03-06-2025
Ex-BBC defence expert Mark Urban: ‘We have gone soft about the cost of war'
Beware talking about military history: there will always be somebody on the internet who claims to know more than you.
This may explain why, when I ask Mark Urban if he has a favourite historical tank, his first instinct is to reply: 'This is dangerous territory.' That Urban, who served in the Royal Tank Regiment and spent three decades covering defence for Newsnight, feels like this shows how fraught these seemingly-innocuous questions can be.
He was recently taken to task in person, while filming videos at The Tank Museum in Bovington, Dorset. 'This bloke just marches up to me, he doesn't know who I am or why I'm filming these videos, and starts expounding about why the [Nazi German] Tiger is the best tank,' Urban recalls. 'And I think we know the type – very much online, not very good at negotiating disagreements, or whatever – and you sort of say, 'Yeah, well, the Tiger was fantastic in all sorts of respects. But, you want to look at this, this and that.' He just repeated what he said the first time. So, yeah, I got a little taste of it.'
Urban, 64, ought to be ready for more. He has written a new book, Tank: The 10 War Machines that Changed the World and the Remarkable Men Behind Them, that chronicles the story of tanks from the First World War through to the present day and explores how they have changed the face of warfare.
The Tiger features, as Adolf Hitler's favoured tank, but Urban reckons if it had been as good as his interlocutor in Devon had claimed, other armies would have adopted similar styles; instead, he feels that the American Sherman was the best tank in the Second World War, while the post-war British Centurion 'ranks as a quite superlative thing'.
The book is timely, as the nature of warfare continues to shift (especially in Ukraine and the Middle East), but tanks have continued to play a role on the front line despite many suggesting that they are not suited to modern conflicts. A line from Australia's Major General Kathryn Toohey (quoted twice by Urban in his book) sticks out. 'Tanks are like dinner jackets,' she said in 2019. 'You don't need them very often, but when you do, nothing else will do.'
Urban's case is that, no matter the changes in how wars are fought, tanks are still useful. 'You can't get away from the fact that, a bit like 1917, in Ukraine you've got two trench lines, you've got all sorts of horrible ways to take out people who are trying to get from one of those to the other,' he says. 'And people being soft, squishy things, [means] if you wrap a foot of armour around them, they're more likely to make it – not guaranteed to make it – than if they're just walking across there or going on a golf cart, as we've seen in some of the Russian attacks recently.'
Urban knows of what he speaks. Not only does he have experience working with tanks themselves, but it was as a journalist in warzones – from the Gulf to the Balkans and Ukraine – that he really saw the impact that the machines can have.
We meet at a park in Highgate, north London, near Urban's home. When he arrives, I am surprised to see his dark blue suit and open-necked blue shirt had been paired with a sling for his right arm; the result of a skiing accident in the Swiss Alps on Good Friday, he explains. An errant fellow skier flew into Urban 'with considerable force', leaving him with three broken ribs and a broken collarbone. The ribs are better, but the collarbone is taking longer to heal.
With the unflappability and upright carriage of an old soldier, he has ditched the heavy painkillers he was prescribed in the accident's aftermath. 'I found that it didn't have a huge effect when they put me on Tramadol,' he says. 'And I thought, well, do I really want to be taking these synthetic opiates if it's not really having any [effect]? So I knocked it off, but I was taking Nurofen and paracetamol, of course.'
Tanks have interested Urban for his whole life. After growing up in Wimbledon, south west London, he joined the Army on his 18th birthday for 'slightly juvenile reasons' that included thinking 'being in a tank would be cool, which didn't really survive my first day'. After what amounted to an unusual gap year in the forces (though he stayed in the Territorial Army), Urban studied international relations at the London School of Economics before undertaking a BBC graduate trainee scheme.
He spent three years at the Corporation as an assistant producer, but realised he wanted to do more hard news reporting, so joined the launch team of The Independent in 1986 and served as its defence correspondent. In four years he had made a sufficient name for himself that he was lured back to Auntie, first as a Newsnight reporter then for a short stint as Middle East correspondent, before returning to the former programme on the diplomatic and defence beat. He would remain there for almost 30 years.
Urban finishes my sentence when I mention that the last time I got in touch with him was when Newsnight was 'collapsing or being revamped or whatever' about 18 months ago. The programme that brought us Jeremy Paxman's merciless grillings of politicians and Emily Maitlis's interview with the Duke of York was, in the eyes of many, denuded and defanged when its running time was slashed to 30 minutes and it was retooled as a discussion programme in May last year.
Does he see the logic in the changes? 'I certainly see a logic in it,' he says, before lamenting the demise of the in-depth, reported films that helped distinguish Newsnight from regular news bulletins on one side and talking-head shows on the other.
'When they got rid of the bit that I thought was still really important and valuable, which was the filmed bit – because, of course, it costs more – then you think, 'Okay, well, if you're going to carry on with the chat bit, then you've really got to reinvent the nature of the conversation.' And that they did, so I think that's what they've got right. It's a different sort of conversation now.
'And one former deputy editor of Newsnight, when I told him what the plan was, he said, 'It's a podcast.' And of course, it is not quite a podcast, but it's more like one than the former incarnation of Newsnight.' BBC bosses are said to be happy with how the new, slimmed-down Newsnight is doing: it is currently attracting around 500,000 viewers, up from a low of less than 300,000.
Having left the BBC for good last year, Urban is now writing newspaper columns as well as hosting a new podcast, The Crisis Room, with former Home Secretary Amber Rudd and ex-CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos to unpick the latest in the world of defence, diplomacy and security. The podcast is made by Global, the media giant that has given refuge to fellow former Newsnight hosts Maitlis and Lewis Goodall. 'It's an expanding business and a lot of the broadcast world is contracting. A lot of opportunities [are] disappearing,' he says of the move. 'It is nice to be somewhere where things are expanding.'
The BBC's coverage of war, especially the conflict between Israel and Hamas, has long been the source of controversy, with some (including the Corporation's former director of television, Danny Cohen) saying that it has been biased against the Jewish state.
What does Urban think? 'I don't want you to interpret this specifically about Gaza: Gaza is a uniquely difficult and emotive subject, it's an extremely difficult thing and I don't want to weigh in on that,' he says. 'But I do think the question about coverage of conflict and war more generally, I see things that have happened over the course of the last 30-40 years that I've been involved in covering conflicts that either puzzle me or I find difficult to understand. I think it's problematic, for example, that so much coverage of conflict is through the lens of victimhood.'
It is a trend that Urban says he first saw in Bosnia in the 1990s, and later in Iraq and Afghanistan: 'What we were being asked to do, so much of the sense of what was the story was through that prism.' After the D-Day landings, he points out, the Allies are thought to have killed more than 25,000 French civilians, a fact that is 'clearly enormously problematic, but we don't tend to view it now in the rear view mirror that it wasn't worth liberating France because of that sacrifice and loss of all those people'.
The shape of modern newsrooms may be the reason for this. 'Certain bits of news organisations are still well resourced, like politics, so then Westminster stuff tends to dominate the news agenda because you've got one science correspondent or one tech person, one military person and you've got seven people on the political side,' he says.
'It's just the way the resources are. And therefore any news editor expects Westminster or whatever to produce an awful lot of the stories. So yes, I think it is problematic the way we cover war… There are questions that need to be asked of people running media organisations, and by journalists themselves, about is it still same old rules, or does the fact that we are under considerable additional threat due to instability in the world mean in some ways, we have to change the framing of some of these stories?'
We are speaking before the findings of the Strategic Defence Review are made public, and their implications for the future of British tank divisions (as well as the wider military), but Urban says not enough thought is given to how the machines will be used in modern conflicts. 'You've got to think about a tank that's less about fighting other tanks and more about triumphing in the situations it'll be in. So it needs to be protected in the ways that the Israelis have protected their latest armoured vehicles,' he says.
'We've sort of got that point, but not entirely, so these automated protection systems, we're going to buy some, but only enough, I think, for one-third of the new Challenger tanks. And you think, 'Come on, guys, it's either worth having this thing to safeguard this multi-million pound investment shooting down incoming anti-tank missiles, or it's not.' But, classic Brits, we're trying to save money by only buying enough for a third of the fleet. You've got to get real about that stuff.'
War continues to change at a rapid pace, with autonomous, robotic and remote-controlled vehicles (particularly drones) playing a large role in places like Ukraine; some armoured vehicles in the Donbas have been unmanned, for instance. So, is there a future for tanks?
'As long as you're trying to get across contested ground, people are firing all kinds of things at you, trying to kill you, you're still going to have something with armour on it, and it's going to be heavy, so you'd probably prefer tracks to wheels, and then you'll want some method for it to defend itself, and you'll put a weapon on it,' says Urban. 'And so you end up with something that looks like a tank, even if you call it something else.'
