[HN Gopher] Does the Tank Have a Future?
___________________________________________________________________
Does the Tank Have a Future?
Author : martincmartin
Score : 115 points
Date : 2022-06-15 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| Melatonic wrote:
| I am still waiting for when we get individual tank like things or
| tank suits. Lots of SciFi and Anime has talked about it for years
| but I feel like there has to be some efficient middleground
| between a bunch of dudes in a modern tank vs just running around
| as infantry with body armor. I am not necessarily talking about
| an Iron Man like thing - just something much more nimble.
| topspin wrote:
| Tanks were created to cope with two dominant threats: small arms
| and artillery shrapnel; the WW1 battlefield of machine guns and
| massed artillery. They've been improved to cope with some new
| threats since, but the number of threats are multiplying rapidly.
| The cost and complexity of tanks is exploding trying to deal with
| all of militarized model airplanes (Bayraktar et al.), guided
| artillery rounds (BONUS), long range armor seeking missiles
| (Brimstone), guided mortar rounds (XM395), intelligent anti-armor
| mines (PTKM-1R), man portable antitank weapons
| (Javelin/NLAW/Stugna-P/...), improved RPGs, etc.
|
| In a world where there is a Stugna-P "behind every blade of
| grass" tanks become a liability. I think they'll be scaled back
| to niches; there will probably always be a need for a big chunk
| of metal to push through and blow holes in things. Going forward
| though, the German Blitzkrieg model or Russia's Horde Of Armor
| doctrine is dead when the combatants are not greatly asymmetric.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| I think that's a slightly skewed way of looking at it. While
| there's some nuggets of truth there, the better way to look at
| a tank is that it provides highly mobile firepower, combined
| with enough protection to get in there and do it's job. And
| that job is to support the infantry by, as you stated so well,
| "blow holes in things" (Quickly, might add!)
|
| But it never was meant to operate on it's own. And when it did,
| it was either lost in large numbers (Russian tank charges in
| WWII) or was in all actuality a fluke (Your Blitzkrieg example.
| See The Chieftan's video on the Battle of France in WWII on why
| this was such a reckless thing to do, followed by reading on
| the Battle of The Bulge on why it didn't work a second time.)
|
| Tanks _unsupported by infantry_ are a liability. However,
| infantry, unsupported by tanks, can be a liability as well when
| attacking an opponent who 's well fortified and/or has heavy
| weapons. When tanks, infantry, and artillery work together
| (combined arms theory), then the danger posed by ATGMs and the
| like is greatly reduced. Armies have been reminded of this
| numerous times last century, and each time a renewed emphasis
| on combined arms fixes the balance.
|
| Lastly, and I feel this point is missing in a lot of arguments:
| ATGMs like Javelin, mines, guided mortars, etc and all but the
| heaviest drones are defensive and supporting weapons. For ATGMs
| and RPGs, these weapons exist to prevent infantry from being
| overrun. (And as the Russians are being reminded, they can be
| quite good at this.) They are _not_ offensive weapons. That is
| the reason the tank remains. It 's offensive.
| metabagel wrote:
| New German tank aims to be harder to kill.
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a40277518/...
| [deleted]
| metabagel wrote:
| Here's an article with no paywall.
|
| https://breakingdefense.com/2022/06/rheinmetall-unveils-new-...
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| For profit, "for export" weapons systems are morally
| reprehensible.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| I never understood why the tank tracks weren't targeted.
|
| They look easy to immobilize.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| They're relatively easily replaced and repaired.
| mike-the-mikado wrote:
| I believe that tank tracks break frequently and the tank will
| carry the spare parts required to make a repair.
| bombcar wrote:
| Also if you look at a tank it's basically a shell around the
| treads - you have to hit it directly on the side or a small
| opening on the front, both of which may not disable the
| tread.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| this just makes the machine immobile it doesn't lessen its
| lethality. Also those tracks are pretty dang well designed as
| they have used across both military and industrial applications
| for a long time now.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Why do you think tank tracks aren't targeted? Unless you can
| directly pen/destroy a tank in one shot, in which case why
| would you not do that, "tracking" a tank is a common tactic to
| make it combat ineffective.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| That entire article was about attacking the tank everywhere
| but the tracks.
| metabagel wrote:
| Fantastic visuals accompanying the article!
| causi wrote:
| They're slick but not terribly accurate. For example, the top-
| attack angle for the Javelin is depicted as far more vertical
| than it actually is. It's actually only about 50 degrees, which
| means it doesn't perform as much better than the NLAW as the
| specs would suggest thanks to the NLAW's 90 degree top attack.
| calcifer wrote:
| It's an article meant for the general public. I think the
| visuals demonstrate the "it comes from above" nature of it
| quite well enough.
| [deleted]
| breadloaf wrote:
| Yes it does. See "The Chieftain: No, The Tank Is Not Dead"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7T650RTT8
|
| TLDW: Tank has a task on a battlefield and fact that you can
| easily kill it won't take that task away. Same goes for infantry
| and they are not going away either. On the other hand we don't
| see battleships anymore, because big guns were replaced by
| precise missiles with much more range.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I always thought that battleships were ursurped by carriers.
| Aircraft killed the battleships.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| And now advanced self-targeting hypersonic intercontinental
| ballistic missiles are going to soon usurp carriers. Just a
| few dozen launched from land will easily overwhelm any
| defense a carrier has.
|
| You know how everything in our lives is slowly becoming
| smart? This goes for all the weapons too.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ship_ballistic_missile
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Surprisingly enough, the AEGIS Anti Ballistic Missile
| variant is in fact designed to intercept the name on the
| tin. That a handful of lazy journalists write "carriers are
| dead" articles with some regularity doesn't mean the actual
| Pentagon is clueless and asleep at the wheel vs it being a
| superficial take of a much more complex topic.
|
| A couple years back the Navy asked congress for funding to
| demonstrate taking down an inbound saturation attack of
| 500+ missiles, probably as a deterrent to China. Congress
| declined.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| This made me chuckle. Not that it's impossible but that is
| quite hand wavey for a very tough technical challenge
| nobody is close to accomplishing yet.
|
| Sure. And carriers can simply launch their reusable
| hypersonic smart drone swarm shields and submerge
| underwater.
| 323 wrote:
| A carrier costs $10 billion. Without considering the crew
| and stuff in it. You can fire 50 $100 mil missiles
| simultaneously at it would still make a lot of sense,
| especially considering the morale aspect.
| Sakos wrote:
| Aircraft aren't anything without their missiles.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| This sea change happened in WWII though.
| themadturk wrote:
| It's the same thing, if you think of aircraft as missiles.
| The point is the extension of range. Aircraft can reach out
| much, much further than a naval gun, and can be used to scout
| more effectively (many 20th century battleships had aircraft
| of their own for scouting/fire spotting). Even modern
| missile-equipped warships are less flexible in some ways than
| a carrier air wing, though we have yet to see warfare pitting
| a modern carrier battle group against anti-ship missiles.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| Came here to post this, so glad to see you did!
|
| I'll add a complimentary link for others' benefit from Military
| History Visualized: "Tanks are obsolete, apparently since 1919"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY
|
| In short, people forget about Combined Arms warfare. One cannot
| look at the tank, or other arms of a military without
| understanding how it supports and is supported by the others.
| When that is overlooked, misunderstandings and exaggerated
| conclusions are the result.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The only reason you'd use tanks _or_ infantry in a modern war
| is that you don 't have enough drones and missiles.
|
| Maybe _you 're_ willing to climb into a tank after what we've
| seen in Ukraine recently, but that's all you, pal.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you want to occupy territory, you've got to do that on the
| ground.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Tanks and soldiers are used to occupy territory, but in the
| face of a well-equipped enemy and/or a motivated populace,
| they can't hold it.
|
| Not everybody _likes_ wars of attrition. Russia is an
| outlier in that regard. Copying their doctrine and tactics
| is a bad idea, as is citing them as a successful example of
| how to accomplish anything. They are great at beating up on
| unarmed civilians, but against a modern armed force they
| wouldn 't stand a chance... and no amount of tanks and
| soldiers will change that.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| >... They are great at beating up on unarmed civilians,
| but against a modern armed force they wouldn't stand a
| chance...
|
| ...modern armed force and which is willing and allowed to
| fight. It's an increasingly important factor of modern
| day engagements.
|
| Let's not forget the political aspects of the
| battlefield, as we are continuing to witness.
| paganel wrote:
| >, but against a modern armed force they wouldn't stand a
| chance.
|
| They seem to be doing quite well against the modern army
| of Ukraine, NATO-trained for 7-8 years now.
| yks wrote:
| The line of engagement barely moved in 3 months all the
| while Ukraine is hopelessly outgunned, Russians are doing
| quite well indeed /s. In reality UAF wasn't even a really
| modern army, just more modern than Russia, and all their
| "NATO" training in effect started in 2014.
|
| Where do people get the impression that Russian army is
| strong and capable is beyond me, they just throw people
| into the meat grinder and sit on top of the infinite
| Soviet arsenal of old equipment.
| FredPret wrote:
| If Clausewitz is to be believed, killing the enemy army is
| priority 1, and territory only matters in pursuit of that
| goal.
|
| Makes sense - if all combatants in the Russian army are
| dead, there's no further need to defend territory for
| Ukraine. A boom with a border guard stamping passports
| would suffice.
| michaelt wrote:
| Right, but what if you want to chase the Russians out of
| Ukraine _without_ killing the Russian army to the last
| man?
| FredPret wrote:
| A temporary solution at best. You chase them out and
| they'll eventually come at you again, until they are dead
| or disbanded.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| When it gets to that point, the russian army without
| supply lines will have no other means to stay engaged.
|
| Thus the priority from the very beginning was to disrupt
| the supply lines and ability to generate resources,
| meanwhile securing own supply and resources.
|
| Ukraine needs more supply of long range artillery and lot
| more ammo for it ... yesterday and right now!
| jltsiren wrote:
| "War is a continuation of policy by other means."
|
| Political goals are always the first priority. Fighting
| may be exciting, but it may also be irrelevant in the
| grand scheme of things. Defeating the enemy is neither
| necessary nor sufficient for winning the war.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| You can't occupy an objective with a drone or a missile. You
| can't control a city with a drone.
|
| Infantry and AFVs that support them will never go away. They
| may change but war isn't just about destruction.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Oh yes you can. Just not a flying drone and not just one.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I'm going to avoid the quippy sarcastic response and try
| my best to be curious:
|
| How would you occupy a city with only drones? What would
| it look like? Would they issue orders to civilians to
| stay in their homes? What sort of objectives that humans
| do now in war [0] do you think drones can fully replace?
|
| [0] establishing forward bases for further logistical
| support, "securing" areas, including searching through
| rubble for humans and making sure they're not a threat,
| etc. I've never been in the military so I don't know from
| experience but I'm pretty sure there's tons of other
| examples here.
| imtringued wrote:
| But your not flying drone is going to look like a
| tankette, aka the autonomous combat warrior weasel from
| Rheinmetall.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| There are some experiments using turret style drones to
| maintain like DMZs. They still need a human operator.
| That is a case where you are mostly just waiting though.
|
| Seizing a town means dealing with a ton of civilians -
| negotiating, handling mixed reports, etc. Drones may
| become part of that but cameras are imperfect and you
| will need people unless Drone tech has a giant leap in
| human interfacing.
| usrn wrote:
| I'm not sure willingness matters as much in the military as
| you seem to think.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| We'll see. We have an all-volunteer military here in the
| US, and that won't change, at this point. The idea, as
| always, is to get more done with fewer people.
| int_19h wrote:
| It'll change very fast once US gets into a major war.
| Say, with China.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Never say never, but you really don't want that to
| happen.
| int_19h wrote:
| I didn't say anything about wanting it to happen. But if
| it happens, does anyone seriously believe that US could
| avoid re-instituting the draft?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But if it happens, does anyone seriously believe that
| US could avoid re-instituting the draft?
|
| The US no longer has a draft law because the US
| determined that the draft was bad both from a military
| manpower perspective and from a domestic politics
| perspective as to maintaining national will to continue a
| conflict.
|
| The US will not reauthorize a draft for an overseas war
| while the US remains a major power. If the US collapses
| from major power status and the entire political and
| military calculus is scrambled, it might.
| remarkEon wrote:
| >The US no longer has a draft law because the US
| determined that the draft was bad both from a military
| manpower perspective and from a domestic politics
| perspective as to maintaining national will to continue a
| conflict.
|
| Nixon got rid of the draft for reasons that had to do
| with the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and his
| presidential election. The argument was that the AVF
| _wouldn 't negatively impact force readiness_, not that
| the draft was "bad" from a military manpower perspective
| (I'm not sure what that means). There's some other
| reasons peppered in correspondence from that time, but
| I'm super skeptical of this argument for enough reasons
| to finish a PhD thesis. It's been a long time coming, but
| the conversation needs to be had about how even if the
| United States _needed_ to institute a draft we may not
| actually be able to do so anymore because of the general
| decline in health and fitness of men in this country.
| More over, there are civ-mil relations considerations
| that aren 't properly accounted for when you claim the
| AVF is superior - we have essentially a warrior caste
| now, that's in many ways sectioned off from the reset of
| the civilian population. Good? Bad? Exercise for the
| reader but you can probably guess my stance.
|
| >The US will not reauthorize a draft for an overseas war
| while the US remains a major power.
|
| I don't see how these are related. Plenty of non "major"
| powers have conscription (in some form or another), as do
| plenty of "major" powers. The US wasn't a "major" power
| before WWI, though it was certainly "a power", and yet my
| great grandfather was drafted. Maybe you mean the US
| won't get into an unwinnable and unpopular ground war in
| South East Asia and then re-institute the draft, but you
| may be underestimating the depth of ineptitude of the
| people who've been running the show the last 30ish years.
| Everyone I served with was a volunteer, obviously, but
| war necessitates a lot of things that people would
| otherwise consider impossible right up until they happen.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The argument was that the AVF wouldn't negatively
| impact force readiness, not that the draft was "bad" from
| a military manpower perspective
|
| The argument for the AVF has evolved over time; the issue
| wasn't once and done, and the importance of longer
| service terms in a wide range of specialties has been
| increasingly cited in arguments for maintaining the AVF.
| But even in the original Gates Commission report, the AVF
| was not, contrary to your description, painted as merely
| non-harmful, but as a more efficient means of meeting
| military requirements, with extensive supporting
| analysis.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are a lot of voices that seem to believe that
| isolationism is the way to go and that this will protect
| their 'lifestyle' from being impacted by the war in
| Ukraine. It's interesting how apparently some of
| history's lessons are impossible to learn, the exact same
| thing happened in 1938 and the end result was a _much_
| bigger war.
|
| Also, the degree to which the world economies are now
| interconnected make it next to impossible to believe that
| a major war in Europe would not impact other parts of the
| world, which is super naive. Time will tell but I fear
| that we're in for a very rough ride if this current war
| doesn't get stopped in its tracks before it can engulf
| more territories, which ultimately will happen.
|
| The only good thing is that now that the Russians have
| shown their true goals that the bulk of the 'NATA did
| this' or 'The Ukrainians only have themselves to blame'
| people have something to chew on.
| remarkEon wrote:
| I'm not a fan of our (US + NATO) current Ukraine policy,
| but that isn't because I'm an isolationist. I think it's
| just dumb policy, on several different dimensions. The
| version of the criticism you're leveling right now can be
| inverted very easily. That the people arguing for
| escalation in Ukraine, that it's "the exact same thing
| [that] happened in 1938" (it isn't), and that unless we
| do things like a NFZ it leads to a larger war, have a
| cartoon version in their heads of war and geopolitical
| strategy. Where there's clear boundaries between the
| "good guys" and "bad guys", like this is some Marvel film
| where you don't really even need to watch it to know what
| happens (spoiler alert: the good guys win!). Perhaps they
| are the ones who have something, and some history, to
| chew on.
| yks wrote:
| You either accept a moral responsibility to protect
| sovereign nations from elimination, and elimination at
| this point was stated by Russian officials and media as a
| goal numerous times, or you accept the Russian position
| of "lands and peoples belong to the strong men" and we're
| back to the age of conquest, but now with nukes. Not only
| the former position is morally right, but it also
| prevents or at least postpones the nuclear proliferation.
|
| This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole
| Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that
| you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging
| out on Hacker News.
| usrn wrote:
| I completely disagree. You can't go preemptively
| flattening every country you don't like (I mean, we did
| for a little while and all it seems to have done is made
| a bigger mess.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Where did I write that you can go to preemptively flatten
| every country you don't like?
| themadturk wrote:
| A draft takes a long time to ramp up, and soldiers take a
| lot of time to train, so we're unlikely to start up a
| draft unless we expect a conflict to be protracted. The
| United States is unlikely to invade China and vice versa.
| A war pitting the US against China is likely to be
| largely naval- and air-oriented, with ground action (if
| any) concentrated on Taiwan, and will probably take at
| most a few weeks or months.
|
| We mustn't forget Vizzini's Aphorism: Never get involved
| in a land war in Asia.
| int_19h wrote:
| If only all the wars that were deemed "unlikely" before
| they began never happened, we'd all be much better off.
|
| The problem is that once shots are fired, things can
| escalate very quickly, and decision-making is often not
| rational.
| FredPret wrote:
| That war (god forbid) might only take a couple of hours
| usrn wrote:
| Unless it's a land war we're more than able to defeat
| China with what we've got now and their future looks very
| dim due to the demographic bomb they've created so that's
| unlikely to change.
|
| I'm not too sure it would be motivating to people either.
| Usually what motivates people is the fear of being
| overrun by some other group but with immigration the way
| it is that's happening anyway.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think the guy has a point in tanks being useful, but
| nobody's saying it can't be satelite controlled drone tanks.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I think that's a potentially useful idea. At this point,
| putting _people_ in tanks is irresponsible. But that doesn
| 't mean they couldn't be used as remotely-operated
| vehicles.
| kcb wrote:
| How could you figure? How would they be controlled while
| under communication jamming? Until autonomous AI exists
| we'll need people on the ground.
| moffkalast wrote:
| The same way that airplane drones are controlled, from a
| satelite in orbit directly above. To jam that you'd need
| to get yourself above the tank, which to be fair is
| probably doable to some extent, so there would have to be
| countermeasures for it. But it's not exactly impossible.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Or you launch an anti-satellite missile.
|
| Which is the reason why great-powers don't go to war with
| each other these days. Forget nukes, the first thing that
| will be destroyed is each other's satellite communication
| systems. That alone would devastate the world's economy.
|
| Anti-satellite warfare is a huge reason why the Space
| Force (stupid name) came into existence.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Drones fly pretty high and usually avoid contact with the
| enemy, and if there's trouble, they can easily flee and
| come back later. For on-the-ground vehicle, one need to
| stay much closer to the enemy, and if something goes
| wrong, the opportunities for fleeing are much harder to
| come by. You certainly don't need to physically be on top
| of the tank to jam - there are military systems that can
| disrupt communications in a wide area. And, probably,
| just dumping something non-transparent on whatever it
| uses to acquire visual information would work too. There
| would be nobody to come out and clean it up - a trivial
| task for a human, much harder for the robotic drone.
| Humans are very flexible, robots aren't, at least not
| until we get some AI going. And tbh, if we have such an
| AI, I'm not sure we really want to give it a tank to
| drive around.
| dsr_ wrote:
| If it doesn't have to carry people, it can carry much
| less armor, which makes it more maneuverable; it might
| carry so much less mass that it doesn't need tracks to
| handle rough terrain. If it's light and nimble enough it
| doesn't need a turret to point the main weapon.
|
| Is a remote-controlled dune buggy with a low-recoil rifle
| a tank?
| jacquesm wrote:
| You still need to protect the ammunition, otherwise a
| nearby explosion will set it off (this also happens at
| the moment but less so than I would expect it to happen
| with less armor, which also would make penetrating the
| wall much easier and which would make the tank a softer
| target altogether).
| dsr_ wrote:
| Sure, but you might not care as much because:
|
| - you can airlift 25 2-ton dune-buggies instead of 1
| 50-ton tank
|
| - you can buy 25 $2 million dune-buggies for the cost of
| 2 $25 million tanks
|
| - if you sent 2 tanks, losing one is half of your force
| projection. If you sent 25 dune-buggies, losing one is 4%
| of your force.
|
| - maintenance on an unmanned 2-ton dune-buggy has to be
| easier, faster and cheaper than maintenance on a tank.
| Tanks need dedicated recovery vehicles (or Ukrainian
| tractors) that cost nearly as much as another tank.
| Maintenance is going to be much, much easier without
| armor and the concomitant suspension for the armor
| getting in the way.
|
| A hybrid powerplant is probably best -- a diesel motor-
| generator to charge batteries and run for distance, with
| an electric motor system and nice quiet relatively cool
| batteries for an hour or two of sneaking around at a
| time. Tanks don't sneak up on you, but a hybrid dune-
| buggy in battery mode can.
|
| This also has knock-on effects for the civilian economy,
| because if the cool support weapon for the infantry is a
| quiet hybrid dune-buggy, the same thing with a crew cabin
| instead of a gun and ammo will be a smash hit.
| imtringued wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TUv5xkY0wic
| smsm42 wrote:
| Probably not with the current level of technology.
| Especially given that the lifetime of the tank is not only
| "drive forward and shoot" - it needs to be fueled, oiled,
| repaired, restocked, pulled out of the mud, etc. Fully
| automating this would be a very complex task. Especially
| achieving it on a battlefield where there are people who
| are present there, unlike the remote controller, and do
| their best to try and not let you do any of that.
| [deleted]
| kashkhan wrote:
| Maybe war shouldn't have a future and not a role. We've had
| enough of the european way of war.
| skylanh wrote:
| This is sort of my reference point from a salient and
| personal perspective on why government's have departments of
| defense.
|
| TEDxAmsterdam: Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjAsM1vAhW0
|
| Link to TED profile:
| https://www.ted.com/speakers/peter_van_uhm
|
| "Peter van Uhm [was from 17 April 2008 until 28 June 2012]
| the Netherlands' chief of defense"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_van_Uhm
| kashkhan wrote:
| A government needs to wage war at some level to exist.
|
| To eliminate war the motives for war created by governments
| need to be addressed. There is only one logical outcome,
| once you decide you don't want war.
| phillc73 wrote:
| Dispense with the government?
| int_19h wrote:
| Governments are fine. It's states that are the problem.
| Nation-states (whether ethnic or civic) especially,
| because they have motivations to wage war that are
| connected to the fiction that forms their core: "this
| territory is historically ours", and "you're treating our
| people poorly". Both are in full display in Ukraine
| today, but just look at any "Greater ..." article in
| Wikipedia to see numerous other examples.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Unless you somehow achieve global equality in all things,
| there's always going to be one group that wants something
| another group has. Combine that with democracy and you
| get a government that's happy to assist them with taking
| it.
| mike-the-mikado wrote:
| Arguably the war is happening because we had prepared for it
| insufficiently.
| the_af wrote:
| It's hard to understand how "we" could not have prepared
| sufficiently. This conflict in Europe isn't a spur of the
| moment thing. Arguably it could have been in the making
| since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but even if you
| don't go that far back, then _at least_ from 2014. It
| certainly didn 't come out of the blue!
|
| I'll make my comment more assertive: I think "we" (for
| almost any value of "we") prepared for this. Some
| assumptions were proven wrong, like it often happens with
| war. But a lot of it is playing out like many assumed it
| would, or at least, it's playing out so that some factions
| can observe what modern war fought with modern weapons
| looks like.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I think EU specifically dropped it's defense and R&D
| budgets and became too weak, making land grabs by Russia
| possible.
|
| There's a reason Russia feels good blustering about
| attacking Finland.
| foverzar wrote:
| > There's a reason Russia feels good blustering about
| attacking Finland.
|
| When did that happen?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/12/russia-threatens-
| retaliatory...
|
| https://nypost.com/2022/05/14/russia-threatens-nukes-for-
| us-...
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/russia-threatens-finland-sweden-
| nat...
|
| This was major news and carried by almost every outlet.
| It is almost certainly just bluster, but escalatory
| bluster for sure.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| If war was the predictable outcome, Ukraine should
| probably have been more dovish towards Russian-speaking
| Ukrainians in the East, ie. not banning Russian language,
| not shelling cities.
|
| Obviously what Russia has done is reprehensible, but if
| Ukraine saw war as incoming I don't see why they took
| these aggravating steps.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| It's said to see such misinformation here.
|
| > [not] banning Russian language
|
| Russian isn't banned in Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians
| use Russian in their day to day life just fine. You can
| hear Russian spoken by Ukrainians on the battlefield.
|
| > not shelling cities
|
| Check photos from Donetsk in e.g. 2020, city ~10
| kilometers from the frontline. Does it look destroyed?
| No, it looks like any peacetime city.
|
| There were artillery exchanges between _both_ sides
| targeting military fortifications. Civilian casualties in
| the last few years have been minimal.
|
| But this doesn't really matter either way. Putin doesn't
| care about civilian casualties, otherwise why would he
| start this war?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Russian isn't banned in Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians
| use Russian in their day to day life just fine. You can
| here Russian spoken by Ukrainians on the battlefield.
|
| It is illegal to have Russian language radio stations,
| Russian language schools, and for government to
| communicate officially in Russian (in addition to
| Ukrainian & English). Of course people still speak
| Russian in Ukraine.
|
| > There were artillery exchanges between both sides
| targeting military fortifications. Civilian casualties in
| the last few years have been minimal.
|
| Yes from both sides. 3.4k civilian casualties prior to
| the actual war.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > Of course people still speak Russian in Ukraine.
|
| Then it's not banned as you claimed.
|
| > Yes from both sides. 3.4k civilian casualties prior to
| the actual war.
|
| With 3000 out of that in 2014 and 2015. In 2021 - 18
| civilian deaths, half of that caused by unexploded
| shells/mines - https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files
| /2021-10/Conflict-...
|
| War in Donbas was actually dying out in the past few
| years, until Putin decided to escalate it and cause
| deaths of 10 000s.
| cestith wrote:
| Russian is as banned in Ukraine as French, Hindi, or
| German are banned in the United States. That is, they are
| not the primary language taught in schools nor the
| language in which government business is conducted but
| nobody's being jailed for speaking it.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The comparison with the US is disingenuous - it is not
| illegal to open a French language school in the United
| States, it is in Ukraine.
|
| Previously, Russian was allowed to be taught in schools
| in Ukraine. It was then banned from being taught in
| schools even in regions where the majority of people
| speak Russian.
|
| Furthermore, it is illegal in Ukraine to have a Russian
| language radio station.
|
| I encourage you to read up on the actual policy
| differences.
| scrose wrote:
| Many of your statements are outright false.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| For radio: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-
| elsewhere-37908828
|
| For schools, businesses and public services:
| https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210401-new-law-
| stoke...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Evidence beats a bare denial. (Of course, the original
| claim didn't have any evidence, either...)
|
| "Yes it is" "No it isn't" is a really uninteresting
| conversation. Somebody supply some _evidence_ , not just
| claims.
| scrose wrote:
| I don't have the time to google citable sources to refute
| false claims without any evidence in the first place. My
| sources are my own multiple very recent visits to
| Ukraine(last visit earlier this year), and my extended
| Ukrainian family and friends who were all taught either
| only Russian(older and grew up in Russian occupied
| territories or Eastern Ukraine) and at times spoke
| Ukrainian under threat of death. Or were taught both
| Russian and Ukrainian(younger, recent grads from the Kyiv
| region)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I've provided some media reports in another comment.
| Evidence for everything I've said is also very available
| on Google.
| cestith wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-parliament-
| langua... does not mention banning Russian-language
| schools nor, in fact, mentions banning teaching it in
| addition to Ukrainian in the same school.
|
| There's an education law that says that starting in 2023,
| all *state* schools must be taught *primarily* in
| Ukranian at and above the *fifth grade*. While imperfect,
| it does allow teaching in several minority languages,
| especially in primary school. Russian is not allowed at
| state schools above primary school as a teaching language
| for other subjects, but it *can* be taught as an elective
| subject and other organizations are free to teach it. The
| ECHR implications of this are mentioned specifically by
| the Venice Commission.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-
| language/criticis...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190516190140/https://www.pr
| esi...
|
| https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/default.asp
| x?p...
|
| From section 5 of the Venice document.:
|
| "69. Thus, it appears that members of the Bulgarian,
| Greek, German, Polish, Romanian and Hungarian minorities,
| in addition to being able to study their language as a
| subject, may also study one or more other subjects
| through the medium of their language at the secondary
| education level. However, members of national minorities
| who do not speak an official EU language --
| Byelorussians, Gagauzes, Jews, and, significantly,
| Russians -- will only be able to study at the secondary
| school level their language as a subject. Thus, a
| hierarchy is created at the secondary school level, with
| indigenous peoples potentially treated more favourably
| than national minorities which speak an official language
| of the EU, and national minorities which speak an
| official language of the EU treated more favourably than
| other national minorities."
|
| There is a high quota for state-language content on radio
| but other languages are allowed a percentage. From
| section 7 of the Venice document.:
|
| "95. With regard to the use of languages in broadcasting,
| Article 24 refers to the Law on Television and Radio
| Broadcasting. At the same time, a transitional provision
| of the Law (Section IX, point 7.24) amends Article 10 of
| the latter Law, tightening the language quota
| requirements, by increasing the proportion of the
| Ukrainian language content for national and regional
| broadcasters from 75 to 90 per cent and, for the local
| broadcasters, from 60 to 80 per cent. This amendment will
| come into force five years after the Law's entry into
| force (i.e. on 16 July 2024)."
|
| So is the situation perfect for everyone? No. Is the EU
| (and Hungary and some others) pushing Ukraine to
| compromise? Yes. Have they promised to work on
| compromises? Also yes.
|
| There's no need to go beyond the actual, documented
| issues and spread falsehoods and propaganda.
|
| *TL;DR:* I invite *you* to read up on the issue.
| int_19h wrote:
| Russian language isn't banned anywhere in Ukraine.
| Indeed, 5 minutes of combat footage from the Ukrainian
| side will quickly show that the majority of their armed
| forces speak Russian.
|
| Even Russians themselves reflected on this, noting that
| most volunteer forces they have faced so far come not
| from the Western (majority-Ukrainian-speaking) regions of
| Ukraine, but rather from Kharkiv, Dnipro etc. Their
| explanation is that all those people are "brainwashed by
| Ukrainian Nazis".
|
| There is some real contention with the status of Russian
| as 1) the official government language, and 2) the
| official education language in schools. But I don't think
| it's fair to phrase that as "banning Russian".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It is illegal to have government communication in Russian
| or to have a Russian language radio station in Ukraine. I
| would call that banning Russian language from some
| aspects of public life.
| thraway11 wrote:
| Do you have a link for this? I hadn't heard about the
| Russian language being banned. I did know about this from
| 2019:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-parliament-
| langua...
|
| "The new legislation requires TV and film distribution
| firms to ensure 90 percent of their content is in
| Ukrainian and for the proportion of Ukrainian-language
| printed media and books to be at least 50 percent."
|
| It also says civil servants must speak Ukrainian. It does
| not say they can't also speak Russian.
|
| In any case, that's not a ban.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It is illegal for any business to offer services or
| communicate in Russian unless the customer explicitly
| asks. It is illegal to have Russian language newspapers
| or schools, all of which existed before the crackdown.
|
| Turkey has done the same thing to Kurdish speakers and
| most of the West has rightfully condemned their attempts
| to crack down on the language.
| notahacker wrote:
| And anyway, the Ukrainian population did take those steps
| when most of them voted for a political outsider from a
| Russian speaking background seen as sympathetic to
| Russian speaking culture and somewhat willing to
| negotiate better relations with the "independent
| Republics". Putin interpreted that as a sign of
| weakness...
| the_af wrote:
| Let's just say I find your comment very on point. I would
| like to discuss this, but I don't think this is the best
| venue, and also this is a very sensitive topic and people
| are likely to be upset. And I wouldn't blame them.
|
| I did want to say your observation is astute.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| >...Ukraine should probably have been more dovish towards
| Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East, ie. not banning
| Russian language, not shelling cities.
|
| This is an understandably myopic view. Especially now, as
| the whole charade of justification and "objectives" of
| russia's invasion in Ukraine is in full swing.
|
| Perhaps, remembering that in putin's view, Ukraine is not
| an independent state, its existence is a mistake, the
| land is a sphere of russia's influence... well, the
| madman outright wants it "back" into the "empire".
|
| Thus it has long been clear that no amount of pacifying
| or "non-irritating" is to alter such policy. Language,
| aspirations and affinities are simply pre-texts for the
| forceful grab.
|
| Fundamentally, we're dealing with a clash of mentalities.
| One adopting to modern day and the one still stuck in the
| "age of empires".
|
| To putin's russians, tank is a symbol of forceful
| conquest. So it's not going away. Perhaps, more images of
| the charred russian army tanks could break this
| perception... temporarily.
| cestith wrote:
| Ukraine has, in fact, been partly occupied and claimed by
| a foreign power since 2014.
| malwrar wrote:
| What do you propose instead?
|
| A state is always going to need a military to defend its
| stability and continuity from existential threats. Despite
| what the internet would have you believe, the world is a
| massive place with a vast diaspora of peoples with tons of
| different contradictory policy preferences. I don't think we
| could give up preparing for the next fight if we wanted to.
| bnralt wrote:
| What was the last successful offensive war? When was the
| last time American tanks were successful in creating a
| positive outcome for United States citizens (which,
| theoretically, is the entire reason they're built)? You
| could make an argument for 30 years ago, but you'd need to
| go back closer to 70 years for a strong case.
|
| The other poster raises a valid point that war, as it is
| typically been envisioned, might be far less prominent than
| people realize. The argument is that the tank has a task on
| the battlefield, but we should ask ourselves how much that
| battlefield matters in this day and age.
| kashkhan wrote:
| Right. When did the US last win a war? Even with
| unlimited weapons, nobody wins any more. Sure you can
| destroy governments like Saddam and Gaddafi, but you
| don't win the hearts and minds, and eventually you lose.
| dragontamer wrote:
| So do what Russia does.
|
| Deport the unfavorable people to Siberia. Then import the
| willing population into Ukraine.
|
| Given the Russian "tactics" and "strategy" for its war in
| Ukraine, it is clearly a threat of cultural genocide.
| Russia aims to destroy the Ukrainian people and their
| history, and disperse them into Siberia where they won't
| be able to become a threat.
|
| ---------
|
| USA tries to "win hearts and minds" because we've
| convinced ourselves that we're the "good guys", and want
| to win under certain conditions. Without hearts and
| minds, we lose and we're willing to accept that.
|
| When Russia fights, they're not aiming for that at all.
| Its just destruction. Even against "brother Slavs", its
| better for Ukraine to be destroyed than for it to play
| nice with NATO (or so they want to believe).
|
| Under these circumstances, the only solution is to arm
| the Ukrainians and give them a fighting chance.
| Otherwise, the Ukrainians will be completely, and
| utterly, annihilated as a people.
|
| ----------
|
| Russia has the will and the right strategy here in broad
| strokes.
|
| They fortunately, don't seem to have the right tactics or
| approach. So it looks like the Russians will fail. But
| even as they fail, they will cause hundreds-of-billions,
| maybe trillions of dollars worth of damages, and likely
| cause the largest famine event the world has ever seen.
|
| Better weapons and a better defense could have prevented
| the Ukrainians from losing their coastland. Better
| weapons could have allowed Ukraine to continue their
| grain exports. Better weapons and defenses could have
| protected Ukrainian's grain silos, which are being blown
| up and pillaged.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Well, financially (and logistically) the Russians are
| fighting a losing war of morale and economics. Every day
| the Ukrainians effectively resist the Russians is a
| victory for Ukraine and the West.
|
| The West will HAPPILY fund the Ukrainians to proxy
| destroy the Russian military, and proxy bankrupt them.
|
| We'll see how long Putin lives with cancer. The speed of
| deployment and assumed schedule for victory would point
| to very fast cancer.
| kashkhan wrote:
| Transporting wins in the short term. Extermination wins
| too. The europeans exterminated the natives on many lands
| and took over. They have many lands for centuries now.
|
| Not many Ohlone on hacker news.
|
| The US tried exterminating the Taliban, but failed.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| you're argument is more that American force has been
| misused, not that it has not place. I'd agree it has been
| misused for 70 years.
| kashkhan wrote:
| The US has far superior military now than 70 years ago,
| and military power imbalance is more in favor of US than
| ever before.
|
| But the world has changed faster. All use of military now
| is misuse and futile.
|
| We don't look at veterans now and say wow what heroes. We
| just thank them for their service. We don't celebrate
| them for "Mission Accomplished". Thanking is like a
| participation trophy.
| msla wrote:
| > We've had enough of the european way of war.
|
| So trying another region's way of war would be an
| improvement, then?
| kashkhan wrote:
| Not many continents imposing war on europe past millennium.
| Europe imposed war on everyone and tried to exterminate
| everyone else. Do better.
| kansface wrote:
| Ignoring Africa, Asia and North America more recently,
| sure!
| echelon wrote:
| There will _never_ be peace. If there are resources held
| without power, someone will take them.
|
| The fact that the world is as peaceful as it is now is
| remarkable. It's because of MAD and the high cost of war.
|
| What we revolt at is the industrial scale of modern war. But
| war has been with us since prehistory. Our ancestors killed,
| raped, and pillaged. Far enough back in time, and they even
| ate one another.
|
| Look to nature. It evolved thousands of types of killing
| machines to harness the energy of other creatures. Lions eat
| wild prey alive. Hornets lay their larva inside live hosts so
| that they can feed. Orcas play with their food for sport.
|
| Just imagine what happens when we get AGI or BCI.
|
| It's easy to be pacifist and condemn war. And we should hope
| for that. But we also have to protect our sovereignty and
| safety, and that means maintaining an adequate defense with
| weapons, food, energy, and supply chain.
|
| Our comfort comes at great cost.
| aetherson wrote:
| What would your current advice be for the Ukraine?
| paganel wrote:
| Not the OP, but they should seek for peace as soon as
| possible, that will reduce the number of dead Ukrainians
| and also the amount of territory that they might further
| lose.
|
| Ideally the Zelensky regime should have gotten the message
| and should have left for the West as soon as the Russian
| paratroopers landed at Gostomel. The Czechoslovaks in '68
| and the Hungarians in '56 had done exactly that. Yes, that
| would have probably meant a couple of decades of a Russian-
| backed puppet regime in Kyiv but the future would have been
| open for anything. As things stand right now Ukraine has
| almost no access to the Black Sea anymore, about 7 million
| people have left their homes, not to mention the tens of
| thousands of civilians dead in this war.
| kashkhan wrote:
| Getting more tanks ain't it. More war also not it.
|
| Russian empire needs to be dismantled. But unlikely UKR
| waging war on russia will do it.
| brokencode wrote:
| So basically you have put no thought into this except
| that you don't like war.
|
| I think most people will agree with you that war is bad.
| But if you get attacked, then all you can do is either
| give up or defend yourself.
|
| Afghanistan chose to give up to the Taliban, and now
| their rights are being taken away.
|
| Ukraine chose to defend themselves, and the jury is still
| out on whether they'll be successful and what the cost
| will be.
|
| But there is no third option where you simply will war
| out of existence.
|
| Diplomacy works with certain enemies, and that will
| hopefully be the outcome in Ukraine too, but that too
| will come with a heavy price, such as giving up major
| amounts of territory.
| paganel wrote:
| The Talibans are the Afghanistan, or a bit part of it.
| kashkhan wrote:
| "Afghanistan" is a western colonial construct made up of
| many groups. Most states are western colonial constructs.
| We might need to move past that.
| kashkhan wrote:
| Plenty of people have put thought into what to do to end
| war. You don't need original thoughts from me.
|
| The natural corollary of someone attacking you is not to
| get into an arms race.
|
| Afghanistan didn't choose Taliban. Pakistan and Saudi
| chose Taliban and armed them enough to take over. War
| obviously works.
|
| What's going to happen in UKR is that the warlike will
| win and then naturally turn their guns towards the
| locals. Exactly like in Afghanistan. You can arm them as
| much as you like, but they will not turn into gandhis
| with an excess of guns.
|
| My point is not that war doesn't work. My point is that
| we should all be fighting against war.
| pasabagi wrote:
| In the specific case of Ukraine, a people's war of
| national liberation is a pretty classic form of nation
| building. That's how a lot of nations came about. The
| Taliban are a particularly bad analogy, because they
| represent regionalist resistance against central
| government in Afghanistan. Countries like Italy, the USA,
| or Vietnam were formed in this manner.
| vel0city wrote:
| > My point is that we should all be fighting against war.
|
| By what, asking nicely?
| kashkhan wrote:
| Yes. Be very persuasive. But restrict yourself to
| persuasion.
|
| The way is for the antiwar people to be more successful
| than warriors and turn war into the losers' choice.
|
| I refuse to arm myself, refuse to serve in militaries and
| refuse to support war as much as i am able. If antiwar
| people are successful, war will evolve out.
| brokencode wrote:
| Do you think Ukraine can persuade Putin to call off the
| invasion? If they didn't defend themselves, they'd be a
| Russian province or puppet state today.
|
| That's always the unfortunate downside of relying on only
| persuasion. Some people will just take what they want if
| you don't force them to stop.
|
| Just read about how well persuasion (aka "appeasement")
| worked in the buildup to WW2. Spoiler: it didn't.
| int_19h wrote:
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > the warlike will win and then naturally turn their guns
| towards the locals
|
| Whether they do that as a democratic government, a
| dictatorship, a paragovernamental entity, or a set of
| mobs makes all the difference in the world.
| kashkhan wrote:
| Anyone pointing a gun at me is not my friend. Anyone that
| chooses a gun to get their way is not my friend.
|
| I don't trust people with guns. They are the same because
| they all choose violence to get their way.
|
| "Democratic" gun holders point more guns at me today than
| mobs.
| dageshi wrote:
| You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in
| you.
| pizzachan wrote:
| That's what I tell people about politics.
| bombcar wrote:
| > I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world
| without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world,
| because they'd never expect it.
|
| As long as there are conflicting desires, there will be
| conflict, and it can break out into war.
|
| However, it's possible that war can be reduced, but it may
| require things we're not quite ready for, such as the end of
| Westphalian states.
| Jistern wrote:
| Your comment is extremely misleading.
|
| Modern militaries are rapidly transforming into what was
| science fiction, say, 50 years ago: almost exclusively remote-
| controlled robots and primarily (or even exclusively)
| autonomous robots.
|
| If you call small, unmanned, armored vehicles "tanks" you are
| misleading people.
|
| In modern militaries, whether it be surface ships, submarines,
| airplanes, tanks, etc.... within another few decades, people
| almost certainly won't be inside of them. People will control
| them remotely and/or algorithms/artificial intelligence will
| control them.
|
| What we are seeing in Ukraine is Russia and NATO disposing
| obsolete military weapons in a disgusting farce of a war.
| Washington and Moscow should have divided up Ukraine like they
| did much of Europe in the waning days of World War II.
|
| There was no need for a single bullet to be fired, let alone
| mortars and missiles. Washington antagonized Moscow
| ceaselessly. Eventually, Moscow took the bait. It's tragedy
| that could have, and should have been avoided.
|
| Nonetheless, just because these days you see men in tanks
| fighting in Ukraine on your phone or laptop, don't think that
| "Tanks are still relevant in modern warfare!" They aren't.
| Tanks, by which I mean large vehicles with people inside of
| them, are obsolete in modern warfare.
|
| People who claim tanks are still viable in modern warfare are
| either fools, liars, or manipulative purveyors of falsehoods
| who enjoy twisting words by referring to small, unmanned robots
| as "tanks."
|
| The Economist.com is yet another legacy media property that
| regularly engages in obvious yellow journalism in a doomed
| struggle to remain profitable. Articles with headlines like,
| "Does the Tank Have a Future?" are clickbait.
|
| I didn't take the bait; I didn't read the article. Why should I
| have? A better article would have been, "Does Economist.com
| Have a Future?"
| jeffdn wrote:
| This is a complete misunderstanding of warfare. Drones cannot
| take and hold ground. Without infantry, an external power
| cannot exert influence over an area. Sure, they can wantonly
| kill civilians, but that doesn't mean they are in charge.
| Until and unless autonomous drones with general artificial
| intelligence can be mass-produced and deployed on the scale
| of infantry brigades, massed infantry will be required. Even
| then, an EMP could disable those drones in one fell swoop.
|
| They are absolutely not disposing of obsolete weapons -- and
| the West has no desire to "carve up Ukraine". How did
| Washington antagonize Moscow? NATO is a voluntary defensive
| pact. The Eastern European countries, who all have a long
| history of being oppressed and occupied by Russian (and
| Soviet) governments, asked to join NATO. What good would it
| do for the West to start a war? What is there to gain from
| brinksmanship when the stakes are a strategic nuclear
| exchange?
|
| The idea that this war is at all something provoked by the
| West, or in any way defensive on Russia's part, is pure
| Russian propaganda. The Putin regime fears the
| democratization of its neighbors resulting in its own people
| losing confidence in its ability to lead the country. This
| phase of the war is merely an extension of Russia's desire to
| quash any semblance of Ukrainian agency -- this war started
| in 2014, after the last vestige of Russia's control over
| Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, fled the country.
|
| Finally, your view actively denies the Ukrainian people their
| agency. If they did not find this war worthwhile, if they did
| not think Ukraine as an idea was worth defending, why are
| they dying in their tens of thousands to defend it?
| YarickR2 wrote:
| jeffdn wrote:
| echelon wrote:
| Is there a good rundown of every piece of weaponry and its
| corresponding utility and strategy somewhere?
|
| I'd love to update or correct my understanding of tanks,
| artillery, HIMARS, aircraft carriers, cruisers, littoral
| combat, submarine classes, F-22, F-35, AWACS, etc.
| themadturk wrote:
| One place for a quick look at different types of armor and
| their uses, is the recent post at the A Collection of
| Unmitigated Pedantry blog:
|
| https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-
| not...
| ranger207 wrote:
| Not a single source, but old.reddit.com/r/warCollege is
| fantastic. It's not as strict as /r/askHistorians (for better
| or for worse) but there are lots of active military officers
| on there who know their stuff
| pizzachan wrote:
| I used to get a copy of Janes Defense Weekly at work. It was
| always a good read when I was a young kid on the hill. They
| even used to put out a buyers guide for IFVs/LAVs. If you
| want to cut through the noise for good military analysis you
| usually have to drop some decent dough.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Video games.
|
| https://www.matrixgames.com/game/armored-brigade
|
| Armored Brigade is probably a good start. 4 minutes for
| artillery to aim, 1 to 2 minutes for shells to actually
| arrive, 10 minutes for air-support to fly in.
|
| 1 to 2 minutes to deliver commands to any particular squad
| (depending on how good their radio contact is).
|
| Roughly realistic levels of arms, armor and penetration.
| Angle of shots and type of weapon (kinetic energy, such as
| APFSDS, or Chemical energy, such as M47 Dragon or HEAT
| rounds) are factored in.
|
| Guided missiles, top-down missiles, fire-and-forget missiles.
| Etc. etc. Its not every weapon, but its a solid set of
| important weapons that probably cover a wide variety of
| possible combat situations.
|
| Line-of-sight is simulated on an incredible degree: height
| maps matter, but so do trees (partially obscured), houses,
| and smoke grenades even. Line of sight is best at 12noon.
| Line of sight is worst at night, unless your squads are
| equipped with thermal vision. Weather (foggy conditions
| especially) can change things dramatically.
|
| -------
|
| The simulated soldiers/tanks aren't the best, but they're
| smart enough to run away during artillery barrages and hunker
| down. They'll seek cover on their own (and if you tell them a
| direction to defend against, they'll look for cover on their
| own too against that direction). Tank commanders "button up"
| during enemy fire (reducing their vision but likely saving
| the commander's life). Covering fire is therefore effective.
|
| ------
|
| The AI is okay. The AI runs into traps and ambushes, and
| never really figures them out. Still, good enough to get you
| the basics of strategy of each of these weapons.
|
| Seeing the 3000m range of a tank vs the 150m range of a M72
| LAW really demonstrates the bravery that those unguided anti-
| tank bazooka squads have.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are some very interesting developments in this field:
|
| https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1523791050313433088
| MezzoDelCammin wrote:
| Single place? Probably no. But You can go branch by branch.
|
| For armor, Chieftain is probably as good as it gets in
| English when it comes to universality (he's both a historian
| and an active service Lt.Col. in the US NG).
|
| For further armor sources, I'd highly recommend the YT
| channel of Tank Museum Bovington:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTankMuseum
|
| The chap whose video Chieftain replies to ("Perun") is worth
| following in his own right for the modern take on Russian /
| Ukraine war. He's more of an economist / logistician, but
| well worth watching:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q
|
| From Perun You'll often hear the name "Michael Kofman". He
| doesn't get one single place where you could find all of his
| stuff, but google him and go through the articles / videos he
| is in. He's often used as a source for quite a lot of
| commentary about Russian Army in the past 20 years or so.
| https://russianmilitaryanalysis.wordpress.com/
|
| When it comes to general doctrine, it's sometimes useful to
| know the compositions of forces. This is a good starting
| point: https://www.youtube.com/c/BattleOrder
|
| When it comes to modern navy, Jive Turkey (now called
| "SubBrief") is probably a cool starting point. Mainly
| submarines (he's an ex US Navy 688 sonar operator), but :
| https://www.youtube.com/c/SubBrief
| ansible wrote:
| Upvote for Perun. He very recently did a video on the
| apparent infantry shortage that the Russian forces seem to
| be facing:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKewF8_SiIs
|
| The short, short, short version is that the Russian BTGs
| (battalion tactical groups) and undermanned in general, and
| the conscripts are supposed to be filling most of the
| infantry slots. Theoretically, because this isn't a
| declared war, the conscripts aren't supposed to be
| fighting, and weren't sent to the "special military
| operation".
|
| I enjoyed watching all the Ukraine war videos on that
| channel.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The US Army keeps a public repository of all field manuals
| approved for general release here:
| https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/FM.aspx
|
| I think the closest to what you're looking for is FM 3-96 the
| Brigade Combat Team (https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/
| DR_a/ARN31505-FM_3-9...). The is the smallest unit that
| includes effectively everything the Army can bring to bear,
| including infantry, armor, artillery, and rotary aviation.
| There might still be some fairly specialized intelligence,
| surveillance, and recon assets only available to divisions,
| but most of what the Army can deploy for fighting purposes
| exists in the BCTs at this point. I imagine other branches of
| service have their equivalents in terms of doctrine on how to
| employ submarines and fighter jets, but I only ever served in
| the Army and am most familiar with their tactics and
| doctrine.
| ufmace wrote:
| Yup. The key point is, a weapon system becomes obsolete when
| something else does its job better, not when it becomes more
| vulnerable. When something valuable becomes more vulnerable,
| you protect it better. When it becomes less valuable because
| something else does the job better, then you get rid of it.
|
| As of right now, nothing does a ground offensive like a few
| dozen tanks advancing at top speed with appropriate support.
| They'll blast anything in their path and charge right through
| all but the toughest and most concentrated defenses. As long as
| you can see those really concentrated defenses in advance and
| go around, they're pretty tough to stop.
| objektif wrote:
| This is like asking Michael Saylor if Bitcoin is still a good
| investment.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| A lot of people are asking whether tanks are survivable anymore,
| but nobody is asking whether unarmored infantry are any more
| survivable in the era of small-drone warfare. It's all relative.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Small drone warfare?
|
| The Ukraine / Russian conflict has degenerated into trench
| warfare with thousands of 155mm / 152mm artillery being shot
| into each other's positions per day.
|
| These are the kinds of conditions where tanks excel. Humans who
| try to walk at 3km/hr get blown up by shrapnel, even 100m away
| is "close enough" to cause a significant injury and take a
| human out of a fight.
|
| Tanks? They pretty much ignore everything except a direct hit
| (within 2m) of the target. All that shrapnel just bounces off
| the tank. We've gone full circle back to WW1 trench/artillery
| warfare, where tanks were invented to break through the
| stalemate.
|
| Other vehicles (even armored cars) don't have thick enough
| armor to survive the shrapnel reliably. APCs, IFVs, Humvees
| still get shredded by artillery and air-burst munitions.
|
| -------
|
| How do you beat artillery? You travel at 50km/hr, so you're
| hard to aim (a 20km shot takes 1.5 minutes to land. Easy to
| kill a human who can only travel a hundred meters in that
| timeframe, especially since its +/- 100m target size since the
| shrapnel blast is so huge).
|
| Tanks / vehicles on the other hand, move too fast to be
| targeted by dumb artillery. Smart artillery still kills you,
| but its relatively rare on the battlefield (due to the high
| costs of computer parts needed to make a smart shell). The vast
| majority of these holes are dumb artillery.
|
| ---------
|
| https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/...
|
| This isn't the landscape of "drone warfare". This is WW1 style
| dumb-artillery wars.
| the_af wrote:
| In support of your statement, I'm impressed that Russian
| doctrine seems to rely so much on good ol' trusty massive
| artillery, of the dumb kind.
|
| I guess, if it works...
| int_19h wrote:
| Said massive artillery fire is directed from the drones.
| You hear a lot about Ukrainian Bayraktars, but the most
| mass-deployed combat drone in Ukraine right now is actually
| Mavic 2 & 3 - on both sides! In fact, it got to the point
| where there's a shortage of them in Russia because DJI
| stopped importing them, but units fighting in Ukraine
| constantly demand and get more via crowdfunding.
|
| (For the curious, here's a blog post from the Donbas
| separatist side that talks about drones and their combat
| use and maintenance, among other things:
| https://kenigtiger.livejournal.com/2140772.html)
|
| However, Ukrainians have learned to embrace the drones in
| 2014-15 already, and have had a lot more experience with
| them since. Russia is still learning that lesson in the
| field.
| int_19h wrote:
| BTW, the same blogger also wrote a post recently that
| specifically discusses the differences in how Russian and
| Ukrainian forces employ their artillery. Also worth a
| read:
|
| https://kenigtiger.livejournal.com/2148946.html
|
| (I would generally recommend this entire blog for those
| curious about the tactics and the logistics of the
| conflict, because it's one of those rare cases when a guy
| who is directly involved in the war, and has a long-
| standing reputation as one of the prominent hawks, is
| consistently writing posts that are critical of _his own
| side_ - which criticism is far more likely to be accurate
| than propaganda from the other side.)
| bombcar wrote:
| Puts the whole Seoul situation in a new light - there's
| something about just massive amounts of shells being thrown
| that's hard to deal with.
|
| And dumb is cheap. Cheap can be king, especially if you can
| keep making them. The US had the same thing in WWII, the
| Panzer tanks were better than the Shermans in nearly every
| way - except cost and repairability.
| the_af wrote:
| Yes. This is also a lesson the Red Army learned in WWII,
| and why not continue with it? Simple systems that can be
| mass produced are better than complex, harder to repair
| ones.
| bombcar wrote:
| The complex, hard to repair ones are great if:
|
| 1. You're selling them.
|
| 2. You have absolute complete superiority and are trying
| to minimize _your_ casualties
|
| There's a country that fits those parameters very well.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Both Russian and Ukrainian, also grad rockets. They're
| pretty much fighting each other with the same weapons.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Whenever people talked about "suicide drones", I felt like
| they haven't studied the history of warfare.
|
| A surprising number of conflicts: WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam,
| degenerated into artillery slugfests. You can't get much
| cheaper, faster, or more effective than guns shooting dumb
| explosives 20km away.
|
| Only when the opponents were stupidly overmatched by US Air
| Superiority (Afghanistan / Iraq) did things change. But
| even with Air Superiority over say, Vietnam, USA still
| degenerated into an artillery slugfest.
|
| -------
|
| Its hard to beat 100lb shrapnel bombs delivered 20km away.
| Logistics wise, trucks carrying shells is just far cheaper
| than any other delivery mechanism. This fact has been true
| since WW1, and no technology has ever really changed the
| calculus. (Adding li-ion batteries, cameras, remote-control
| and other features so that you can turn the delivery
| mechanism into a drone is just unnecessary chips in most
| cases)
| thraway11 wrote:
| > But even with Air Superiority over say, Vietnam, USA
| still degenerated into an artillery slugfest.
|
| I just finished James Holland's Normandy '44 and I'd say,
| according to his book, that sentence pretty accurately
| describes pretty much all of the WW2 Normandy campaign as
| well.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I simplified the argument for brevity, but drones are
| critical to the artillery war right now because of spotting
| and fire-correction.
|
| Artillery is far more lethal in 2022 than it was in 1945
| because you can spot and kill individual infantry units from
| ten miles away.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| ten? i think its closer to 30 miles.
|
| If memory serves me correctly, my brother said the cannon
| he captained was capable of incredible accuracy at 30
| miles.
| dragontamer wrote:
| That's just drones serving the role of forward-observer
| though.
|
| The underlying tactic of someone, or something, out in the
| field, issuing radio messages back to home-base to
| coordinate artillery has been around since WW2, maybe
| earlier. Drones represent an evolution to the forward-
| observer paradigm, not a revolution.
|
| In WW2, those were paratroopers, commandos, or other scouts
| who were performing those forward-observer duties while
| hiding inside of a treeline.
|
| Sure, they were Morse code messages over a radio powered by
| a 20lb lead-acid battery pack with terrible encryption, but
| the fundamental tactic hasn't changed (especially because
| said forward-observer team would rarely be spotted... since
| they aren't firing their guns they're really hard to find)
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I think there's a meaningful difference here, and it's
| very incorrect to consider it an incremental change.
|
| An infantry squad dug into foxholes in some forest in
| WWII was really quite safe against artillery. A forward
| observer can maybe spot a tank or artillery battery
| (sometimes). A drone can scan an entire battlefield and
| identify infantry 10 miles behind a line of trenches, and
| coordinated artillery strikes can wipe them out.
|
| That's hugely difference! It vastly changes the lethality
| per unit of artillery, and the relative risk for infantry
| units who aren't in obviously-fortified positions.
| metabagel wrote:
| Infantry can more effectively hide, disperse, and bring down
| aerial drones.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| This is very terrain-dependent.
|
| It worked around Kyiv because it's forested and hilly, it
| works in cities with large soviet apartment blocks, but isn't
| working well at all in flat Donbas farmland.
|
| It's also a 100% defensive strategy. Unsupported infantry
| have almost no ability to retake dug-in positions.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| The truth is they never were. I think i heard somewhere that
| avg battlefield lifetime of a tank in ww2 was less than 20
| minutes
| 1123581321 wrote:
| A lot of money is being invested in anti-drone tech.
| syntaxfree wrote:
| I expected this to be about Shark Tank somehow.
| pclark wrote:
| It seems like the future of warfare is longe range (eg: firing
| missiles at tanks from across the horizon) or hyper short range
| (eg: troops clearing cities block by block) -- anything else
| seems like it'll get wrecked by either the precision of long
| range or the precision of short range stuff.
|
| A tank isn't hyper mobile, isn't hyper accurate and isn't hyper
| long range. I don't get it's role -- especially when it costs
| tens of millions and can be destroyed with either a $5k anti-
| armor launcher or from a missile fired across the horizon.
| jopython wrote:
| Long range missiles are expensive. ATGMs require you to be
| closer (2 miles or less) to the target which means the
| operating crews are vulnerable to the same tanks and other
| mortar fire which they are trying to kill.
|
| I think long range artillery (> 50kms) is the solution.
| int_19h wrote:
| There's also drones to consider.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| A tank is certainly more useful in the middle distance than at
| extreme range, or in tight spaces, there's better choices of
| tool for those jobs guided artillery/rockets at distance and
| heavy auto-cannon clad infantry fighting vehicles like in the
| city. But not all warfare exists in either of those ranges.
|
| Tanks are great at assaulting enemy hard points, taking fire
| away from supporting infantry who can move in and cleanup the
| position after the tank has suppressed it or broken it open.
| It's a heavy weapon of mobility and manoeuvre on the field.
|
| A tank's role is that of heavy cavalry, designed to intimidate
| and break defensive lines in a charge across contested
| territory and to provide immediate direct fire on a target in
| support of advancing infantry. As the modern rifleman company
| is the descendant of line infantry of old, the tank is the
| descendant of the Cuirassier.
| trhway wrote:
| Russian tanks aren't a representative of a modern tank as among
| other things they have crappy active defense - it is all about
| electronics. Israel's is a good one, and their tanks survive
| multiple shots by actively killing incoming RPG warheads and the
| likes.
|
| Also Russian tanks are on the light side as they can't manage a
| powerful enough engine required, ie gas turbine of 1500hp+. The
| best they have so far managed is 1000hp diesel on may be 200
| tanks by now, the rest is old one 800hp. Thus their tanks have
| armor lighter and of older type than say Abrams.
|
| And there is huge area of discussion about integration of all
| weapons on the battlefield - without such integration any weapon
| loses its efficiency tremendously - and Russian military is very
| bad at integration, and tanks in isolation are much weaker target
| as opponent much easily finds the window opportunity.
| int_19h wrote:
| Have Israeli tanks ever faced Javelins tho?
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| They have faced formidable ATGMs including Kornet E, and have
| suffered losses. Time will tell how effective their hard-kill
| countermeasures will prove to be.
| cturner wrote:
| Not a direct answer, but an advantage of Israeli armour is
| that they only need to deploy locally. This means less
| penalty for armour than US systems which are designed to be
| carried in air transports for foreign deployment, or Russian
| units designed around train transport. The Israeli Namer IFV
| weighs more than twice as much as a Bradley IFV, and can
| carry more troops.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Does infantry have a future, given what WWI taught us about their
| vulnerability to artillery and machine guns? Do (naval) ships
| have a future, given what WWII taught us about their
| vulnerability to torpedoes? Do air defenses or air forces have a
| future, given what happened in Mole Cricket 19 (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mole_Cricket_19 )? Do...
|
| Zzz.
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| Tanks Considered Harmful?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The USMC got rid of their tanks. The closest thing to a tank they
| still have is a Light Armored Vehicle.
| mellavora wrote:
| And some people in the USMC hotly debate if this was a good
| idea or not
| ranger207 wrote:
| The USMC decided it's going to fight a different kind of fight,
| being dropped off on small Pacific islands with antiship
| missiles and artillery to produce a set of distributed antiship
| bunkers. Their divestment of the tank is not because they
| thought the tank is obsolete, but because the tank doesn't fit
| with the fight they're planning for. Most armies, including the
| US's, still plan to have fights where tanks make sense. Of
| course the question of whether or not those kinds of fights are
| likely to happen is a valid question, but is orthogonal to the
| question of whether or not drones and ATGMs make tanks obsolete
| gherkinnn wrote:
| They got rid of their tanks because the Army will provide them.
| It says so in the 2030 doctrine document.
|
| How is that so hard to understand?
| cestith wrote:
| This is an excellent question that's asked every five to ten
| years since 1916 and so far always ends up answered "yes".
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Judging by the current situation, it seems that there are more
| resources for building tanks than there are for building anti-
| tank weapons. Once the anti-tank weapon stocks have been
| depleted, tanks still play a devastating role in warfare.
|
| EDIT: I'm just relaying what I read in several articles about the
| difficulties in making anti-tank weapons because they rely on
| rare-earth minerals and because they rely on silicon chips, which
| are in short supply worldwide. Here's one of the articles I read:
| https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/04/26/managing-the-dod-s...
| 323 wrote:
| Tanks also rely on silicon chips. Many more than in an anti-
| tank weapon.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I don't understand this comment.
|
| The anti-tank weaponry is an order of magnitude less expensive
| than the tank (some is several orders).
|
| The M1A2 Abrams has a unit cost of around 10 million USD
| (numbers from 2016, so likely higher now).
|
| The drones currently destroying tanks in Ukraine (Bayraktar
| TB2) had a unit price of around 5 million, although some
| estimates are as low as 1-2 million per unit delivered to
| Ukraine at this point (production has ramped up).
|
| notably - the whole drone isn't consumed when a tank is
| destroyed, so I really suspect we're going to see a _drastic_
| ramp up in drone warfare.
| imtringued wrote:
| Tanks can also destroy more stuff than they cost.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| It's the scarcity of the parts, not the overall cost.
| Javelins require rare-earth minerals (which largely come from
| Russia) and rare silicon chips that are in short supply
| worldwide. I edited my original post to include a link to an
| article about the difficulties in replacing the diminishing
| stock of anti-tank weapons.
| pclark wrote:
| Modern tanks also use minerals and chips, they're basically
| armoured computers. They also, obviously, take a huge
| amount of resources to produce, transport and train to use.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's the expensive drones. But there are plenty of kills
| attributed to octocopters dropping modified anti-tank
| grenades.
| dsr_ wrote:
| A tank is 15-75 tons of armor, engine, chassis and gun. It
| costs millions of dollars per tank.
|
| An antitank weapon is 6-120 lbs of propulsion, controller and
| warhead. It costs between a thousand and tens of thousands of
| dollars per weapon.
|
| Economics refutes you.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| I'm not speaking about cost. I'm talking about the scarcity
| of the parts and the manufacturing capability required to
| make anti-tank weapons.
|
| https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/04/26/managing-the-
| dod-s...
| lapsed_pacifist wrote:
| A soldier is tens of thousands of dollars of training and
| gear. A bullet costs pennies. Thus soldiers have no place on
| the battlefield?
|
| I think you should watch Chieftains video and read some
| military theory. Simply being vulnerable to less expensive
| weapon systems does not make a unit/vehicle/soldier useless
| or obsolete.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Personally - I agree. I don't yet think we're at the point
| where tanks are obsolete.
|
| That said... I think the niche the tank occupies right now
| is getting a LOT smaller.
|
| Infantry screening is no longer enough. It's not just
| manpads and other anti-tank weaponry coming in from close
| quarters... it's gps guided missiles dropping on the tank
| from drones miles above.
|
| We're definitely still going to see ground vehicles play an
| important part in combat, but I strongly suspect it's going
| to move back towards favoring nimble vehicles with specific
| utility. Not the current style of armored tanks.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Indeed, if you value a soldier's life the same as a human's
| life, you really don't want them on the battlefield any
| more than absolutely necessary to defend against the
| invaders.
|
| Spears and catapults and bows make your soldiers effective
| dozens of yards away from the enemy.
|
| Rifles get your soldiers to a hundred, sometimes two
| hundred yards away.
|
| Artillery and drones make your soldiers effective up to a
| few miles away.
|
| The further away you can keep your soldiers while
| accomplishing your goals, the better.
| metabagel wrote:
| You could say it the other way around - once the tank stocks
| are depleted, anti-tank weapons can still play a devastating
| role (against other armored or unarmored vehicles).
| prometheus76 wrote:
| You could say it the other way around, but the complexity of
| the electronics in the anti-tank weapons have proven to be
| difficult to produce in large quantities because of the chip
| shortage, but also because of the high level of experience
| and knowledge required to continue to make them. Tanks are
| much less reliant on complex electronics and manufacturing
| capability in order to be effective on the battlefield.
|
| The US Defense Dept. has said it will take at least ten years
| to rebuild the stock of anti-tank weapons that have been used
| in Ukraine in the last five months.
| mattnewton wrote:
| How many years will it take to replace the 700 or so tanks
| lost in Ukraine? Russia is estimated to have 3,000 or so
| tanks currently operating, they are closing in on losing
| 1/4th their number. It's unclear how many of their roughly
| 10k in storage are still working and whether making new
| tanks or repairing those will have the same chip shortage
| problems.
| MrRiddle wrote:
| There is absolutely no chance Russia lost 700 tanks.
| Ukrainian sources are pure garbage.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| The ones in storage are like t-62s so no chips required
| =)
| metabagel wrote:
| Yeah, no. This defies credulity. Tanks are complex systems
| too, with very high cost and long lead times. Javelin
| production is currently 2,100 per year and ramping up. I
| don't know what NLAW production is, but some 24,000 have
| supposedly been produced in the lifetime of the weapon.
| Russia started the war with about 3,000 tanks.
| toast0 wrote:
| > The US Defense Dept. has said it will take at least ten
| years to rebuild the stock of anti-tank weapons that have
| been used in Ukraine in the last five months.
|
| Reponding to this and some of your other comments
| elsewhere... These anti-tank weapons may be the best anti-
| tank weapons, but they're not the only ones. If all of
| these are used, there are plenty of other ways to destroy
| tanks, so it's important, but not required to have a large
| stock of them.
|
| You could probably increase the rate of manufacture of
| these, but there's also value in having ten continuous
| years of manufacturing instead of long time periods between
| batches.
|
| I may be overly cynical, but in some ways, this war seems
| like a warehouse clearance event. It seems like everyone is
| finding their old stockpiles of Soviet era equipment and
| sending it to Ukraine to be used and/or destroyed. And
| presumably afterwards, it'll be time for the military
| industrial complexes to turn back on and build new
| stockpiles. Add in a few field demos of new equipment too.
| the_af wrote:
| > _Tanks are much less reliant on complex electronics and
| manufacturing capability in order to be effective on the
| battlefield._
|
| I don't disagree with your overall comment, but note the
| modern main battle tank is a really complex beast, both in
| sensors, gun control, and also defensive systems. Even
| Russian tanks are very complex (their current high losses
| notwithstanding), but Western tanks are incredibly complex.
| They are not meant to sustain heavy losses, they are
| designed to _survive_.
|
| If modern weapons strongly reduce the survivability of
| tanks, at least the future of _Western_ tanks may be in
| question.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Have you watched any of the Ukraine footage? Tanks are
| being blown up from bombs dropped from COTS drones. Longer
| range semi-autonomous drones seem to be the future.
| the_af wrote:
| I agree tanks seem to be very vulnerable in the current
| Ukraine war.
|
| That said, drones cannot replace tanks. Maybe something
| else will, but drones cannot make breakthrough advances,
| nor accompany and shield advancing infantry. Drones may
| be cheap tank killers, but I don't think they can replace
| tanks.
| int_19h wrote:
| Not every weapon system has a direct and obvious
| replacement when it becomes obsolete - the nature of the
| combat itself changes around what's viable given the
| tech.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| How well do long range drones work if the other side puts
| up a serious blockages of radio waves and decides that
| "no you dont get satellites anymore"?
| lapsed_pacifist wrote:
| Much of this has to do with Russian tank doctrine and the
| lack of sufficient infantry to provide mutual support to
| armor.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I think the shortage is mostly due to a lack of a desire to
| make big changes to resolve the issue.
|
| If a meeting was called of 10 big tech/manufacturing
| companies and they were each told they'd be hansomely
| rewarded if they managed to make large volumes of a missile
| design, and that all IP/Patent laws would be suspended for
| the purpose, I guarantee you that there would be massive
| stockpiles within the month.
| bombcar wrote:
| We have no idea what a major economy like the current US
| would look like if it went on a real war footing.
| According to this [34] we spent 40% of GDP on WWII
| (equivalent of $5 trillion today) - that would be almost
| $10 trillion _a year_ now if we did the equivalent. That
| 's absolutely _insane_ numbers, and many, many things
| would change, and quite quickly.
|
| [34] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-
| economy/2020/february/war-...
| hermitdev wrote:
| When was the last time the US even produced a new tank
| hull? Pretty sure they haven't produced a new Abrams hull
| since the 80s (yes, they've been rebuilt and upgraded a few
| times, but no new hulls to my knowledge). I'm not even
| talking about a new design, I'm talking about production of
| an existing design.
| brokencode wrote:
| That's probably because anti-tank weapons aren't all that
| important for the US military. The US military has guided
| missiles from planes and ships that serve this role much
| more effectively.
|
| If we actually needed infantry anti-tank weapons, I don't
| think we have any problem building them in huge quantities.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Tanks used correctly and in sufficient mass produces something
| called the _Shock Effect of Armor_. Smart munitions are getting
| more and more effective, but it 's really hard to calmly lob
| missiles at a charging unit of tanks supported by artillery,
| infantry, CAS, etc.
|
| " _Principle: armor in strength produces decisive shock effect_
|
| The psychological shock effect that comes to troops on the
| receiving end of a massed armored assault is terrific. This
| effect radiates from the point of attack in concentric semi-
| circles, as do the waves from a stone dropped in the water near
| the edge of a millpond. If the attack is in strength, these
| shockwaves reach to the enemy division, corps and army
| headquarters. Shock effect gives armor part of its protection and
| hastens the disintegration of the enemy force attacked. The shock
| effect of the mass employment of armor varies as the square or
| cube of the number of tanks used. Attacking with armored strength
| too small to produce decisive shock effect often results in great
| losses and inconclusive results."
|
| https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/earmor/content/Historical...
|
| Simply put, they are pants-soiling terrifying spectacles of death
| and they prove overwhelming. Once significant momentum of a well-
| executed armored attack has been gained, they are difficult to
| slow or stop. Drone swarms may make this tactic obsolete, but
| we're not there yet.
| throwaway1492 wrote:
| Former US Army 19k here. Tanks are expensive to build,
| expensive to maintain, expensive to operate, hard to transport
| and require certain levels of infrastructure to operate in
| theater (bridges to support their weight). With current threats
| they are bound to become even heavier (and require more fuel).
|
| While I am all for seeing the rise of Bolo's, and I love shock
| effect as much as the next enthusiast, the ability of a $500
| drone with the equivalent of a RKG-3 grenade to take one out is
| really the only relevant part of the question. Tanks are dead.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RKG-3_anti-tank_grenade
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_universe
|
| Edit to add; "expensive to operate" was a bit of an
| understatement, the logistical support required for a tank
| company is tremendous, totally preposperous; 1000s of gallons
| of fuel a day, 3 types of ammo, support equipment and
| personnel.
| mymythisisthis wrote:
| What about drone tanks?
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| I don't think the commodity drone approach is going to work
| very well against a competently-run military with electronic
| warfare capabilities the Russians seem not to be employing.
|
| To defeat capable EW, you'd need self-directed swarms of
| drones, and we don't have those yet (especially not at Best
| Buy). I agree that remotely-piloted commodity drones would
| likely make a terrible mess of something like an African army
| with T-55s and not much else, and of course today's Russia (I
| never thought I'd write that sentence).
|
| I concur on the cost of armor, but it comes with significant
| benefits, hence the investment we've made in logistics to
| support them. It's only preposterous when the situation makes
| it so, like a highly mobile island hopping campaign. They
| worked pretty well in Iraq. Twice.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| To paraphrase The Chieftan (who's video is linked elsewhere
| in this thread but I'll included here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7T650RTT8 ), it's not about
| the tank's vulnerabilities, but the capabilities it provides
| that have yet to be provided elsewhere.
|
| ATGMs, RPGs, guided mortar rounds and switchblade drones are
| not offensive weapons that can take and hold ground. But
| infantry, supported by a tank which they can knock on the
| hatch of and tell to obliterate the machine gun nest pinning
| them down with instant 120mm fire, can.
|
| When armies find something that can replace the mobile,
| protected, and relatively _instant_ firepower a tank can
| provide to the infantry, the tank will be dead. But nothing
| yet has quite come along to combine those things, and so
| regardless of the tank 's vulnerabilities, it will remain.
| [deleted]
| eftychis wrote:
| Why do portable drones not offer the instant firepower?
| matt_s wrote:
| How much ammo can a drone carry? Even if its an African
| ... drone or a European one, it's a simple question of
| weight ratios.
| moogly wrote:
| Perhaps it could carry 5 -- no, 3! -- holy hand grenades.
| yding wrote:
| If you're talking about DJI or equivalents they only have
| 30 minutes or so of flight time and can carry at most one
| bomb at a time. They can be useful in guerrilla
| situations but firepower wise it's not even in the same
| league as a tank with 40-60 cannon rounds and several
| thousand machine gun rounds.
| wyldfire wrote:
| What if the drone were so inexpensive and portable that
| you could consider it like you do ammunition? Then the
| flight time and payload is much less critical - it's just
| a pilot-able bomb.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| They don't offer the same level of firepower. A portable
| drone may be faster employed than a helicopter, large
| drone, or close support aircraft, but it suffers from
| lack of payload. It also takes longer to get on target,
| and has it's own set of vulnerabilities. (The
| vulnerability argument being that even if it is
| expendable, a drone disrupted or shot down does not help
| your unit eliminate the threat it was facing.)
|
| A large-caliber, direct-fire gun provides long range,
| precise, and instant effects. As The Chieftan explains:
| https://youtu.be/lI7T650RTT8?t=934 (timecode link
| provided.)
| dragontamer wrote:
| Because when a tank fires its APFSDS gun, the muzzle
| velocity is 1500 meters-per-second.
|
| In contrast, a drone flies at 25 to 50 meters-per-second.
|
| ------
|
| To put it in concrete terms, a tank 3000 meters away will
| hit its target in 2 seconds. A drone 3000 meters away
| will take 1.5 minutes.
|
| In contrast, the Javelin you launch will take 12 seconds
| before it hits the tank at that range. That's more than
| enough time for the tank commander to see the Javelin and
| return fire, killing you before the Javelin even strikes
| the tank. (This is why "fire and forget" is so important
| on a missile like the Javelin). So we can see that even a
| missile like a Javelin has a significant speed
| disadvantage on these long-range plains that exist on the
| Donbas region. Its a different fight than the typical
| heavy-urban environment that Ukraine was doing well in a
| few months ago.
|
| -----
|
| Its one thing to fight a tank in urban combat, where they
| can only see 200 meters out (too many buildings blocking
| your vision and the tank's vision).
|
| Its a totally different thing to fight a tank on open
| plains, where 3000m worth of vision is common.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > To put it in concrete terms, a tank 3000 meters away
| will hit its target in 2 seconds. A drone 3000 meters
| away will take 1.5 minutes.
|
| > In contrast, the Javelin you launch will take 12
| seconds before it hits the tank at that range.
|
| What's the latency for the turret to pivot to the target
| angle? I suppose it's pretty fast but let's say in worst
| case 180deg? How long does that take? 1s? 10s?
| ineedasername wrote:
| T72 is about 3 seconds for 180 degrees. But it also takes
| time for a human in the tank to notice the incoming AT
| round, trace it back to the source, acquire a target
| lock, and then swing the turret over.
|
| I can only guess at how long the full return fire process
| takes, but you only need to be pointing a javelin AT at
| the tank, it will do the rest. You can be sprinting away
| pretty much as you launch and get 50 meters away. Safe?
| Hell no, but it's not as bad as the "2 seconds" comment
| makes it out to be.
| ineedasername wrote:
| That 2 seconds is the projectile. Unless you're already
| aimed directly at the AT firing point it's going to take
| more than 2 seconds for the tank to acquire a target lock
| and swing the turret into place.
|
| Assume the turret is 90 degrees off target and it will
| take 2 seconds just to swing the turret around. Assuming
| it takes 2 seconds to notice the AT round fired, 2
| seconds to target lock, that's still 8 seconds total for
| the tank shell to hit.
|
| That's not great for the AT team, but it is a survivable
| amount of time for shoot-and-scoot tactics, enough that
| it's going to be a hellish war of attrition between armor
| & AT teams, not a completely one-sided battle. Which
| seems to be roughly what we're seeing in eastern Ukraine,
| unfortunately. A truly shitty and hellish situation all
| around.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Assume the turret is 90 degrees off target and it will
| take 2 seconds just to swing the turret around. Assuming
| it takes 2 seconds to notice the AT round fired, 2
| seconds to target lock, that's still 8 seconds total for
| the tank shell to hit.
|
| That's a lot of "assumptions" that still leads to a
| virtual tie situation: both parties kill each other.
|
| There's also the situation where the tank commander
| emerges out of hide-position, fires a shell, and kills
| the enemy infantry before they even know where the tank
| is, and the tank then retreats back into hide-position
| before any enemy even knows that a tank is there.
|
| A tank in turret-down position is still exceptionally
| difficult to spot. And that tank commander looking out,
| waiting for the ideal time to ambush with his main tank
| gun, will have night-vision, thermal vision, and loads of
| other equipment.
|
| See this screenshot of the Chieftan's discussion:
| https://imgur.com/tk10YHN.jpg
|
| In "turret down" position, pretty much only the tank
| commander is visible. They can spot you 3000m away in
| this kind of position thanks to modern binoculars.
|
| ----------------
|
| Given that the tank moves at 50km/hr, and has more
| expensive equipment (thermal vision / etc. etc.), the
| tank honestly has the advantage in most of these fights.
|
| Infantry might (?) have the advantage of surprise and
| hiding. But tanks also might have that advantage. There's
| no guarantee that the infantry always ambush the tanks.
| Especially when you consider how much faster a tank
| travels, and the shear size / distance that these weapons
| cover (a tank can choose any point with 3000m line-of-
| sight to attack the enemy infantry, knowing that the
| infantry is too slow to keep up with the tank's
| movement).
| yding wrote:
| Drones or no drones, I'd rather be sitting behind 35cm of
| hardened steel than out in the open with maybe 2cm of body
| armor max.
| jeffdn wrote:
| Dropping an RKG-3 grenade on a tank from a cheap drone also
| requires that the tank be stopped -- something that happens
| far less often in a war of movement than in trench warfare.
| The war in Ukraine has been extraordinarily static (like the
| Nagorno-Karabakh War), and this has provided the
| opportunities for COTS drones to be useful in this way. A
| combined-arms offensive on a divisional or corps front might
| take a handful of losses this way, but it most certainly will
| not be stopped.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| RPGs have existed for along time. How does using a drone to
| deliver the grenade instead of a rocket really change the
| scenario?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Would you rather take on a tank with an RPG in hand, or be
| safe in a bunker and remote control your attack?
|
| If you made a misstake in the first scenario, there is no
| second try. But if you have a second drone, there is.
|
| (ukraine has more men than drones, though)
| tonyhb wrote:
| The "shock" part of "shock effect" is kind of diminished if
| you can hide miles away from tanks, completely safe, and
| neuter them.
| etrevino wrote:
| The Trophy Weapon System can intercept and defeat anti-tank
| missiles and grenades and has been proven in combat. Both US
| and Israeli tanks have those mounted on them. I wouldn't be
| so quick to dismiss tanks as dead. Just older tanks without
| active countermeasures are dead.
| [deleted]
| motbob wrote:
| Battleships are pretty intimidating too. Still obsolete.
| 734129837261 wrote:
| It's easier to make a weapon that takes out a tank, than it is to
| make a tank that can defend itself to it.
|
| Javelin missiles are just one thing, but cheap drones with simple
| rockets on them should be able to take out a moving force of
| numerous tanks.
|
| Imagine having an arsenal of 20 tanks storming your city.
|
| Now imagine having about 100 drones ordered from Amazon,
| outfitted with RKG-3 anti-tank grenades. One each. You can fly
| low, you can fly through the woods, and you can fly each
| individually operated drone right up to the top part of a tank,
| and boom.
|
| No clever software automation. Just a drone that can lift
| something like 1 kg worth of anti-tank grenade.
|
| You have 20 drone operators. You'll have 5 drones per tank. One
| after the other. Skip the already defeated tanks. Attack the
| tanks that will create a barrier when destroyed first, take
| natural barriers into account.
|
| Your tanks can have all the power and shock and awe you might
| think they have, but any 12-year old will be able to take you out
| as if they were playing a video game.
| nimbius wrote:
| >It's easier to make a weapon that takes out a tank, than it is
| to make a tank that can defend itself to it.
|
| This has been a fact of warfare for almost a century. in fact
| it was so easy the US Government published a warfighter
| training video on how to do it, and it didnt even fill 15
| minutes.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taHFUKKKmJM
|
| Tanks had shock and awe value _in nineteen sixteen_. for the
| first time on the battlefields you had an imposing, lumbering,
| seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of forged iron that if left to
| its means, could obliterate hard targets like buildings and
| bunkers without much effort and keep advancing seemingly
| endlessly. if you could reason to stop them, the thought was
| perished by the overwhelming terror alone they imposed.
|
| by WWII most antitank technology had reached horrors
| unimaginable; being a tanker was objectively near suicide. the
| swedish bofors sabot rounds could not only pierce most german
| armor, but cook the occupants alive with a shower of boiling
| steel before they invariably detonated the ordinance on board.
| even smaller mines like the TM41 were enough to blow the road
| wheels through the driver and out the hatch. And if all that
| proves too technical, the Japanese tactic in WW2 was to simply
| hose tanks in petrol and light them ablaze.
|
| the only shock and awe of a 21st century tank is watching your
| tax dollars propel something with 0.6mpg
| jimmytidey wrote:
| Your broader point might be correct but an anti tank grenade
| would not be likely to knock out a modern tank.
| earthbee wrote:
| I think every half way capable military on the planet is seeing
| the news and videos coming out of Ukraine and thinking, hmm,
| must invest in anti-drone technology.
|
| A decade from now what's happening in Ukraine won't work
| against most major military powers. The drones we're seeing are
| very slow and very low but modern anti-aircraft systems aren't
| optimised to detect things this small and low so are getting
| away mostly untouched, but there's no significant technological
| hurdle against modifying existing systems or developing new
| ones that work against this type of threat.
| firebaze wrote:
| Either you're kidding, or you're really ignoring the fact that
| "the enemy" will pursue the same? I'm slowly losing trust in
| humanity (ok, I'ma slow learner).
| amluto wrote:
| Because solo tanks storming a city isn't what tanks are for.
|
| https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not...
|
| edit: for example, I would not want to be a drone operator
| controlling a drone in real time anywhere near a modern army.
| RF direction finders are a thing.
| openasocket wrote:
| The war in Ukraine doesn't provide sufficient evidence that
| modern combined arms operations are outdated. Russia deployed
| combat troops significantly short on man power, leading to a
| situation where attacks had far more armor than infantry. See
| https://warontherocks.com/2022/06/not-built-for-purpose-the-...
| for example. It's been known since the Spanish Civil War that
| tanks are vulnerable to anti-tank teams when not properly
| supported by infantry, especially in adverse terrain. WW2-era
| tanks were effectively countered by anti-tank gun teams in
| entrenched positions, which is why they worked in concert with
| infantry, artillery, and close air support to suppress anti-tank
| guns and enable the tanks to advance. Or they could bypass these
| well-defended positions and attack at weaker points, taking
| advantage of the tank's superior tactical mobility.
|
| While it is possible that drones and modern ATGM teams could
| effectively counter traditional combined arms operations, the
| evidence from the war in Ukraine is largely inconclusive at this
| time. If Russia were to correct their manpower issues, or at
| least be able to conduct traditional combined arms offensives in
| certain areas, then we'd have more solid evidence. Notably
| Ukraine still sees value in the tank, since they've been
| repeatedly requesting tanks (along with a variety of equipment)
| from the West.
|
| Personally, I think we'll see an adjustment to the balance of
| military forces, but the tank will continue to play a pivotal
| role. Active protection systems will continue to improve, we'll
| see the expansion of short range air defenses and doctrine to
| counter drones (and even longer-ranged ATGMs), increased teaming
| of drones alongside infantry and armor (in doctrine acting as a
| sort of middle ground between artillery and air power), and the
| usage of novel indirect fires for tanks like the KSTAM.
| duxup wrote:
| It's hard to get a feel for what is happening overall, but the
| amount of video of Russian armor of all types operating alone (
| no infantry support) has been pretty shocking.
| baybal2 wrote:
| dibujante wrote:
| Yes, it's still valuable to be able to move a heavily armored
| computer onto the battlefield, even if you need to be more
| cautious about exposing it to direct fire now.
| cestith wrote:
| They're cheaper and making them quite so heavily armored is
| less important if there are no humans in them, too. That's a
| whole different can of worms when the calculus changes from
| blood and treasure to just treasure though, especially if only
| on one side.
| bozhark wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTBA5tQsDbE
| happyopossum wrote:
| What we've seen in Ukraine is far from modern tanks fighting with
| modern tank doctrine.
|
| Yes, technically some of those tanks are 'modern', but many of
| them appear to have fake reactive armor, are poorly built, and
| they are being deployed without infantry, air, or logistical
| support. It's the perfect recipe to lose all of your tanks.
| bergenty wrote:
| Tanks are no match for drones. Anything that slow moving will
| get taken out and cheaply. Reactive armor is good for one maybe
| two hits and that's only a couple of thousand in drones.
| diordiderot wrote:
| One or two hits _in the same spot_.
|
| The bigger threat is dual charged ammunition like the
| javelins
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| This is assuming there wouldn't be a swarm of drones deployed
| alongside the tanks. Tanks could be used analogously to
| aircraft carriers, which would be sitting ducks vs
| jets/subs/battleships, if it weren't for their own jets
| they're carrying, or the battleships sailing with them.
| paxys wrote:
| Most of what you have mentioned are inherent shortcomings of
| tanks in a modern battlefield. They are fuel intensive. They
| need massive logistical support. They are vulnerable to
| targeted attacks, like from drones. None of this is unique to
| the Ukraine situation.
|
| It is very hard for tanks to be effective in the age of cheap
| UAVs.
| nradov wrote:
| Right. There were similar discussions about whether the tank
| has a future after many of them were destroyed in the 2020
| Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The main issues were crappy
| Russian equipment and poor tactics.
|
| https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-
| military/2020/09/30/...
| ksidudwbw wrote:
| There isnt a silver bullet for every situation and
| condition, but a moveable metal box that can target heat-
| emitting targets in its line of sight is useful. As long as
| its potential is fully utilised like machine assisted
| target aquisiton and liquidation (ai assisted optics +
| firing)
| hinkley wrote:
| The Abrams A1 got like half a mile to the gallon didn't it?
| How many miles can they move before you have to park them
| next to a giant, unarmored gas can?
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| US armor formations are based around a 12 hour resupply
| cycle. This is why an armored brigade is not just the tanks
| and such, it's also all the logistics equipment they need
| to sustain operations. That said, logistics is a strength
| of the US military, and something that is a severe
| challenge in Ukraine atm.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I'll see if I can find a link, but there's a small program
| the army is running for unmanned tanks, and the RCV-M is
| electric with a diesel genset to charge the batteries,
| range of ~450 miles I think?
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| the abrams had a 500 gallon tank, so... pretty far?
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Sounds like a pretty big explosive to carry on hand.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Not really. The tanks are outside the armor and just blow
| up if they get a direct hit. Shockingly enough the people
| who design gas tanks for tanks thought of the possibility
| the tank might get shot by something.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| It's ok. They can put it next to the actual explosives.
| hinkley wrote:
| TIL that the energy content of 33k gallons of gas is
| equivalent to a 1 kiloton bomb. I am probably on a list
| now for trying to figure out the explosive power of a
| Javelin missile, which I did not find.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Infantry are vulnerable to literally everything, and yet no
| one besides some dingbats that watched terminator too many
| times are suggesting the age of infantry is over. Aircraft
| are vulnerable to missiles. Is anyone suggesting the age of
| aircraft are over? Drones, particularly consumer quadcopter
| adopted out of convenience are vulnerable to missiles,
| autocannons, and electronic warfare. Does not the very same
| logic being offered as proof of the end of tanks apply to
| drones as well?
|
| This whole argument is stupid and predicated on a vast
| misunderstanding of how combined arms operations work.
| Systems are not discard because they're vulnerable, if they
| can be employed in a way that min/maxes their impact vs
| vulnerability.
|
| There is nothing new about this conflict as far as tanks and
| ATGMs. Everything happening here happened in the Yom Kippor
| war, in Grozny, in Syria, and in Yemen.
|
| You just have a bunch of lazy bloggers and journalists making
| a sensationalized claim to sound like something exciting and
| dramatic is happening, at the cost of grossly distorting the
| actual reality.
|
| What will change is future tanks will likely prioritize
| active protection systems and sensors over bulk armor. But
| the basic concept of combing firepower, mobility, and
| protection is not going away any time soon.
|
| Example, Rheinmetall just announced their new tank prototype
| this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTBA5tQsDbE
|
| A couple key features:
|
| * an active protection system specifically for top attack
| munitions like Javelin
|
| * a remote weapons station with a machine gun specifically
| for engaging small low altitude drones like quad copters
|
| * flexible manning, including looking at autonomy and remote
| control
|
| * ability to host drones for its own situational awareness
|
| * a loitering munition that's being co-designed, launched by
| the big gun
|
| Maybe the era of the T-72 is over. But the people confidently
| predicting the era of tanks and armored fighting vehicles in
| general are over, cuz missiles, cuz drones, frankly, have no
| clue what they're talking about.
| bergenty wrote:
| Aircraft are fast, have actual deterrents against attacks
| and can fire from a distance. Tanks need to be close to
| attack, are slow and completely vulnerable to drone
| attacks.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| For ground combat tanks are very comparable. They can
| have an effect on any target within 2km or more within
| single seconds of spotting it. Tanks also have
| deterrents, such as the basics of combined arms tactics,
| but also smoke screens, etc.
| hinkley wrote:
| > and yet no one besides some dingbats that watched
| terminator too many times
|
| and missed the moral of the story...
|
| > This whole argument is stupid and predicated on a vast
| misunderstanding of how combined arms operations work.
| Systems are not discard because they're vulnerable, if they
| can be employed in a way that min/maxes their impact vs
| vulnerability.
|
| The mythology of the board game Go is that it was invented
| by a Chinese general in an attempt to teach his son
| strategy and tactics. In that domain there is a concept
| called Aji, in which you should not write off pieces on the
| board that are doomed. The fact that they are still on the
| board makes them useful, even if they can't possibly be
| saved, saved only by gross error by the opponent, or saving
| them is possible but devastating to your overall prospects.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Infantry disperse and hide. Tanks really struggle to do
| either.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Which is why you screen tanks with infantry.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Not sure what you think a screen is... but it doesn't
| hide anything. A screen is about finding, not hiding.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yes, exactly. The infantry screen the tanks from enemy
| infantry ATGM groups. Everything that makes enemy
| infantry with ATGMs more effective tank hunters makes
| infantry screening the tanks more effective at countering
| them.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > The infantry screen the tanks from enemy infantry
|
| Then you mean the infantry screen the enemy infantry from
| the tanks. You screen the threat, not what you're
| protecting.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| > an active protection system specifically for top attack
| munitions like Javelin
|
| Worth noting: The western-made MANPADs are designed to
| exploit a serious design flaw in Soviet-era tanks. The
| ammunition is stored in the turret where it is easy to
| ignite externally. That's why we have so much youtube of
| Russian tanks blowing their turret sky-high.
|
| Long story short, design failure can't be remedied by
| anything they can put on the top of the tank unless it's
| another tank.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yeah, that's an issue too, though frankly speaking,
| partitioned ammo rack and blow out panels be danged, I
| don't think I'd want to be inside an Abrams that got hit
| by a Javelin or equivalent.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Tanks are not going anywhere. Especially depending on your
| definition of "tank". The initial Russian push to Kiev was a
| disastrous blunder as they ran into unexpected resistance; no one
| just rolls unsupported tanks into a city they are expecting to
| have to fight for. But taking (and holding) a city means taking
| (and holding) the streets, which is impossible for the infantry
| alone without direct fire and armor support. You will be
| decimated by sniper and indirect fire otherwise. If anything,
| this conflict underscores just how crucial armor is to modern
| warfare. With GPS guided artillery, and omnipresent drone
| threats, the days of infantrymen defending trench lines in the
| open are over.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| " With GPS guided artillery, and omnipresent drone threats, the
| days of infantrymen defending trench lines in the open are
| over."
|
| But you aware, that there are currently many infantrymen
| digging and defending trenches in the ukraine? (partly allmost
| equipped like in WW2)
|
| What little russia has of precisiom ammunition is reserved for
| more valuable targets, than infantry. They just get shelled by
| dumb artillery. Lots of it.
| adolph wrote:
| > no one just rolls unsupported tanks into a city they are
| expecting to have to fight for
|
| An example counterpoint is the Iraq war "Thunder Runs." Of
| course the US had air superiority, etc, etc. However, sometimes
| the resistance level cannot be known in ways other than getting
| out there and seeing if your unit draws fire.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_(2003)#Thund...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the US had air superiority, etc, etc._
|
| Thunder runs were limited incursions designed to test Iraqi
| defenses. Beyond air superiority, which is huge, the American
| tanks also had active defenses and well-trained crew.
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