antiarmour

Antiarmour refers to weapons, devices, and tactics designed to defeat armored fighting vehicles, particularly main battle tanks and armored personnel carriers. The goal is to penetrate armor, disable mobility, or disrupt systems.

Categories of antiarmour include kinetic energy weapons (such as penetrators fired from guns or missiles) and chemical energy weapons (shaped charges) used in anti-tank guided missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. Other methods include anti-tank mines, air-delivered ordnance, and improvised or dedicated anti-armor devices. Modern systems often mix these approaches, using tandem-charge warheads to defeat reactive armor and top-attack profiles to strike armor-susceptible zones.

Protection and countermeasures have evolved in response. Armor improvements (including reactive and composite armor) and active protection systems aim to defeat or deflect incoming antiarmour munitions. Tactics emphasize combined arms, mobility, and targeting vulnerabilities such as exposed tracks or turret roofs.

Historically, antiarmour has shaped battlefield doctrine since World War II, when shaped charges first proved effective against tanks, followed by postwar kinetic-energy penetrators and guided missiles. In recent decades, antiarmour has been central to both conventional interstate battles and irregular warfare, including anti-armor artillery, portable missiles, and anti-armor mines and IEDs.

See also: anti-tank weapon, ATGM, anti-tank gun.