fire-support. But these IFVs could be even less effective in the role than a 60- or 70-year-tank might be.

Old tanks “represent an increase in range, protection and kinetic effect over these IFVs,” Watling and Reynolds explained, “and therefore pose a serious battlefield threat when there are a limited number of anti-tank guided weapons.”