Key Points – Russia’s T-90 main battle tank, despite being touted by Vladimir Putin as the “best in the world,” has demonstrated a critical vulnerability in Ukraine known as the “disco head” glitch, where its turret spins uncontrollably after being hit.
-This embarrassing defect has been observed in multiple engagements, including against US-supplied M2 Bradley fighting vehicles and FPV drones.
-Experts like retired British Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon attribute the malfunction to a combination of inexperienced Russian crews becoming disoriented and failures in the tank’s less-sophisticated fire control electronics, a problem likely exacerbated by Western sanctions impacting component quality.
Disco Head’ Glitch: The Embarrassing Flaw Plaguing Russia’s ‘Best’ T-90 Tank
The defect was noticed as far back as January 2024 when a Russian T-90 Main Battle Tank (MBT) suffered multiple hits by and was eventually disabled by a Ukrainian US-supplied M2 Bradley Infantry fighting vehicle (IFV).
Video that later appeared on various sites showed the T-90 getting mauled by the Bradley’s M242 25mm Bushmaster chain gun.
The MBT appeared to take multiple hits during the engagement while each direct hit by the chain gun created a bright flash as it impacted on the T-90’s armour.
The T-90 ended up being disabled in what is called a “mobility kill” with the crew abandoning the vehicle and fleeing the battlefield.
But also noticed in some of the footage of the engagement was that at some point, the T-90 appeared to be losing control – its turret spinning uncontrollably before crashing into a tree.
The Disco Head Glitch
The wild spinning of the turret is now diagnosed as what was designated later in 2024 as a “disco head” glitch.
This defect in the T-90 is somewhat of an embarrassment in that this is the MBT that Russian President Vladimir Putin has called the “best tank in the world”.
This is a claim he has made on numerous occasions since the tank came into contact and took fire from Ukrainian forces.
The worst example of the head glitch defect came during a battle in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region in the Donbas when two other US-supplied Bradley IFVs again engaged one of the Russian tanks.
During the engagement, the Ukrainians opened up with the Bushmaster from close range and began “plinking” the T-90’s armour with the weapon’s 25mm M791 APDS-T and the M919 APFSDS-T rounds, the latter of which is made of depleted uranium.
These repetitive hits caused this tank to go into the “head glitch” mode, with the turret again spinning out of control.
Another T-90 malfunctioned when it came under attack by a strike drone company from Ukraine’s highly-experienced and now-famous 47th Mechanized Brigade.
The tank suffered several hits from drones as it was moving down a road, which appears to be somewhere in the eastern Donbas region again.
Another drone strikes the rear of the T-90’s hull, sending the turret into a spin, and the tank crew cannot regain control.
After this engagement, social media posts made by the 47th Brigade speculated that the strike had damaged one of the tank’s guidance optics, which was the root cause of the spinning turret.
Targeting System Design
The “disco-head glitch” results from the T-90’s 125mm smoothbore cannon fire control system.
This system is more advanced than that of previous-generation design tanks and is controlled by an automatic targeting system.
The electrically-controlled turret responds to laser warning sensors distributed around the tank’s surface to position the gun towards the target.
Both the US-made M1 Abrams and British Challenger 2 tanks are equipped with a similar design feature, which is sometimes referred to as “hunter-killer system”.
Given the potential for this kind of a system to malfunction after multiple hits disabling some of these sensors – the “head glitch” is “likely be a combination between inexperienced crews and poor electronics,” said Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former British Army tank commander who served in the Iraq war.
“It’s very easy for inexperienced people to become very disoriented in a tank because a tank’s hull can move in one direction, the turret could be in another direction and the commander’s sight could be in a completely other direction, which is why we get the term ‘disco head’ because people can easily become disoriented and the tank spins out of control,” he explained.
“It could also be an electronics failure. Western tanks have a quite sophisticated fire control system, and the Russians don’t appear to have got it right,” he continued.
“I cannot say definitively, but some of the electronics in a T-90 are from Western sources, so sanctions are likely to exacerbate the situation” as Russia industry has to make substitutions for western-made electronics with less-capable Russian or Chinese-made components.
Increased numbers of the T-90s, which cost about $4.5 million, are being seen on the battlefields of Ukraine due to Russian forces suffering huge losses of older-model T-72 and T-80 models, many of which were either designed and/or built more than 40 years ago.
Russia’s most advanced tank, the T-14 Armata, was first seen during the 2015 Victory Day Parade in Moscow, but has yet to appear on the battlefields in Ukraine.
This has raised the suspicion that this tank has not been committed to the Ukraine war because the Kremlin is unsure of how it might perform in combat.
About the Author:
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
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