A Tank by Any Other Name

A Russian T-80 tank in Ukraine’s Donbas region on March 11.Photos by Paula Bronstein for Foreign Policy

The names of tanks tell a story. The M1 Abrams main battle tank is named after Gen. Creighton Abrams, who commanded armor units in World War II. The time separating Abrams’s service in World War II and today’s war in Ukraine is roughly the same time separating the Civil War service of Sherman from those who rode in the tanks that bore his name. These naming conventions form neat, 80-year links in a chain of American war. Germany, which has eradicated so much of its martial past from its heritage, retains the naming convention of its tanks, a fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin touts in claims of Ukraine’s Nazification as today’s Leopards follow their Panther and Tiger progenitors into the bloodlands of Eastern Europe.

The Russian T-90s, whose charred carcasses littered the highways into Kyiv last summer, have their own lineage. They are descendants of the first Soviet tank, the T-18, which entered mass production in 1928, long after Western powers pioneered tank design during the later years of World War I. After Russia’s communist revolution, development of a tank became an important signal that Soviet industry could keep pace with the West.

Unlike the U.S. tanks named for generals or the German tanks named for predatory cats, Soviet tanks would forgo romanticized naming conventions. A collectivized society was more pragmatic and literal. Soviet tanks (and most Russian tanks today) would have only a T followed by a number (typically the year of their adoption) to denote the model. 

A Russian T-80 tank in Ukraine’s Donbas region on March 11.

Anglo-German rivalry gave birth to the tank during World War I, so it makes sense that the names would be different. Like today in Ukraine, tanks were deployed to break a battlefield stalemate. They promised to breach trenches and silence machine-gun nests on the Western Front, a wonder weapon to end the war. Secrecy surrounded their development. Initially, the British conceived of the tank as a “landship.” The Royal Navy participated in its design, and the program described its purpose as the development of a “water carrier”—also called a “tank.” 

When the British first used the Mark I variant at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, it augured a new era of industrialized warfare, one that witnesses struggled to comprehend. A British soldier, seeing a tank for the first time, recalled, “We heard strange throbbing noises, and lumbering slowly towards us came three huge mechanical monsters such as we had never seen before.” 

Even though most could not comprehend the tank when it first arrived on the battlefield, humanity’s greatest dreamers—among them, H.G. Wells and Leonardo da Vinci—envisaged tanks long before their creation. The tank’s lineage can be traced back to the armored chariots of ancient armies. The words used by other cultures place the tank more firmly in the evolution of war machines. In the Arab world, tanks are called dabbaaba, after a type of medieval siege engine. In Sweden, they are stridsvagn, which translates as chariot. The Polish call them czolg, from the verb “to crawl,” an attempt to describe the machine’s movement. The Japanese term, sensha, translates as “battle vehicle,” an articulation of its function. 

I drove an Abrams once, in Iraq. I was an infantryman and had made friends with one of our supporting tankers, a squat gunnery sergeant who looked as if he was born to sit in a turret. A tank’s efficacy is judged by balancing two characteristics at odds with each other: speed and armor. In this way, every good tank is a contradiction. It is both impossibly heavy and impossibly fast. After taking a couple laps around the base, I commented on how well the tank handled. The gunnery sergeant laughed, and what he told me that day is true: “Tough to go back to walking after you’ve ridden one of these into a war.”

This article appears in the Spring 2023 print issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Subscribe now to support our journalism.

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