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Does the Tank Have a Future?

economist.com

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Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#481

Post by spacemanmatt »

na85 wrote: post #295
spacemanmatt wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I know it's cool to throw acronyms around but MANPADS stands for MAN-Portable Air Defence Systems. They're for shooting down aircraft. The Javelin and NLAW are not examples of MANPADS.

My mistake. Usually I know the (recently popularized due to use in Ukraine) modern infantry tools a shade better. I have been a sleep-deprived traveler this week!

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#482

Post by spacemanmatt »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #265
spacemanmatt wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Of course not. But getting out and walking away surely beats an explosion than blows the turret off. No one survives that.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#483

Post by tlear »

remarkEon wrote: post #474
tlear wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they know that? Will Germany magically stop using Russian gas, reinstitute draft and manage to produce more than a dozen tanks a year? All the signals pre-invasion of Ukraine pointed to no. Unlike Ukraine right now Baltics CAN be taken by a surprise air mobile assault, some of those countries have 20%+ of population who subsist on healthy dose of RT and worship Putin the Tsar, they will serve as pawns we see now i…

Yeah, it’s fair to question the real commitment to Article 5 that some NATO members have given their entanglement in a number of other economic engagements. I tend to think that there’s kind of a priority list of NATO members in reality that differs from what’s on paper. Germany? Absolutely. France and the UK? Of course. But Lithuania and Turkey? Poland I still think is a red line since, well, it’s been a red line si…

I am not certain they could, but it is not me who makes decisions, and those guys thought they could take Kyiv in 36 hours. It seems doable as paras could be reinforced much faster. The big problem is the none of those countries have depth to absorb initial attack, Ukraine's terrain is not great for the defender but at least it is a large country.

I was incorrect about the 5th column number. Lithuania is actually the best in this category with very few non-citizens. Seems like many left and some naturalized, current total is more like 8% not 33% like it was in the 90s. Latvia has the most but it is still much less than 20%.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#484

Post by kashkhan »

ogogmad wrote: post #373
kashkhan wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you think the Ukrainians should do?

survive.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#485

Post by vba616 »

halffaday wrote: post #458
vba616 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the US is not a "credible security partner" then what the media thinks about a Ukrainian surrender is utterly irrelevant. Even if is is a credible security partner, the same is true. It's...I don't know what to call it except intriguing, the way you flip from a picture of the US as a totalitarian monolith with tentacles controlling everything, to the US as an utterly impotent former empire in shambles, unable to e…

It's...I don't know what to call it except intriguing, the way you conclude anything I wrote means the US is a totalitarian monolith.

It's only two sentences, so I assumed neither of them were fluff...I interpreted "the legacy media" being mentioned adjacent to your personifying the US as someone carrying out foreign policy as implying they are closely related.

If you didn't mean it that way, ok, but I think it's a common view and common to express it like this.

If the media is an arm of the establishment, the rulers of the country, with a singular purpose of supporting it regardless of policy changes, that is what I'd call a totalitarian monolith.

Now if you don't view things that way, fine, but it seems like maybe half of the politically aware US public is more or less on board with that worldview, except that they identify the "monolith" with the left.

Literally every day recently, I hear, on the radio that is always playing in a convenience store I go to, an ad for a famous person's new show on Newsmax, that is somehow rebelling against (I forget the exact phrase) major media outlets. I guess the phrase "mainstream media" is tired, but the concept seems to remain.

The baseline here is the assumption that there is no free press, that there is no diversity of opinion, and I see that sort of claim made everywhere, every day. By, you know, the brave dissenters.

I wonder if it's so ubiquitous that you have stopped seeing it as a background?

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#486

Post by vba616 »

Jataman606 wrote: post #375
halffaday wrote: post #357

The tone of the article is a little hard to take seriously given that the legacy media are mostly now admitting that a Ukrainian surrender is necessary and that all Russian territorial objectives are likely to be met. The more interesting question is if having the US as a credible security partner has a future.

> that all Russian territorial objectives are likely to be met Their objective was to overthrow Ukrainian goverment and take half a country. So no, their objectives definietly will not be met.

Their territorial objectives have apparently been redefined to encompass the areas that they already de facto possessed since 2014.

Isn't that true?

The only obvious thing accomplished lately is all the death and destruction. It can't have been planned this way.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#487

Post by topspin »

ckozlowski wrote: post #127
topspin wrote: post #78

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 rang…

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…

> ATGMs like Javelin, mines, guided mortars, etc and all but the heaviest drones are defensive and supporting weapons.

Naturally they're defensive. Tanks are offensive weapons; breakthrough armor, conceived to break WW1 lines. So weapons to defend against tanks have proliferated.

The question is has this proliferation made them obsolete? Can you still effect breakthroughs when a guy with a tube can kill armor from 5+ km away? And if his man portable tank killer can't do the job he can text a missile from 50+ km with a anti-tank precision warhead so big there is no mobile armor system known to man that can withstand it. You can't have a Battle of Kursk when one M270 could theoretically kill a dozen tanks every five to ten minutes.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#489

Post by jacquesm »

tlear wrote: post #483
remarkEon wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it’s fair to question the real commitment to Article 5 that some NATO members have given their entanglement in a number of other economic engagements. I tend to think that there’s kind of a priority list of NATO members in reality that differs from what’s on paper. Germany? Absolutely. France and the UK? Of course. But Lithuania and Turkey? Poland I still think is a red line since, well, it’s been a red line si…

I am not certain they could, but it is not me who makes decisions, and those guys thought they could take Kyiv in 36 hours. It seems doable as paras could be reinforced much faster. The big problem is the none of those countries have depth to absorb initial attack, Ukraine's terrain is not great for the defender but at least it is a large country. I was incorrect about the 5th column number. Lithuania is actually the…

The thing to realize is that for Latvia it is very much like Ukraine in terms of geographic distribution of ethnic Russians vs ethnic Latvians.

Re: Does the Tank Have a Future?

#490

Post by thefringthing »

dforrestwilson wrote: post #355
openasocket wrote: post #176

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…

I hypothesize that the Taliban had it right all along. 4x4 Toyota Hilux trucks with some sort of heavy gun + a fireteam of infantry kitted out with 1x drone, 1x manpad, 1x atgm. Far cheaper than a modern tank and far more mobile. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War

Fun fact: Ukrainian anarchist general Nestor Makhno is credited with the invention of the technical during the Russian Civil War, in the form of a machine gun mounted on a horse-drawn wagon.
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