panzersaurkrautwerfer
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Posts posted by panzersaurkrautwerfer
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Frankly this whole discussion is navel gazing. It matters in Combat Mission but not in reality.Yep. The odds of the US military facing an air threat that is a serious danger to ground forces hovers somewhere around zero. SHORAD type platforms like Stinger are hardly worth investing in in terms of money or capability, larger systems are expensive and will certainly likely rarely leave the motorpool. PATRIOT is still relevant because of the TBM capability, but everything else is pretty marginal.
Is it? When was the last time a few US companies got bombed?Korea I believe.
The point is though that the enemy we are talking about fighting here is not the Iraqis. It isn't Islamic State. It isn't the Serbs. It isn;t ever Iran or North Korea. It is Russa - ome of the USA's Great Power rivals. This is the Premier League we are dealing wit. Not the Second Divisio and it would be a very serious mistake to underestimate them As Charles XII, Napoleon and Hitler did.1988 called, they'd like their analysis back. The Russian air force is smaller, less capable, less exercised, and will be trying to keep JDAMS away from their ground forces in the event of a conventional conflict. They're pretty much the consumate second stringer. While underestimating a threat is a bad idea, at the same time failing to understand the actual threat (which would be hybrid warfare) and applying a decades old strategic template of Regional Frontal Aviation Regiments flying wingtip to wingtip over the Inner German Border to crush the BDR's capital in Bonn is equally dangerous. The Russian air force is not the Soviet Air Force, and extensive tactical ADA assets are a waste of effort against them.
It is like an insurance policy. Chances are that house fire you took out the policy against won't happen. You are a sensible guy and take lots of precautions. But if it does happen and you are not insured it is catastrophic. Likewise if that Russian air strike gets through your barely protected tank company that you did so much work training and mintaining is going to get gutted.No. Tactical ADA for the US is pretty much flaming Ebola infected monkey insurance. It's a lot of money spent on a nearly impossibly remote, albiet possibly dangerous situation that very likely will never get anywhere near you or your house.
Another interesting example is the Falkands 1982. Britain's tactical air defence on the ground was pretty much limited to Rapier. This at a time when the Britisw army was gearing up to fight the Soviets in Germany where the air threat would have been much worse than anything the Argetine Air Force could have done. And they stil manged to sink a couple of amphibious landing ships at a place called Bluff CoveThe Falklands is an excellent example of the impotance of ground based air defense in the face of a determined air threat. Despite Rapier, the only really effective air defense in the Falklands was the very limited cap provided by the Sea Harriers. Had the Brits a fleet carrier it's doubtful there'd have been so many, if any shipping losses, while if they'd covered the island in SAMs the results wouldn't have changed much.
Just a military history buff and war gamer.This to me is sort of the arrogance involved in this. It's terribly and deeply sparky to assume that somehow, the whole defense establishment is just too dumb to make the wise choices that someone who's read a lot of military history can make.
What do you think military professionals do? How much history do you think I've read? Don't you think that people equally smart, and equally educated have come to the same conclusion of "SHORAD is not an Army priority?"
But no. You've read a book! You know better!
I'm not trying to be insulting but its sort of silly, like someone screaming at the TV over the "idiot" plays made by a football coach. If it was so easy, or so obvious, why do we pay officers to make these choices, instead of just making it an internet poll on militaryhistory.com?
The reality is pretty simple. SHORAD right now in a time of stand-off type systems is increasingly obsolete. No longer is it a flight of MIG-27s dropping dumb bombs on a tank company, it's several miles out a standoff system is released, and it's hitting possibly before I even hear the jet. Anything Stinger based is in effect, as someone else pointed out, the M44A1 "Comfy Blankie" in terms of air protection. Anything larger than that is not much better, at the cost of being a very expensive system with no other use.
The only real air defense is shooting down the enemy attackers miles and miles before they're within engagement range, and the only system that seriously does that is another airplane. The US has more than enough advanced fighters, more than enough command and control for said fighters, and there is no reasonable chance that an enemy strike will get through, without suffering enough losses to render any gains far out of proportion to aviation assets lost.
This isn't 1988. We're not facing a larger, equally advanced air force. Shoe is on our foot, and the only ground forces that honestly have something to worry about is anyone who's on the receiving end of NATO/US aviation*.
*Or subject to the USAF's inability to tell the difference between friendly and hostile tanks.
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Re: Heresy
It's just something that's not "bad" but sort of overdone. Much how I feel about zombies in fiction, although admittedly Marines are slightly more intelligent than the former. Like it's gotten to the point where in some science fiction settings, everything is a space marine, there's civilian space marines, Army space marines, dentist space marines, etc etc.
If I had to go divvy up spaceroles I'd put the Marines on the zero-gee/enclosed environment type missions (like boarding actions, space stations, dome colonies etc) and leave the space to dirt stuff to the Army. The real tricky thing is figuring how what'd happen to the Navy and Air Force though (the difference between a nuclear submarine and a hard scifi space ship is pretty small, so the USN seems like a good starting place for building a spacenavy, but the USAF has traditionally been the agency for space stuff).
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Re: AT Guns.
You're tying it to a war. All those 25, 37 and 40 mm guns were supposed to be the definitive infantry answer to armor circa 20s-30s. It lingered in some quarters a bit longer.
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There's also the legacy and inheritance trilogies in the same storyline. They're okay. I'm sort of tired of Marines in space though. David Drake is good. I never liked hover tanks but the rest of it is worth reading (just hard to think of it as a tank without tracks). John Scalzi is great. Love his stuff.
The expanse trilogy is good too. The military stuff isn't a focus but it is well fleshed out and its a neat works for events to happen in. The upcoming syfi movie based on it will likely ruin it for me.
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Most people have forgotten that NATO has guranteed to Russia in the early 1990s, there would be no extension of the NATO towards the east at any time whatsoever.This is actually one of the biggest urban legends to come out of the Cold War.
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I'm usually a strong believer in needing to actually read someone's work before I can be too critical of it, but Ringo's reputation is such I feel comfortable avoiding his works.
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Ponder this: where are the mongols now?What defeated the mongols wasn't their warfighting ability, or in my illustration, identifying a tool they either did not require or desire to use, but a whole host of other issues outside the example. If the Mongols had been slaughtered on the open plains for lack of fortifications you'd have a point though!
So, are jets effective at taking out helicopters, and more specifically, helicopters armed with air to air missiles?Your mileage varies. In training actually the A-10 has proven the grim reaper of all things rotary (to include rotary wing assets armed with notional missiles) because of it's ability to go slow and good observation abilities.
In terms of sensors, AWACS from my understanding has a radar filter installed so it doesn't display trains and cars in motion. It's a powerful array, and I believe JSTARs can also pick up rotary pretty well.
The big "can't kill helicopters with jets!" issue has a lot more to do with fighter sensors being not especially well adapted to looking for things somewhat stationary 10-15 meters off the ground. The counter to that is that if something is stuck hiding 10-15 meters off the ground, it's not doing its mission (unless its mission is to hide in that spot). Once you require the helicopter to move, or god forbid employ weapons, its life expectancy shortens dramatically given the inability to evade once detected (think of it like, it might be hard for you to find an ant in your living room, but once you've spotted it, it's pretty much doomed). Further when dealing with bigger sensor support like AWACS and JSTARs you don't have to find the helicopter yourself, someone else tells you about where to look for it, and then it's not nearly as difficult to ruin faces.
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Is there any way to add our own tank names?
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And it could be your tank company that meets the same fate as my in game Combat Team. Caught by enemy air while moviing through open terrain. One probably should not do that but sometimes one has to get to a particular position quickly. Then fixed wing or helicopter gunships catch you at exacly the wrong time and your air defences, such as they are happen to be out of place or engaging other targets. Well, we all know what happens in circumstances like that.That attack air would have to slip through in terms of sensors:
PATRIOT
E-3 Sentry AWACS
Ground based early warning radars
Fighter based sensor systems
Other NATO radar platforms (which are largely designed to share a common operating picture with US assets)
From those sensors, any number of fixed wing assets can be massed on the attacking element. If the initial waves are ineffective, more planes can be vectored to target (unlike SAMs) until the enemy aviation is no longer mission capable.
Then if they're bopping above the horizon Patriot might just zot them anyway.
If the enemy attack dodges all those sensors, all those planes who's only job is to spot and destroy enemy CAS or strike assets, the ability of a M6 Linebacker to save the day was zero. Four stingers will not stop the sort of onslaught that would have to exist to bypass that sort of layered defense, and the howling hoard of thousands of PAK-FAs that do not exist would simply pop the M6 like a zit before flying to strafe the tank company to pieces with dual AK-47s fired out the window because you are describing a situation that is so craycray I find it worthwhile to talk about it using that word.
The Linebacker was like issuing a shotgun to a tank crew to fend off enemy infantry boarding the tank. If the infantry slipped through everything else, and is now standing on my turret, that shotgun would be mighty helpful. But it would only be helpful after EVERYTHING ELSE HAD FAILED SO CATASTROPHICALLY AS TO BOGGLE THE MIND (the rifles are for if we have to leave the tank, not some sort of alamo defense).
The M6 was canned after this process:
1. Army cancels ADATS
2. Someone decides we still need SHORAD
3. More or less, the M6 is made from nearly off the shelf parts
4. M6 more or less doesn't really do much. In large exercises, if red air closes with blue forces the M6 is just not enough to matter. Deployed, what enemy air existed was something the M6 couldn't help with
5. M6 and ADA soldiers serve as adhoc infantry.
6. M6 vehicles are refurbed to replace higher mileage M2/M3 platforms.
It wasn't super useful, even in its heyday.
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Cool. A pet peeve of mine in video games has always been as you progress, despite inflicting massive losses on the enemy, you always wind up facing a totally fresh enemy force that is in no way hindered by the death of several divisions worth of its comrades. It also adds incentive to playing out losing battles more because you may lose the battle of stan's farm or whatever, but if it cost the enemy two companies to do it vs your scout section, it should make tomorrow's fight less difficult, while you can still make the previous battle valuable.
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Mexico a failed state? That's a canard. The GDP per person is 19K, ranking only second to Chile in South/Latin America. It's been classified as a middle class nation for many years. Americans get a false impression due to the hordes of unemployed paisanos who flood over the border. These aren't typical Mexicans.
And Ukraine isn't a classically failed state either. My point wasn't Mexico needs to be invaded, it was that it's not the US's place to invade Mexico and encourage parts of it to became US dominated enclaves based on its troubles and the presence of US nationals in those enclaves. The issue here isn't "Ukraine has problems but we are ignoring them because we <3 Ukraine!" it's "Ukraine has problems, and Russia should butt out of them"
It is offensive mostly to US and US imposes it's will on it's European allies.Could you please identify countries and populations that support Russia's actions in the Ukraine? They may oppose it less than the US, but about as positive as you'll get is "Russia is wrong to do this, but we don't strongly care because it's not our backyard"
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The enemy units are not effected from mission to mission.Is there a way to do this though? It'd be an awesome twist to a campaign to reward authentically aggressive behavior, and would be a nice touch to see the enemy's third company only has six tanks because I killed four of them last mission.
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I think that low-intensity or frozen conflict inside Ukraine if more preferrable option.Which is equally offensive to the rest of the world at large. Same effect different goal. Objection to Russian intervention is the objection to Russian intervention, not exactly supporting the Ukraine (although because of the way Russia has followed through it's turned into effectively supporting the Ukraine).
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The big need going forward is something to swat small and medium drones. That needs to be pretty close to the front line. It would be nice if its ammo didn't cost 200 times the price of the drone you just killed with it, as wellWhy do you think the US military has such a hard-on for lasers right now? Doesn't take much to burn a hole in a drone or burn out it's optics.
In which case we both know the lessons of 1940 such as the dangers of defence cuts, neglecting key weapons systems, complaisancy and underestimaing the enemy. I suggest the US military and industrial/military complex has made the same mistake There is probably enough time to fix it and the fix is probably a quick and simple one such as bringing back the Linebacker system fitting some of the Bradleys with the quad Stinger Launchers some of them used to have and training the crew to use them (which I suspect would take the most time) That way the US army would again have a mobile and reasonably well armoured air defence systems. I expect suitable Stryker variant would a good idea for units equiipped with that vehicle.No. Linebacker wasn't that good of a system, it just means that I, as a about to be former tanker wouldn't have to pre-site my Stinger teams, or worry about my Avenger getting too close to hostile fire. The only capabilities it had different than a normal Brad was the Stinger launcher from under armor, and an IFF interrogator. For leaker HINDs that's enough, but even conventional Brads can engage helicopters just as well with their 25 MM, and tanks have the bear mace option of MPAT (which is a capability retained in the AMP), and the CROW is good for swatting things up close.
Further along those lines, the real key to air defense is ensuring there's a weapon in the air, towards a bad guy when needed. If that was done by a Ledbetter Device, a wormhole delivering an AIM-120 out of a clear blue sky, or an F-22 vectored by an E-3 it's irrelevant so long as red air isn't flying anymore.
What sets the US Air component, and NATO when flying with the US military, is the ability to achieve near constant air surveillance and combat air patrols. No other country has the serious ability to maintain that sort of coverage just in terms of numbers of operational planes alone, let alone modern aircraft (which the US has more than enough by itself, let alone with NATO augmentation). Russia relies on ground systems for air defense because it knows that it cannot match NATO in the air. It's simple economics in terms of platforms and pilots. Ground systems are less capable, but much less expensive allowing for greater saturation at the expense of effectiveness and utility (or a BUK isn't going to do anything but shoot down planes, while an F-22 can at least lug a bomb or two).
So again, don't ask "why aren't there missiles on the ground???" ask "can we put a missile into a MIG if it shows up?" with the answer to that being "yes, yes we can"
The lesson of France wasn't weapons systems, it was organization, employment, and training. The US military has organized structures to provide air defense, it has a plan to employ those weapons in an air defense role, and the training to use them effectively. And to top it off it has some really nasty weapons systems to carry out the fruits of that organization, employment and training element.
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See edit. I am more than familiar with the Battle of France.
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How many battles and wars have been lost through complaisancy, neglect of key weapons sytems and underestimating the enemy. The 1940 Battle of France is a fine example of what can happenBut did the Germans build enough bunkers to win in France? Inquiring minds want to know!
Edit: Pardon the sarcasm
The 1940 French campaign had a lot to do with what the French had being poorly prepared, not exactly a lack of weapons types, The French Air Force especially was badly drilled, undermanned, and suffered from a variety of planning failures. The Maginot Line was not a flexiable reactive defense, it was plan A, with no plan B.
The US Air Defense response is simply one that is designed around having a very rapid, flexible response from the sky. It is build around a historical, and really practical ability to put a lot of very capable planes, paired with some of the best sensors in existence on target.
If we're looking for a more historical example, the dynamic between AT gun and tank is best. The lack of US AT guns is not a sign of negligence, it's looking at a weapons system, making sure the capability is replicated elsewhere, and then discarding it. There are no peer Air Forces to the the USAF, let alone when you take into account the entire US military air wing. And while ADA is useful, it's useful if you reasonably expect to not be able to control the airspace above your forces. And the simple, blunt answer is there are zero air forces on earth that stand a reasonable chance of securing enough air control over some place defended by the US military's air component to surge in CAS assets in amounts enough to justify building an air defense system.
The Russian Air Force is upgrading, but it is rebuilding from "criminally broken" to "actually a functional air force again!" It's not a peer air force. It's more than the Serbs yeah, but simply being better than the Serbs doesn't mean a weeks long struggle, the reality is that the US and NATO can surge way more fighters than the Russians have on hand, more advanced fighters, and the question remains, how long can Russia keep the western air forces out of its backyard, not how often can the Russians get into NATO's air space. Occasional leakers? Yeah, maybe, but you can bet money if there's three HINDs making gunruns on a US element, pretty much very fighter in Europe is about to dogpile on said HINDs (which is the utility of a fighter based air defense honestly)
The Patriot still exists not because it's the thin red line between swarms of SU-27s killing the entire army, but because we really, really don't like TBMs and would like to not have to worry about them (see the migration to the purely kinetic missile vs having a warhead, bad for ADA, great for murdering Scuds). Conversely, if you can shoot down a missile, planes are going to be child's play. The stinger exists for the same reason we have AT4s, to deal with leakers that made it through all the other more capable systems.
Which ties it back to the AT gun. US troops are not waiting to die before the Russian tank hoards, there's tanks, ATGMs, aviation, and a whole other hosts of threats that make just the AT4 and Javelin more than enough to deal with armor. There's no need for a 120 MM AT gun towed into battle to support US troops because the rest of the weapons reasonably cover that heavy AT weapon gap. There's no need for a complex ADA system (NAASM is cool, but it's not really better than the Avenger in terms of supporting troops forward anyway) if you have quite possibly the most sophisticated fighter component ever fielded by mankind, paired with enough sensors that simply having them all acquire the same target at max power might be able to flash fry enemy pilots.
The positively one ADA thing I wish existed was something like a slightly better Linebacker. The Avenger and NAASM, basically truck mounted systems are a liability following behind armor or other heavy forces, and something with armor and a stinger/other short range missile wouldn't hurt (it could even just be a Linebacker with a small radar to be honest).
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The British in CMSF had HESH rounds for their Challengers IIRC, rounds that solely work by sending shock waves through the armour of the target, causing intensive spalling and eventually casualties among the crew. I wonder how that would be modelled in CMx2 v3.0.Not as much as it used to. Most tanks have some sort of liner (like kevlar or a final spaced layer of armor) designed to defeat HESH. It's still around because it works wonders on buildings, but the prime time for HESH as AT was decades ago.
On topic: Artillery is pretty hit or miss (har!) on tanks. Most amusingly I put an Oplot in a hole after two precision barrages failed to kill it (2Xsalvos of 3), so I guess I removed it from battle at least? On the other hand I've unzipped more than a few other tanks on a first hit basis.
I've just taken it as semi-abstracted, like the round striking the top of the frontal slope, while other rounds land square on the commander's hatch or something. The ERA may have not even defeated the artillery round in the original example but simply triggered at the round, and the HE shell then hit somewhere that would deflect most of the blast. On the other hand contact fuses are sensitive so perhaps the concussion and fragments of the ERA would cause an airburst type detonation.
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Ukrainians have a legit grievance against Russia as a result of the forced collectivization and subsequent famine that followed. But these events occurred in the 1930s. Russia has since transitioned from a totalitarian to an authoritarian nation.It's economy has taken off, many of its citizens have entered the middle class.And Russians hade a legit grievance against the west in 1940 as a result of German actions.
And yet that experience continues to define Russian policy making. History has a way of lingering, especially traumatic history.
Western medias have framed the conflict as the Big Bully picking on the scrappy little guy. I remain unsympathetic with this view.Ukraine isn't a great country by any stretch of the imagination, but if the US carved off part of Mexico because it was full of US retirees (they long to be Americans again, and Mexico is a failed state!) the UK returned various commonwealth countries to colony status (they're the queens subjects and they long to return to her welcoming arms and are suffering under the present government!) the lid flipping would be just as severe. Objection to Russian actions shouldn't be seen as tacit approval of the Ukraine, but objection to sneakily taking parts of other countries. If the Eastern Ukraine really wanted to return to Russia there were other ways to do it that didn't involve "separatists," Russian special forces on leave, and T-72s and BUKs sprouting up from the soil.
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ATACMS wouldn't be totally out of place, and it's been used in place of CAS on a few occasions. Don't know if the Russians use their precision rocket/non-SCUDlike SSMs in a similar way though.
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The other issue of course is the thousand flavors of science fiction. I would never in a thousand years play a game based on Bolos. Not a critism of liking the concept, but it's something I, despite being otherwise a huge science fiction fan, would readily pass on. Conversely, I'm sure there's lots of people who would have zero interest in seeing what the Colonial Marines* from Aliens would have done in a stand-up fight rather than a bughunt, which is pretty much something I would buy even at Steel Beast prices and I had to drive to Battefront's offices to pick up my copy. You make a world war two game, there's different theaters, but the crossover is better (there's no world war two setting outside of something really esoteric, like just Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete and nothing else that I wouldn't at least look at). You make a modern game, you build a scenerio that'll hit all the high points (like CMSF and CMBS did). You do scifi? There's a lot of rabbitholes out there.
*They'd likely have done pretty poorly anyway, but I like the gritty low-fi 80's futures of Blade Runner and the Aliens series. A future that's less UAVs, touch screens, and equipment done by Apple, and more Fulda Gap 1990 (as seen by 1980) playing out under an alien sky.
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I think both John and I agree hat this is a serious error by the US Defence planners, procurers and the military. Perhaps it was done to balance the books, perhaps for other reasons. But mistakes like this have often had to be paid for in blood. If this game highlights one real world lesson it is the danger to the US military of the neglected air defences and the price that could be paid for neglect and complaisance in a near future conflict.Ponder this. How many castles did the mongols build?
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Wow, that's funny fact
It's a common problem. Russian HE-Frag does it too.
It makes sense though, you're fusing something that has to instantaneously decide if it it's hit something or not. If you want it exploding hitting mud and doing casualties, vs exploding 7 inches under the mud, you have to make some compromises. Most fuses can have the settings dialed down or otherwise adjusted to prevent hail induced detonations or something.
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I really like science fiction. Lots and lots.
Here's my issue with CM: Mariner Valley though. Science fiction is less about "the future" and more commentary on our present placed in a fantasy realm. Hard science fiction draws more from "science" than "fiction" but it isn't to show us the future in a realistic sense.
Combat Mission is all about realism. Which therein is the problem, how does a realistic wargame series tackle an inherently unrealistic setting? And further the amount of time to properly flesh out a believable science fiction setting is much more dramatic than simply shopping for conflicts that might be close enough to build on (which is no small feat in itself, but we have the US Army and the Russian Army, and their MTOE. We don't have to decide the US will become the Federated States of the Americas after merging with Canada minus Quebec, most of Mexico and Cuba, and that it's principle off-world force will be the Armored Cav Regiment, which is comprised of two armor battalions, and an air assault squadron of dragoons to clear complex objectives, while the Russian Federation will be the Slavic Empire in 2179 as a result of the catastrophic Baltic Wars, and the T-18 will use dual 200 KW DEW weapons, which will make it less mobile than other hover tanks).
It'd be cool to see a science fiction wargame, but making Combat Mission the series for that is a bit like turning your local steakhouse into a Mexican resutrant. Both are things you might like, but you'd rather have both choices exist in parallel, and I'd rather have CM: Armageddon (the Ardennes to the Elbe), and then have Battlefront introduce "Under a Uncaring Star: Mechanized Warfare in 2179" as a separate product line, then miss out on more good modern/historical games.
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Searching on tank-net I have found results from Peru T-90S trials,They weren't trials, they were a sales demonstration. Just fyi.
APS changes everything!
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
The mistake made in claiming the tank is dead is often the assumption of tank technology being static while anti-tank advances unchecked. If there's a radical departure in technology (railguns with ranges of 11 KM, able to penetrate all known armor sort of radical change) then maybe, but mostly the cutting edge between tank and anti-tank is so impossibly narrow and interlinked that simply if you build a better ATGM at this point, someone is going to build a better APS.
Panzerfausts, anti-tank rifles, and other infantry weapons were supposed to reign in the tank. Instead it just made the tank bigger and angrier. Javelins are lethal now simply because they are the abject cutting edge of AT systems. Once there's the Russian/Chinese knockoff you can bet there will be some sort of overhead APS system that'll render high angle ATGMs as effective as conventional ones.
And then there will be a new ATGM that bypasses it all. But it's a back and forth dance. And there's no sign AT has outpaced armor enough to do it in for good.
RE: Strykers
Strykers are good for:
1. Being the "heavy" forces for rapid deployment/peace keeping missions.
2. Being the "light" forces for full spectrum warfare.
They've performed very poorly against armor in the open at NTC and other training venues. Like massacred to a man level poorly, ATGM carriers just aren't that good, and armor mobility makes infantry ATGMs very reliant on already owning the terrain. They do however offer good, high mobility infantry though, so using them to follow and assume bypassed urban or other complex terrain makes them a useful tool.
However for a good historical model of how light highly mobile formations handle conventional fights, look at how the 9th ID's experiments went. They could leverage mobility and firepower to achieve local success against heavier forces the majority of the time. However once the heavy forces caught them (and they always caught them) they were wiped out, and the heavy force was generally able to sustain and continued to fight through the damage the light force had inflicted.
It's better to be able to close with an destroy the enemy instead of trying to peck him to death and hope you can stay out of his reach. Tanks can do that. FCS/Stryker model vehicles cannot.