Tanks Designed for Urban Combat

By Michael McCabe

Article published on: June 26, 2025 in the Armor Spring 2025 Edition of Armor

Read Time: < 7 mins

Image 1. U.S. Army M1 Abrams tanks maneuver in the streets in the city of Tal Afar, Iraq, Feb 3, 2005. (By Staff Sgt. Aar-on Allmon)

Traditionally, tanks are seen as being at an inherent disadvantage in urban combat. In the 21st Century, however, the U.S. military must be prepared for urban combat in large, densely populated cities. The Army would do well to introduce heavy infantry divisions for this task, and these divisions will need armored cavalry for scouting, escort duty, and fire support. Developing a tank specifically for urban terrain will therefore be necessary, both for practical and doctrinal reasons.

A tank designed for urban terrain would have radically different design requirements than a main battle tank designed for open warfare. Main battle tanks rely primarily upon their speed and long-range firepower and are willing to sacrifice extra armor to retain mobility. In urban combat, however, the reverse is true: fights are at much closer ranges, mobility is measured by the ability to navigate sharp turns and tight/narrow streets, and speed can be sacrificed to retain maximum armor protection. Other unique requirements are the ability to shoot in multiple directions at once, shoot around 90-degree corners, increased importance on the ability to shoot at high and negative elevations, and designing the hull to carry cage armor and/or active protection systems.

This article will go through these and other design principles for an urban tank, dividing them between “hard factors” which are easily measured, and “soft factors,” which are less cut-and-dry. Soft factors are what war-winners excel at and will consequently be given more attention.

Hard factors

The first, most important, hard factor in an urban tank is its armor. Urban tanks will routinely fight at close range, and so every trick in the book will be necessary to ensure safety and survivability. Armor should be uniformly thick on the front, sides, and rear, since attacks from every angle are to be expected. A pentagon-shaped hull can offer the benefits of sloped armor and V-hulls for protection from mines. A slightly more complex alternative is an octagon-shaped hull, which can offer more angles and smaller flat surfaces for increased shot deflection. Additional armor modules, like cage armor and active protection systems, will not replace or reduce the hull armor’s thickness, and the chassis must be designed to carry them all at once without overloading.

The second hard factor, relating directly to the first, is the vehicle’s engine and mobility. Rather than being built for speed, a tank’s engine will instead resemble a bulldozer engine. An urban tank will be a very heavy vehicle, and so a bulldozer-style engine will be capable of both handling the sheer weight of the vehicle and will allow the tank to overpower obstacles.

Obstacle clearing must be an expected, routine occurrence for urban tanks, and the ability to smash through them and other man-made fortifications without requiring a separate armored bulldozer will be advantageous.1

The third hard factor is the tank’s guns. An urban tank will use short-barreled guns, since longer barrels are difficult to maneuver in tight spaces and the tank is less likely to engage in long-range shooting. As a bonus, short-barreled guns are quicker to acquire targets.2 High-elevation and negative-elevation shooting also benefits from this quicker target acquisition.

An urban tank would have a mixture of gun calibers for its main turret and side turrets/sponsons, since it will need to be capable of firing in multiple directions at once. Side turrets and sponsons will not necessarily require large-caliber guns, but they will require rapid-fire guns. These will often be fired around street/building corners and into buildings from the street to provide flanking fire in support of advancing infantry. Urban tanks may also incorporate a flamethrower in front. The flamethrower would be desirable for covering a tank’s underbelly from attackers in spider holes, tunnel entrances such as manholes, and/or basement windows. It can also thwart attempts to drag mines into the tank’s path and reduce ground-level enemy gun positions designed to provide grazing fire.

Soft factors

A major development in modern tank design is the unmanned turret. As mentioned before, urban tanks must expect enemy fire from multiple directions simultaneously, and thus would benefit from having multiple turrets like a 1920s tank3 or a pre-dreadnought battleship. The 1920s designs were a failure because the turrets needed to be manned. Thus, they could not effectively balance the following needs:

• Armor protection
• Interior cubic volume for the men and the ammunition
• Ergonomics
• Accessibility for operation, reloading, and clearing jams
• Optics and fields of view
• Power supply
• Preventing the turrets from getting in each other’s way

The advent of World War II also favored main battle tanks, which displaced the 1920s designs for the same reason dreadnoughts displaced pre-dreadnoughts: longer-range guns, better speed, etc.

Unmanned turrets, however, allow modern side turrets/sponsons to be much smaller and more compact than their 1920s ancestors, and keep the operators at a safe distance in the event of a direct hit and/or ammunition cook-off. Unmanned turrets can also be placed farther forward on the hull than manned turrets, since they weigh less and thus pose less risk of causing balance/center-of-gravity issues. Placing side turrets further forward, in turn, enables urban tanks to fire around 90-degree corners while exposing as little of its hull as possible. The controls for these would ideally be constructed like the A-10 Warthog’s controls, with redundancy and mechanical backups for all automated systems.

A second soft factor design element is the inclusion of escape hatches on all sides and the rear of the tank, a move that necessitates placing the engine and side turrets/sponsons towards the front of the vehicle.

These are not new concepts; the WW2-era Churchill4 heavy tank had side exits, while rear exit doors are included in the design of the Israeli Merkava tank, itself a product of Israel’s experiences in dense urban terrain. The logic behind them is simple: if the tank is knocked out, the crew will need escape hatch options in all directions, not just the top of the tank. Classic urban antitank tactics involve firing down onto the tank from above; while this will be less damaging to an urban tank than a main battle tank on account of its uniformly thick armor, limiting urban tankers to exiting via top hatches noticeably reduces their likelihood of escaping safely when bailing out under fire. This survivability need will also affect the design and employment of cage armor; cage armor designs must not block escape routes, and the escape routes must not widen the cage armor profile any more than is necessary. If the tank becomes too wide, then its usefulness in narrow streets declines rapidly.

Placing the engine in the vehicle’s front, along with the flamethrower, side turrets, and sponsons, increases the safety of the crew from the fuel as well as the ammunition. The crew in the rear of the tank can be physically separated from the fuel tanks and ammunition by a protective thermal/blast-proof barrier and pilot the tank’s weapons remotely. Placing the fuel tank in front instead of a driver or gunner also allows the front of the tank to be any shape; thus, the front can be a steeply sloped nose for maximum deflection of oncoming frontal or flank shots.

Visibility in urban terrain is another traditional difficulty for tanks. In addition to using the 360-degree cameras already available to M1 Abrams tanks, an urban tank would carry drones for reconnaissance. The 360-degree cameras can only provide ground-level vision, whereas drones can offer the commander a bird’s-eye view and aid in spotting targets in high-rise buildings.

These should be digitally linked, so that data can be shared in real time between tanks and commanders. Lateral communication is difficult in urban terrain, and anything which can ameliorate this should be incorporated.

Closing thoughts

Urban tanks will always be a niche role, but their niche will become more prevalent in a future war. Urban combat without the presence of armored vehicles is extremely hazardous to the infantryman, and the side which develops a purpose-built tank for urban combat will enjoy a marked advantage over one that continues to use main battle tanks. Many of the technological hindrances to developing such tanks in the past no longer exist, and it is no longer a matter of “if,” but rather “when” these new tanks will appear on the battlefield.

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