Vanir Ausf B

The Bradley is proving to be feasible in a light tank role. The key is to stay mobile, limit exposure time and don't concentrate (operate in ones and twos).

Yuriy Butusov on the situation around Pokrovsk.

He appears to have been answering a question about defensive operations. It's fair to say we are not seeing a lot of evidence of tank usage by Ukraine these days. There are probably multiple reasons reasons for this, but historically tanks have been more critical to offense than defense.

According to Zelensky, F-16s have not arrived yet as of 3 days ago. Of course, he could be lying.

The delusion of offense, perhaps. Actual offense has been dead for a while now.

Tanks are cool. Fight me!

You would think, but the report says the IMX-101 plant has been mothballed. In a statement to Reuters, the Army confirmed for the first time publicly that “the plan changed” and it stopped producing IMX-101 for the 155mm shell last July. Army procurement official Bush said the unused IMX facility is an “insurance policy,” adding, “We’re going to use it at some point.”

IMX-101, or something else? From the linked report: Decades later, in 2014, the Army began trying to transition away from TNT to a different explosive compound called IMX-101. At the time, the Army said IMX-101 was more environmentally friendly and less vulnerable to detonation by accident or terrorist attack. But Reuters learned that last summer, about 17 months into the war in Ukraine, the Army quietly switched back to TNT for cost and efficiency reasons.

A report on how the 155mm shell shortage came about and continuing difficulties. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-artillery/ _____ In a forest in western Poland, a complex on the same site where a factory was built by Nazi German occupiers to support an invasion of the Soviet Union now makes thousands of tons of TNT every year. The problem for Ukraine is that the factory, located near the city of Bydgoszcz, is the last surviving TNT plant in Europe or North America. Workers there now work around the clock. It’s run by a state-owned company, Nitro-Chem, and makes about 10,000 tons of TNT per year. The company declined to say exactly how much. A single 155mm round typically requires about 10 kg of TNT. That means that the 10,000 tons of TNT would be enough to provide for about 1 million rounds, if every bit were used for 155mm shells. Besides the plant in Poland, production of TNT is now concentrated in China and India. Customs records examined by Reuters show at least 1,200 tons of TNT were exported from India in 2023 and 2024 to arms makers that supply Western forces. India also shipped large volumes of the explosive fillers RDX and HMX to Poland’s Nitro-Chem. But both India and China also have tried to maintain good relations with Russia. And neither likely would be able to fill NATO’s needs, even if willing. “You cannot imagine just how overheated the market is at the moment,” said a European defense industry executive. “The worst thing at the moment is the global shortage of TNT and RDX. The shortage of these raw materials is the basic reason why production cannot be ramped up much more at this point.”

Are we reading the same paper? It seems to me there's a lot to chew on in there if you're a fan of unmanned systems. It's just not all about the drones. ________ Thus, alongside the requirement to protect the force from stand-in observation, it is also necessary to be able to defeat enemy longer-range UAVs, either at low altitude but stood off up to 10 km, or at medium altitude above the MANPADS ceiling While helicopters are expensive to operate and vulnerable in the face of Russian air defences, UAVs may offer a means to move pallets of food, water and ammunition forwards. Using uncrewed ground vehicles for breaching similarly offers the opportunity to widen and multiply the lanes through which supplies can pass. Uncrewed ground vehicle technology is not currently ideally suited to offensive obstacle breaching, because it is easily knocked out through damage to key sensors and often depends on remote control, while such breaching must be done either from close proximity to the vehicle or via fixed cable. Once behind the FLOT, however, such systems have significant potential, and experimentation in this space could mature the capability until it is able to support offensive breaching operations... Medical evacuation via UAV is more morally complex, but in many instances may improve the rate of survival considerably by allowing casualties to be recovered across complex or denied terrain to a medical facility in a hardened position where a better standard of care can be provided. For offensive suppression, the utilisation of loitering munitions, provided with target coordinates by EW baselines, could enable strikes on operators of threat systems that are otherwise safe beyond line of sight of their targets. An equivalent to the Lancet-3M would be very useful for this. It would also require an uplift in the density of Ukrainian EW baselines at brigade level to identify enemy UAV operators and engage them.

Ukrainian Bradleys are provided with BRAT on both hull and turret, which is at least somewhat effective against Lancets. Abrams has ARAT only on the hull, a deficiency Ukrainian tankers have complained about. “We as a crew and as a battalion in general would like from our American partners to provide us with dynamic armor, so that we have not only the flanks protected, but also the turret.”

"The only reliable protection against these microdrones will be either fully sealed bunkers and combat vehicles, or combat suits with an exoskeleton similar to space ones (and the price of a tank). That is, there will no longer be any infantry in its current understanding in future wars." Dismounted infantry is dead alongside the tank

I think you answered your own question . AFAIK the only non-Israeli APS in active service is on the South Korean K2 tank. Poland has them on order but there's no chance they end up in Ukraine. EDIT: I was just reading up on Korean APSs and what do you know, Rafael is listed as a co-developer of the KAPS-2 APS system on the K2PL tank.

Tactical wargamer me could not agree more, but... politics. And it's not just APS. What about the damn F-35? The whole reason it exists is to make AirLand Battle work against modern GBAD.

I think people have different ideas about what it means to "work". I am unaware of any technical limitation that would prevent it from working most of the time in Ukraine, or anywhere else, but it's not an invincibility shield. The US Army claims a 70% interception rate for the Iron Fist APS on the Bradley in their "challenging and rigorous testing" (their words, not mine) and apparently consider that good enough to be worth it* No one should expect APS to revolutionize warfare. It's one tool in the tool box. * Interestingly, an earlier version only achieved a 50% intercept rate, which was deemed not good enough.