Apocal

IR can't see through thick clouds or windows.

OK. This is a thing MikeyD wrote. Will he support it?

AFAIK, the round battle-carried is situational; if there is the possibility of encountering enemy tanks, battle-carry sabot. If something is too light for the sabot (which works against APCs/IFVs just fine), then its probably vulnerable to the coax instead. Getting the first shot off only matters if its an effective shot.

The average American tank battalion got through its entire wartime service with ~50 dead. Total killed in the American armor branch were utterly incomparable (~2000) to that of American infantry (~150,000). The tank (and tank destroyer, for that matter) battalions' actual casualty rates were on-par with the field artillery, when adjusted for combat-time. They had relatively little to complain about riding into battle behind a few inches of steel; the "deathtrap" during WW2 was a field jacket and boots, not the Sherman. (source: http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualties-2.html#duty) If tankers were feeling demoralized, it was because they were fighting a war and wars are unpleasant for everyone involved to one degree or another; not because American armor was actually beaten up on the battlefield as a routine thing or they were losing men by the handful. But MikeyD was arguing they were actually beaten and ended the war a spent force. I notice he's gone out of his way to not actually substantiate his initial statement with, well, anything at all.

The 5.56 NATO has inferior penetration to 7.62mm NATO, with only a few exceptions. As for countering body armor with 5.56, the black tip M995 AP round has been in service since the Cold War. I'm not sure how it shapes up against modern Russian body armor though. The reason the debate has mostly ignored body armor is two-fold: for starters, none of our opponents in the past two decades have made much use of it and secondly, the major casualty-producing weapons either penetrate reliably (medium and heavy machine guns) or are HE/fragment-based (grenade launchers, mortars, rockets, ATGMs).

I thought we were arguing actual battlefield performance. If you're instead talking about outcomes over the whole war, the US stood on the winning side with it's army completely intact. When you build 25,000 of something and only lose ~4000 of them, you might be tempted to put all those spares to productive use...

-American armor traded equal with German armor for the most part. -American tanks sustained fewer casualties per knockout, on average, than German tanks. -American tanks were less likely to brew-up after being penetrated than German tanks. Where is this merit? Yes, part of using tanks well is using them as part of a combined arms force. Yes, the 4th Armored Division was better than most, but the 3rd Armored Division was not and its organization unsuited (too many tanks, too few infantry) to the war as it was being fought. They still managed to do better than break even against equivalent German formations. Sure there is. But your side isn't presenting a nuanced argument. It began with the bold, unsupported statement that US armor had been beaten up on the battlefield and ended the war demoralized.

Smoke from any source helps; vehicle smoke can "shield" you from wrath of RPGs once you're closing on the objective and your track goes stationary.

From the article: "The Taliban, it has been said, “Ignore 5.56mm, respect 7.62mm and fear .50 BMG.”" This is something of a contradiction from the usual Lessons Learned from Afghanistan that I've seen. Most notably this one: http://www.michaelyon-online.com/images/pdf/the_eagle_went_over_the_mountain.ppt (apologies for pic instead of text, taken from PowerPoint) In other parts of that lessons learned, you'll find reference to Taliban calmly sighting RPGs while .50cal fire kicks up dirt less than three feet away from them. These are dudes who simply are not intimidated by gunfire. Which is why everyone wants to see improved HE delivery pushed lower and lower down the food chain. Other notes from the above: concerns about weight, mobility, etc. but none regarding 5.56 being especially inadequate to the task at-hand. Obviously we could have a longer-ranged, harder-hitting weapon in everyone's hands, but the infantry are already overloaded when dismounted, so it feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The figures for the post were pulled from this book: http://www.amazon.com/Data-World-War-Tank-Engagements/dp/1470079062 Which is in turn based on a Ballistics Research Laboratory memo. Obviously this single monograph, covering only two armored divisions over a five month period, doesn't tell the complete story so if MikeyD wants to support his assertion that the American tank arm was "positively butchered on the battlefield" he's certainly free to do so. I'm just skeptical he can, given that the number of major tank battles throughout western Europe from '44-'45 number somewhere south of fifty total. Most of us on the forum know them by name and more than a few posters know the outcomes of every single one.

In what fights? I seem to recall US armor routinely tooling the Germans in Normandy and the Bulge.

The weapon that raises range concerns in Afghanistan is the RPG, not the AK-47, since the former is the Taliban's preferred method of initiating serious contact. If an AK round smacks a few inches away, you're still good to go, but if an RPG lands a few inches away, you're probably hurting. There are also RRs they occasionally use as well, for much the same purpose. edit: when I was getting out they were starting to replace the EBRs (modernized M14s) with the M110.

What? Reno was tooled by natives using similar firearms, but with a (his estimate) four or five to one advantage in numbers. In spite of this, relief or reinforcement from Custer didn't come and his force was eventually routed, forming a defensive position with another officer's detachment (Benteen) and hastily digging rifle pits. They survived. Meanwhile, other, more famous segment of the battle was going down elsewhere. But nobody really knows what happened with Custer's fight for a very straight-forward reason. They all died. I'm not sure how or where a different contemporary rifle would have helped Reno or Benteen, especially given that natives had access to broadly similar weapons along with a substantial numerical advantage.

The PLA isn't particularly deployable outside of a handful of light units, since they don't have the sealift necessary to move very many ground forces to the hotspots and keep them supplied. The one scenario where they would have a manpower advantage -- an actual land invasion of China -- nukes would fly long before that advantage could tell. North Korea's army, as near as any can tell, is in even worse straits, along with South Korea being able to contribute nearly as many men once their reserves are activated, atop whatever the US military can feed in. At any rate, I can't imagine a single conflict in the modern era that was decided by the choice of rifle.

Thanks Ian. Not a ton, maybe like fifty games tops. I was conservative with armor in cities and towns for that reason, basically I'd use dismounts to clear out "enclaves" for my armor and rarely poke around with vehicles in the lead. I mean it still happened but ATGMs capable of going through the Abrams front were my biggest worry and short-ranged RPGs generally just killed tons of my infantry.

I don't know why my post has a thumbs down on it.

The ubiquity wasn't much of a problem for me personally; you take your time and lead with infantry eyes with arty/mortars on iffy locations, there aren't too many surprises that can be sprung. If the AT-13 could fire inside buildings in CMSF I never noticed. And the main issue I had with the -29 was it wiping out my infantry. Which is realistic enough, HE beats bullets for lethality at everything but spitting distance.

Artillery suppresses ATGMs just fine. Most ATGM types shouldn't be able to fire from inside a building either; Javelin is the exception.

Arena max engagement elevation is fifteen degrees. A Javelin dives at 45-60 degrees in the terminal phase.

Depends on the drone; most of our armed types fly well above the effective envelope (<20,000ft,) of all but the largest AAA calibers. The tank's battlefield role is mobile, protected long-range firepower. Protected in the sense that there are far fewer weapons on the battlefield that will threaten a tank (ATGMs, dedicated AT mines, other tanks, etc.), whereas basically everything can threaten a dismounted infantryman. That is the battlefield problem the tank was built to -- and continues to -- solve. This is not a reversal of the battlefield food-chain from 1916. The advantage of armor from that period, up until at least the sixties or seventies when ICM was widely available, was that it was largely immune to anything but absurd amounts of massed artillery and still able to press forward an attack. This is still an advantage armor in general possesses over dismounted infantry. Infantry-centric forces fighting today structure their operations in such a way that they avoid firepower (now including effective and responsive aerial weapons on top of artillery) as their foremost concern. Firepower still kills. That is why armor is going to remain relevant, until you can come up with some way of making an unarmored man able to stand up and wade through machine gun fire and shell's fragments. Mounted troops with melee weapons remained an integral part of combined arms long after the musket was introduced. They just didn't bother wearing as much armor, because it pointless. The armor on a tank isn't pointless since there remain a whole host of weapons on the modern battlefield against which immunity is still a solid tactical advantage.

Why would you link a Russian-language source on an English language forum to poster who's never claimed to be able to read Russian?

It's not the tech specs of the weapons that matter much. As long as it has the right mix of broad characteristics, the nitty-gritty details are just deck-chairs on the Titanic. What's nasty is the specific density of those weapons within the squads and platoons; it's asking much of any infantry force to advance into effective range of 25+ automatic weapons.

Yah, I played a bit a few weeks ago. It was fun, especially in sim mode while squaded up with voice comms.

1. RT. I like the setting, the terrain is definitely a huge factor without being as frustrating as bocage, I'm not playing with early/mid-war cripple-tanks, there is an interesting variation in composition between the two forces and engine improvements. 2. BN. Loads of content, plenty of scenarios, some great campaigns, Market-Garden doesn't really interest me much but at least added something besides the airborne operation. 3. SF. I like modern forces, the asymmetric tactics involved, the setting is especially timely and it had tons of content. 4. FI. Just not interesting to me at all.

JasonC made a pretty good tactical principles post: