ATGM Anti-Tank Guided Missile
A guided missile fired by infantry, vehicles or aircraft to destroy armored targets at range, correcting its own flight path onto the target rather than flying a fixed unguided trajectory like a rocket.
An anti-tank guided missile is a weapon that steers itself, or is steered by an operator, onto an armored target well beyond the range of an unguided rocket like an RPG.1 It exists to solve a simple problem: infantry needed a way to kill a tank without getting close enough for the tank to kill them first, and an unguided shaped-charge round loses accuracy fast past a couple hundred meters.
Guidance is what separates ATGM generations. First-generation missiles like the original TOW and Milan were wire-guided, with the operator tracking the target through a sight the whole time the missile flew, a method called MCLOS. Second-generation systems automated part of that, with the missile correcting itself onto the operator’s sightline (SACLOS). Third-generation missiles like the Javelin carry their own imaging seeker and go fully fire-and-forget after launch, letting the gunner move to cover immediately.2 As tank armor added reactive and composite layers on the frontal arc, ATGM designers responded with tandem warheads to defeat reactive armor and top-attack flight profiles that hit a tank’s thinner roof instead of its hardened front, which is now the main design split buyers evaluate.
What actually matters when comparing ATGMs is range, guidance type, warhead configuration, and launch platform: whether a system is man-portable, vehicle-mounted, or helicopter-launched changes its role entirely, and a top-attack fire-and-forget missile is a very different procurement decision from an older wire-guided direct-attack one.
WeaponSpecs catalogs ATGMs under the missile type page with these same fields, and Best ATGMs of 2026 ranks current systems on exactly this range, guidance and warhead criteria rather than manufacturer marketing claims.
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