LongLeftFlank

....Which so far have been 100% pure drive-by opinion, untainted by any documentation.
At least meme or something.

Umm, except @Letter from Prague didn't present that stark binary at all, so it's your logic that is faulty in this case. Please go back and reread.
What he did say is entirely correct: backing and arming Ukraine's ongoing evisceration of the Red Army DOES carry a risk of creating a broad collapse in Russia. Just how it is. 
...I'd also observe that LfP's English is many orders of magnitude better than our Czech. We are lucky to have his commentary.

Umm, except @Letter from Prague didn't present that stark binary at all, so it's your logic that is faulty in this case. Please go back and reread.
What he did say is entirely correct: backing and arming Ukraine's ongoing evisceration of the Red Army DOES carry a risk of creating a broad collapse in Russia. Just how it is. 
...I'd also observe that LfP's English is many orders of magnitude better than our Czech. We are lucky to have his commentary.

Umm, except @Letter from Prague didn't present that stark binary at all, so it's your logic that is faulty in this case. Please go back and reread.
What he did say is entirely correct: backing and arming Ukraine's ongoing evisceration of the Red Army DOES carry a risk of creating a broad collapse in Russia. Just how it is. 
...I'd also observe that LfP's English is many orders of magnitude better than our Czech. We are lucky to have his commentary.

....Which so far have been 100% pure drive-by opinion, untainted by any documentation.
At least meme or something.

....Which so far have been 100% pure drive-by opinion, untainted by any documentation.
At least meme or something.

Secondary explosions we can see mostly if SP-artillery is hit. Ammo for towed howitzers often keeps nearby, so if the drone hit the gun we mostly can see just one explosion. 
Magyar on own video with FPV-strike on 2A36 guns told that is not easy to destroy heavy towed guns with FPV. You hit just the iron part and what next? Often the gun after this can be repaired. 
I watched recently reportage from UKR repairing unit, which repairs western howitzers. Some of their "patients" were coming back several times and they managed to repair it. Of course, part of howitzers come dead, but they use it for "cannibalization", some parts they made itself or order it in "garage-production"
So I think enough part of damaged and destroyed western towed howitzers can be one piece, hit several times or it can be repaired after

Carry on, General Martel!
(Understanding that this piece dates from May 2022, England's deep strike apostles *might* have selected a better patron saint. But then again, Liddell Hart, ahem....)
The Reconnaissance Strike Group imagined and championed by retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor remains, in my opinion, the most promising force structure to face the current challenges of land warfare.

Carry on, General Martel!
(Understanding that this piece dates from May 2022, England's deep strike apostles *might* have selected a better patron saint. But then again, Liddell Hart, ahem....)
The Reconnaissance Strike Group imagined and championed by retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor remains, in my opinion, the most promising force structure to face the current challenges of land warfare.

Finally someone found a way to make tankettes great again! I see it clearly now: a swarm of robotic tankettes coordinated by a very big and very well armoured robotic brain. Let's call the brain unit E.F.L.H. for the old times' sake (short for "Even Fuller and a Liddle Harder").

Given some of the discussion here over the last day or so, I thought I'd flag this unit in case some are unaware of it.
The UK Deep Reconnaissance Strike Brigade. It carried out it's first major exercise last year, and is something that was in development before 02/22. No doubt many of our talking points are being considered within its role which appears an attempt to break away from a COIN mentality and revert to dealing with peer threats.
Everyone is recce, everyone is strike. 
https://www.joint-forces.com/features/68290-scorpion-cyclone-1st-deep-reconnaissance-strike-bct
https://ukarmedforcescommentary.blogspot.com/2022/05/everyone-is-recce-everyone-is-strike.html

P

China has its own issues regarding procurement, not to mention corruption problems. While they are not nearly as bad as Russia, they do like to chest beat about advanced technology while compromising more basic capabilities of their military. Also the fact of the matter is they fib a lot just like the Russians do about their actual capabilities. (All bling no basics Perun video is one to watch)

[editor’s note: I drafted this about 12 hours ago but because reasons I couldn’t post it till now. The conversation has moved on a bit in the meantime – apologies for being a bit tardy]
***
Some time ago in this thread I asked ‘what is tank?’ and it’s not so surprising that almost 2 years later we’re still circling that tree. Traditionally, tanks are considered to embody three qualities: mobility, protection, and firepower, with trade-offs between the three depending on what your doctrine thinks is more important (Israel, for example, prioritises protection at the expense of mobility), but still having elements of all three – if you just have mobility and firepower then what you’re driving is a technical, not a tank. Or perhaps a drone. If you have protection and firepower but no mobility; you’re in a bunker, not tank. If you have protection and mobility but no firepower; that’s a truck, not a tank.
The tank will be dead when that troika is no longer relevant on the battlefield. The last couple of pages have seen some weird intellectual gymnastics, such as: “tank dead because tank only has mobility, protection, and firepower – all else is drone!” to which; um, yes? And “tank dead because tank only do infantry support! Tank only SPG now!” as if infantry support were not the very thing tanks were created to provide. Tanks entered the battlefield to assist the break-in and breakthrough. The breakout was the domain of the cavalry. The horsed cavalry. Since then tanks have proven useful in other roles, and endured on the battlefield because that troika remains valid.
In the intervening century there have been any number of times when tanks have immolated themselves on whatever the anti-tank defence du jour was; August 1918 at Amiens, May 1940 just down the road at Arras, June to December 1941 in Cyrenaica, May to October 1942 in North Africa, July 1943 in Russia, July 1944 in Normandy, March 1945 in Hungary, June 1954 in Vietnam, October 1973 in the Sinai … and those are just off the top. I am certainly forgetting many many other examples. And yet, and yet, despite all those salutary and sanguinary examples the troika remained relevant.
Armour was useful in Falklands and Vietnam. Granted there wasn’t a lot of armour in the Falklands, but the ground commanders – on both sides – appreciated the ones they had and would certainly have liked more. That they didn’t was mostly a function of logistics (and employability in that particular landscape), rather than utility. Similarly, in Vietnam the Australians, at least, found their Centurions (and their Gavins if you care to include APCs in the generic ‘amour’ bucket) so useful that the RAAC was finally able to shake off their reputation as being Koalas. Armour wasn’t decisive in either conflict, but that’s a different question.
Usefulness aside, noting that tanks aren’t supreme – or decisive - in all contexts is a startling insight into the obvious. For example it is true, as I fully and happily acknowledge, that tanks were not decisive and indeed had practically no impact at all on the Sikkim conflict in 1967, or on the Sumdorong Chu standoff in 1987. By the same token, aircraft carriers were of exactly zero use during the Chaco War in the mid-1930’s or the Sino-Soviet conflict in 1969, yet surprisingly that didn’t spell the demise of carriers.
Iraq 1991 was a gross mismatch of technology, which led to some extraordinarily photogenic technology-porn moments, which were subsequently used to prove everything from the supremacy of airpower, the accuracy of Patriot (whoops, lol), the relevance of the A-10 (lol), the dominance of tanks, or the superiority of the “Western Way of War.” But those all come back to technological supremacy – lose tech supremacy and the rest doesn’t matter; at tech parity you’re going to be stuck in an attritional grind, while at tech-deficit you get a turn at being the whipping boy. Tech parity is what happened in Normandy 1944, and it’s what happened in Iran-Iraq in the 1980s, and tech parity led to operational deadlock. And this dynamic is what we are seeing repeated again in Ukraine.
ISR has become more pervasive and persistent, which definitely makes life harder, but once again we’ve been here before. The whole point of aerial combat in WWI was to retain or deny aerial recce ability, and it led directly to the formation of national airforces. In 1944 a few stupid little toy planes that could barely fly bought activity along whole sections of the fronts in Normandy and Italy to a halt because those toys could see everything and were directly linked to overwhelming fires systems. And yet, the German army was able to adapt and overcome … for a while, at least defensively. They weren’t able to go on an general offensive despite having loads of shiny tanks, but that had more to do with loss of any ability to operate in the aerial domain, and more generally the yawning chasm of overall materiel inferiority, than it was to do with the Austers and the Cubs.
Neither side in Ukraine is at the point of having either air supremacy, or absurd materiel overmatch, or a significant technological advantage and so parity has led to a broad stalemate.
Tanks … and armour generally … and land vehicles even more generally … are taking a lot of hits in Ukraine, in part because they are facing a weapon system that has some novel characteristics. But then, so is infantry. And artillery. And navy. And air force.
But I don’t believe we will give up on infantry.
I don’t believe we will give up on ships, or airpower, or artillery.
And I don’t believe we will give up on armour or tanks, at least not while the troika remains relevant.
All of those systems will change over time though. Of course they will. They have to, to survive! But that’s normal – force densities, for example, have plummeted since the days of Waterloo, going from being measured by the number of men per metre then to the number of metres per man now, in response to increased range and lethality of weapons, as well as the ability to perform distributed and dispersed command, plus having highly trained and professional standing armies.^ Aircraft too have evolved over the last hundred years, finding new roles while at the same time inventing new ways to accomplish old roles. And so have tanks.
Will there be a next generation of tanks? I think yes. Will the next generation of tanks be broadly similar to the current generation in terms of the balance of the troika between mobility, protection, and firepower? Again, I think yes. Broadly.
What about the generation after that? I think there will be one, not least because yes; militaries are conservative beasts. They are conservative beasts because they're paid to be. Betting the farm on an unproven nascent technology is probably not a great idea, especially when 'the farm' happens to be liberty and independence for the nation and all its citizens.^^ Bet wrong and you get to say hello to Johnny Foreigner as your new head of state. See, for example, France 1940-1944 after they went all-in on shiny new high-tech heavy fixed fortifications, which no one else was doing.
But I also think that gen+2 tanks will be about as different to current tanks as the Centurion was to the Mark I “Male.”^^^ Still a tank that combines firepower, protection and mobility in a single package, but differently.
 
Wars tend to do that to equipment.
 
***
^ as an aside, to my eye modern professional standing armies seem almost akin to the ~16th Century mercenary armies in Italy in terms of their separation from the societies they nominally serve
^^ Yes; Unproven. The information we are getting from Ukraine is partial, highly biased, and selective. That is not a good foundation to make fundamental or existential decisions on.
^^^ fun fact: the British sent a Centurion south to participate in the Falklands War.

Careful.  F-16s are no more of a magic bullet than the M1s/Challies/Leo2s. And they die a lot more visibly.

As a side note, I hope I am articulating myself reasonably well here. I am still somewhat new here despite having lurked for an ungodly amount of time on the forum. Its certainly lovely to discuss / talk to you all!


 

“More than two-thirds of the Russian tanks that Ukraine’s military has destroyed in recent months have been taken out using first-person-view (FPV) drones, a NATO official told Foreign Policy, an increasing sign of Kyiv’s reliance on the unpiloted aircraft as it awaits more artillery ammunition from the United States and other Western countries. “
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/09/drones-russia-tanks-ukraine-war-fpv-artillery/#:~:text=More than two-thirds of,ammunition from the United States
 


https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/04/24/why-is-russia-losing-the-fpv-drone-war/?sh=4f97658572dc
 
https://en.defence-ua.com/analysis/detailed_fpv_drone_usage_statistics_show_russias_starting_to_outpace_ukraine-9361.html
At some point we have to simply admit that this is not social media bias.  These are some big numbers being tossed around that match what we are seeing.  So either this is a really big misread or something else is going on.
 
 

Again, here is the thing…maybe they were.  We never tested our c-ATGM doctrines beyond exercises in Europe…and shockingly the mighty tank (we had spent billions on) was still relevant.  Much like the lessons observed in the wars leading up to WW1 we basically ignored stuff that did not fit our model.  If that model was never truly tested, and it wasn’t, then one cannot simply say “ well tanks were relevant because we kept using them”.  I mean, sure, human history of warfare is not full of examples of us hanging onto military capability well past its expiry date…he says reading about cavalry wearing shiny armor in WW1.
And then there is the inconvenient fact that ATGM technology developed a lot in the last 50 years while the tank really hasn’t evolved that much.  We stuck on some better armor and a computer in the gun.  They also got larger, heavier and burn more gas.  APS was about the only major development and it is lagging ATGM capability, let alone drones.
Then in 1991 we had one of the largest confirmation bias events in military history.  We looked at the Gulf War and said “the system works!”  While conveniently missing the fact that the Gulf War was not a peer-on-peer conflict.  We beat up a one eyed goat with developmental challenges and went “see, now let’s spend another few trillion on this stuff.”
And then when we saw weird stuff happening in places like Chechnya, Nagorno Karbak, and Ukraine…we went “silly Soviet doctrine”.  So going all the way back to the last real peer on peer tank actions we see the major impact of small, smart and precise missiles and go “meh, Israel still won and we kept using them…so they must still work.”
Tanks may have been put on the endangered species list back in 1973 but we ignored it.  Here we are in 2024 watching all sorts of weird evidence over a two year period and the analysis is still. “Meh, Ukraine is winning enough…they must still work…we will keep using them.”  Probably the last thing Austro-Hungarian Cavalry said after shining their breast plates in 1914.
For me this war is an Ostfreisland moment, and frankly I think it is for most modern militaries.  And what happens next will likely follow the same pattern:
”The leadership of the US Navy, however, was outraged by Mitchell's handling of the tests; the 2,000 lb bombs had not been sanctioned by the Navy, which had set the rules for the engagement. Mitchell's bombers had also not allowed inspectors aboard the ship between bombing runs as stipulated by the Navy. The joint Army–Navy report on the tests, issued a month later and signed by General John J. Pershing, stated that "the battleship is still the backbone of the fleet."[62] Mitchell wrote his own, contradictory account of the tests, which was then leaked to the press. The sinking of the battleship sparked great controversy in the American public sphere; Mitchell's supporters exaggerated the significance of the tests by falsely claiming Ostfriesland to be an unsinkable "super-battleship" and that "old sea dogs ... wept aloud."[62] Senator William Borah argued that the tests had rendered battleships obsolete. Mitchell was widely supported in the press, though his increasingly combative tactics eventually resulted in a court-martial for insubordination that forced him to retire from the military.[63]”
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Ostfriesland

In this war that is August, if not sooner. 

Here is the thing though, it was noted well before the 2024 FPV scourge that tanks were becoming unsuitable for their primary role.  The evidence is all over Ukraine.  We noted the lack of performance from armor going back to 2022.  In reality it was a combination of factors - ISR, Artillery, ATGMs, mines and UAS.  Once AirPower was essentially denied and the Wild West below 2000 feet broke out, the tank became hunted out of its ability to be a pillar within a combined arms context.  
We have seen far too much evidence to support this, and not just edited war porn.  RUSI and CSIS reports have noted a lot of strange behaviours on both sides with respect to armor.  The easy button excuse has been “well that is Soviet legacy - they don’t know how to do combined arms”.  That does not even make sense as the Soviets knew combined arms very well.  They just went about it differently. Further it stretches credibility to argue that both sides after two years have somehow been unable to solve for Cbt Team/Battlegroup operations.  Something else is clearly going on.  We have seen reports of Russian concentration being picked up and hammered well before they can even get into direct fire ranges.  Both sides are keeping tanks well back for indirect roles, or sending them forward in ones and twos for sniping. They are doing this not because they have forgotten how to put 12 tanks together, they have done it because putting 12 tanks in the same grid square is asking for 12 tanks to be detected and die.
Now FPVs have arrived in scope and scale and are making things worse.  It has been noted many these crazy little bastards are crippling and mauling at scales that rivalled artillery support - in fact one could make a coherent argument they kept the UA in the game during the Ammunition Famine of  winter spring ‘24.  What your video is showing is not that a T64 got hit by a couple FPVs and survived, it is showing that this strikes were recorded by another drone.  That T64 was fixed by ISR likely well before those FPVs showed up.  So while it shrugged off the two FPVs, it would not shrug off the artillery, ATGMs or more FPVs coming their way because they were spotted and tracked by ISR the whole time.
Finally, and again…this is not all about UAS.  If all we had to worry about were UAS in all there shapes and sizes it would be bad enough.  This is a confluence of C4ISR, PGM and Unmanned - combined with extant forms of fires.  We are living in a Fires dominate age, which like the last one led to Defensive primacy. I personally think we are in Denial primacy but can see Defensive from here. The entire package, particularly C4ISR are what are changing the entire game.  C4ISR means manoeuvre is detected well out and engaged starting at around 20kms and progressively worse as one gets closer to a front line. Concentrating is toxic under these conditions and other sides have seen this. Battalion concentrations without air superiority, ISR superiority and some sort of non-existent shielding are dying before they can cross the start line. 
So here we are, the first day of the rest of lives.  Manoeuvre and mass are broken.  ISR, precision and denial broke them. The real question is, “can it be unbroken in this war?”  Or do we have to wait until the next one?

I thank you for the offer of assuming a missionary position, but I prefer ginger midgets. The really beardy ones.
Other than that, I shall always continue to tell someone when they have an illogical position, no matter the person.
Before anyone even begins to look at primary sources, students are usually sent to logic 101, where they hear that neither an appeal to authority nor an appeal to tradition holds much argumentative water.
Therefore, I will continue to respect the expertise in the areas you obviously have vast and specialised expertise in, but will speak up whenever someone dismissingly speaks in favor of mass death and suffering because they didn't like what someone belonging to the victim group said on an internet forum. I prefer to stick to logically sound and moral positions, and I think many people do regardless of occupation, age or background!

Oooo, I think we could be great friends.  I will give you 1 - although there was that Great Wall thingy.  2. Was a matter of choice and there may be thesis there on how mass and armor were interlinked.  3. Is a really good point but I think its operationalization was outside the timeframe of the Middle Ages, in fact it likely was a driver for early Modern European dominance along with maritime power.

That's waaay off topic, but I can't resist it so I will shoot-and-scoot one reply, and then go into (feigned Mongol-style) withdrawal.
European medieval states were not capable of Empire- toppling campaigns as the Mongols did or wars dragging on for years with WWI casualty levels in Chinese style. However, at other aspects of warfare they were the world leaders. Both their strengths and weaknesses often derived from the peculiarities of the political system prevailing in Europe at the time, feudalism.
1. Fortifications. While individual fortresses in the Eastern Roman Empire or the Islamic caliphates could be formidable and impress the Westerners, there was no other region in the World which would rival the Medieval Europe in the overall level of fortification, quality and quantity of the defensive architecture taken together. Individual feudal lords were expected to build castles, had the means to build castles and built them.
2. Individual Armour. From XI century to XV century it makes rapid progress, usually keeping abreast of the other  parts of the world. In 2 half of XIV century the full plate harness is introduced and no other armour in the world matches it until the discovery of Kevlars and similar materials in the XX century. Again, a feature of feudalism allowing an individual soldier the means to spend the equivalent of several dozen villages with villagers on his personal protection,
3. Gunpowder. Invented in China, adopted in the islamic world and the Great Steppe, it found its home in Europe. The progress in firearms in Europe was the fastest in the World. Connected with 1. and 2  - in the land of fortresses, both stationary and ambulatory ones, the ability to harness the chemical energy to defeat them was much appreciated. 
 

Careful.  F-16s are no more of a magic bullet than the M1s/Challies/Leo2s. And they die a lot more visibly.

Careful.  F-16s are no more of a magic bullet than the M1s/Challies/Leo2s. And they die a lot more visibly.