Tank losses in Azerbaijan-Armenia Conflict

In case you have been distracted by all the U.S. news lately, there has been a significant conflict for the last month between Azerbaijan-Armenia over Nogorno-Karabakh that resulted in dozens of tanks lost, many due to drones and loitering munitions. This is conventional war. We have not done any systematic analysis of this, so I am hesitant to make any comments on it, but it is a significant event, in that a number of Armenian tanks were taken out by Azerbaijani drones. I have found the twitter accounts @RALee85 and @Rebel44CZ and @oryxspioenkop to be worth following. They tend to include a lot of the videos that have been released from this fight.

This is an article on the subject that came out this week:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/attack-drones-dominating-tanks-armenia-085624016.html

A few highlights:
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  1. Armenia says it has lost around 900 servicemen.
  2. Actual casualties are probably higher.
  3. Open source analysis by Forbes magazine has tracked the destruction by drones of around 200 tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, plus 300 soft-skinned military vehicles.
  4. It is kind of one-sided, as Armenia does not have such a collection of drones (it helps to have oil).
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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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One comment

  1. When you go back even to World War One, the Germans pretty much had to keep themselves invisible from the air (in daytime of course) or be blown to pieces by Allied artillery. The ability to hit what you can see, pushed the main line of resistance beyond artillery range. So even in World War One, air support (when you could get it) could counted for a lot.

    The videos I have seen have armored vehicles sitting wide out in the open in daytime. Which seems either insanely foolish, or that the videos are against dummy vehicles set up for propaganda purposes. Or maybe something else I am not thinking of. Granted the mountains don’t have a lot of ground cover to hide in, but it seems the Germans in WW2, in Italy, would have faced greater air power and were able to pull it off.

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