311–320 of 490 posts
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Never say never, but you really don't want that to happen.
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?
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I don't recall the United States and Ukraine signing a mutual defense pact, or a treaty that designates the United States as the guarantor of Ukrainian independence. The former position you are advocating for literally amounts to "the United States is the Global Empire, and all changes in state arrangements must be approved by Her". That's fine, but just make that your argument. Trying to morally guilt trip people is…
> a treaty that designates the United States as the guarantor of Ukrainian independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit... > there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture? There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2.…
From your link:
>>Another key point was that U.S. State Department lawyers made a distinction between "guarantee" and "assurance", referring to the security guarantees that were desired by Ukraine in exchange for non-proliferation. In the end a statement was read into the negotiation record that the (according to the U.S. lawyers) lesser sense of the English word "assurance" would be the sole implied translation for all appearances of both terms in all three language versions of the statement.
>Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?
There's a lot going on in Africa and the Horn. More or less all feature some degree of genocide or mass killings, objectives of replacing the current government, or redrawing the lines on the map.
>There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2.
This is absolutely not true. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (the first one), Myanmar and a couple others I'm forgetting all were an order of magnitude larger than this one in terms of casualties. Maybe you mean this is the first major conflict of this kind in Europe since WWII, in which case... maybe, because you'd have to omit Yugoslavia. There's room to argue about that one. Not sure why that's relevant, unless we're going back to the insistence about the United States' role in security on the European continent.
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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 b…
> But the basic concept of combing firepower, mobility, and protection is not going away any time soon. This reads like the gist of it. I imagine them getting lighter, heavier, more sophisticated/expensive, cheaper, slower or faster. But the basic archetype seems to be almost timeless as long as there is some utility for armor, mobility and projectile weapons.
An armored truck may have equivalent ability to defend itself using active systems with much greater mobility and firepower than a tank. A converted autonomous econovan might be even more effective, bypassing the need for defense entirely.
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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.
An anti tank missile is a "drone" (and has been touted as the end of the tank for the past 50 years or more). Has the much slower-moving propeller driven contraption changed anything significant here?
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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.
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.
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…
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.
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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 b…
Infantry disperse and hide. Tanks really struggle to do either.
Do you think you would be able to see this tank if it were 3000 meters away?
Because the tank commander, with his set of night vision / thermal vision binoculars sees you.
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If that tank commander closes the hatch and ducks down, you wont see him at all. In full hide position, the tank commander will only reveal himself and his tank when a nearby infantry asks for support.
Of course, tank commanders want to see the battlefield for themselves and will stick their heads out like that unless they think there is an eminent danger.
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At 3000 meters, you can't hear the tanks, and you can't see them in hide position either. They move around the battlefield at 50km/hr all terrain, so they don't follow roads or well trodden paths either.
And the tank is absolutely lethal at this range in a way that no other weapon is comparable to. Even sniper bullets and rockets are far far slower than tank shells.
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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.
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.
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> 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?
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 a…
NLAW has 1000m range. AT4 and Panzerfaust3 has 300m range.
If you are using an NLAW and the enemy tank has line of sight 3000 meters away, you are outgunned, outranged, and outmaneuvered and almost certainly will lose.
The tank has 40+ shots with a firing rate every 4 seconds. Javelin is a 50LB weapon that is single shot, so a miss (due to thermal smoke grenades / flares) is a critical mistake that will kill you.
Running away at 3km/hr only delays the inevitable, as the tank travels 50km/hr to close the distance with you... And had far more shots to invoke suppressing fire to scare you from running away effectively.
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The advanced weapons help, but a tank is a tank. It's faster than you, has more range than any weapon you can carry, is almost always decked out with the best night vision optics, has more bullets, bigger bullets, and armor to negate most of your weapons.
At best the advanced missiles even the odds. I'm not sure if I'd call it an advantage though, because of the single shot nature / long reload times of missiles / recoilless rifles, especially compared to tank guns.
