Tank desant

Nowadays, this tactic is rare in well-equipped armed forces, with front-line troops usually riding in armoured personnel carriers or infantry fighting vehicles.

However, Soviet troops used it regularly in the Soviet–Afghan War, and tank desant was employed on a massive scale by Russia during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The tank desant tactic, like more conventional airborne and amphibious operations, was used to achieve fundamental goals of maneuver warfare: "surprise, leverage, simultaneity and interchangeability".

[1] The use of tank desant was only prescribed within the first kilometer of the forward edge of the combat area for only the simplest of tactical mission objectives, since the circumstances would be difficult for the troops engaged.

Today, tank desant is considered a wasteful and human-costly improvisation, which, in the opinion of some writers, was adopted by the Red Army because they failed to appreciate the problem of tank–infantry cooperation.

In contrast to the offensive Soviet tank desant tactics of World War II, these were soldiers who wanted to be able to move from their vehicles quickly in case of ambush (which often turned their transports into death traps).

During the Second Chechen War and other local conflicts of the post-Soviet era, the units of the Russian military and law enforcement acquired the tactic, making it a routine.