holoween

And in which of those did the democracies not have a massive economic advantedge? The only time this advantedge wasnt massive was early ww2 and that didnt exactly turn out well.

Its a good concept if you have enough spare parts and the logistic capacity to bring them where needed. But spare parts like ammunition stocks have been where the last 30 years of saving on the military have been applied.

Meh just be happy your oponent is playing. My first two didnt show up and my last one stopped sending turns curiously just as my t34s broke into his backfield when attacking and when i wiped his right flank company on the defense.

Which is btw why i dint quote a manual but linked a video showing it done in ukraine. The typical sequence ive seen is Arty from approach til the end of the fight, ATGMs joining in in the main fight and FPV drones largely finishing off abandoned vehicles or harassing outside of the main fight. Which is why the tank in the video ive linked wasnt able to deal with the troops in the trench... except wiping them out. Without setting conditions every attack is suicide. I only play against human oponents. And you have to expose yourself eventually as the attacker. The trick is to do it in a way that maximises the combat power difference between you and your oponent at the point of contact.

No need to attend a staff college to see what theyre doing. Tank, IFV and APC move in Tank shoots up the general area of the enemy while the IFV and APC dismount their troops And then they just leave the infantry alone. So we have sequential rather than combined applications of the different arms. Its also lacking indirect fire entirely. Though it varies quite a bit. Compare this posted a few pages ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fifpgIJkxXA Smoke to isolate the attacked position, supression fire from the BMP while the tank moves in to shoot up a known position and in the end the BMP doesnt leave the infantry alone.

Yes as experience tells us killing civillians breaks their morale and leads to regime change... oh wait no it does the exact opposite.

Ok so please dont post things you clearly have no idea about. This is an a4 which weighs around 55t basically still the initial design weight. Yet the 10t heavier a6 and a7v dont have issues related to the weight. Im not sure what exactly youre trying to say about its center of mass but ive yet to hear anyone having any issues ralated to it but please clarify what you mean. Insufficient engine power also seems entirely unfounded given its got a better power to weight ratio than any soviet legacy tanks. The photo also was of a training accident in poland where two tanks straight up collided which is simply a crew error. Now to get to what is most likely actually happening When the tank drives past pay attention to the gun just in front of the smoke extractor. You can see the barrel is clamped down so this is certainly nowhere near the frontline. For long road marches and driving without turret crew the turret is locked to the rear and the gun clamped down. This also lets the driver drive turned out.

SHORAD is no longer optional because airpower cant keep low airspace clean. And giving those a C-RAM capability is trivial in the sense that all newly developed ones can already do it. yea but thats quite a bit less growth potential than you can expect from an aps. See now you make me question how up to date you actually are on certain tech. APS are with the exception of Israel only deployed in homeopathic ammounts. The tanks deployed in Ukraine are all at least 2 generations behind the anti tank weapons deployed. Which is why the tank died when 1920s tanks got destroyed in the 10s of thousands at the start of ww2 and again when ATGMs got introduced... oh wait they didnt. Integrated platoon APS arent a thing yet though id be surprised if it isnt being worked on. Alwso youve got it backwards. A platoon of tanks firing APS has alredy drawn the heat. As said at the start of the post SHORAD is no loonger optional. Also hoe do the russsians and ukrainians manage to keep themselves supplied since its aparently impossible? Yes tanks sit back with the arty which is why we see them shooting at other tanks sitting on the other side of a hedge 50m away... oh wait no they are sitting at the frontline. No thats in active development but as a target profile its simply more infantry that cant take cover properly. It also doesnt speed up infantry and i really wouldnt want to be the infantry having to walk through 20km of arty covered terrain to get to the frontline. Your approach to creating military capability is to throw everything out and start from scratch. Mine is to see where the failiure points are and if they can be fixed or need a different approach. And Infantry from my view is far less replacable than any combat vehicle. There is a har cap on how many are available and tapping into the manpower pool directly reduces the productive capabilities of the nation theyre part of.

C-RAM, mobility to make targeting problematic. How do you want infantry to deal with it? 1 An APS allows protection to keep pace with attacking munitions development because it doesnt require fully redeveloping and building hulls. 2 ATGMs and RPGs are already close to the weight/size limit for infantry use. If they are pushed beyond that to be able to ko tanks youre changing the math dramatically. From 1 infantry squad theoretically able to destroy a companys worth of tanks to an infantry platoon able to ko maybe one or two. 3 Youre always creative unless it comes to stuff you dont like. Its not hard to imagine a tank platoons APS data linked to combine their sensors and coordinate their response. Yes tanks need more logistics support than infantry but nowhere near as much as artillery. And tanks can simply drive back some kilometers to resupply out of range of most arty while infantrys supplies have to be brought to the frontline. Yea tell me how well has infantry been doing against ISR and Arty? And mech isnt going anywhere because infantry isnt going to carry all the equipment they need without vehicles.

Also poles like to conveniently ignore this when discussion contributions. But lets put this to rest. Polish military aid has been invaluable by being there early on and in quantity. But polish rethoric quite often doesnt square with their actions especially if there is a chance to screw over germany.

I think youve misunderstood me. So simple question is this a tank:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiesel_AWC And currently the answer is a simple no. If it turns a corner and is suddenly faced with an MBT or IFV it will simply get destroyed. But if you remove all heavier vehicles because they are too expensive it now can destroy whatever is around the corner. And at that point its a tank.

I wholly disagree with this idea. Weve spend this ammount of money to be able to destroy as many tanks/IFVs as quickly as we can because that has been the primary threat since NATO exists. The current MBT generation very well reflects that. They are for all intents and purposes tank destroyers and entirely optimized for that and in the 500m to 2500m range they are unparalelled in that task. For the longest time most didnt even have a proper HE round and the primary rounds were KE and HEAT. The IFVs were the ones doing the infantry support. The core and unique selling point of a tank is if a tank moves somewhere and encounters an enemy no matter what it is a tank stands a good chance to take it out without being taken out in return. That capability is so valuable that it will get continuously replicated and id argue its the essence of what makes a tank. What exact form this takes remains to be seen and it could very well eventually become unmanned and at some point most likely will have to be fully automated for short reaction times.

Sure tanks have been used as indirect fire support. But the continuous flow of video evidence of tanks used in the direct fire role supporting infantry, spearheading attacks and anchoring defenses is together with the fact that both sides specifically want tanks not just spgs is clear evidence they still very much have a role. Tanks havent worked as effectively as expected for a variety of reasons. - Tanks developed 40 years ago and last updated 20 years ago going up against current munitions - An overall low training level - Bad combined arms especially on the russian side - Lack of short range air defense That airpower hasnt worked as wed expect if NATO was involved also isnt exactly hard to explain. - Both sides have fairly heavy air defenses - Ukraine simply doesnt have many aircraft available - Russia didnt really train and focus on SEAD which meant ukraines air defense stayed largely intact. - So we have mutually denied airspace

Giving current NATO doctrine an honest reality check is absolutely essential. But taking it as a starting point seems entirely reasonable.

The length of early muskets has a lot more to do with getting velocity out of bad powder and bad barrel matallurgy. smoothbore barrels dont stabilize the round so they cant gaign accuracy and rifling already wirks with very short barles (an inch is enough). But early musktes with shorter barrels would have even less range or would need far more powder and would still be as heavy to withstand the pressure anyways.

The role of a tank is direct fire. Its essentially a great sensor with a 0 time delay precision artillery attached. And ukraine and russia are using them in the direct fire role. If they werent they wouldnt be asking for tanks but spgs which do the whole indirect fire far better. were also seeing successful use of even just mraps for assaults and for the charkiv offensive they have been essential in quickly taking lots of ground once the line had been broken. Tanks have always taken heavy casualties in combat. But the alternative to using them has been firing artillery shells in such quantities that it wasnt sustainable with even the entire worlds production capacity dedicated to war and still taking infantry casualties at a rate unsustanable for most modern developed nations.

Not sure how other nations are doing it but the german trained and equiped units keep constant lines of communication back to the german army. Ive seen it and it seems to me entirely a product of too short time to train and wrong expectations on what the trainees would be doing. Usually if you train up units you go from simple to difficult. First you learn basic soldiering skills, then you learn your specific job, then you do defensive fighting then offensive fighting then delaying actions. And i cant speak for whoever trained that bunch of ukrainians but i havent had an exercise since the war started where we didnt have drones overhead all the time.

So is ukraine does everything right. What im interested in is what exactly causes their attacks to fail or succeed and how does it do that so i can draw conclusions on what needs to be done to be successful.

delete please

They dont need to actually mass in the sense of more troops per km of frontline. Take their current company attack occupying maybe 2km of frontline. now add another 2 on each flank. the overall attack now occupies 10 km. You now have reduced the enemys guns able to react to each individual attack significantly. Same goes for the own firesupport but massing your own guns in such an area is far faster than the enemys reaction. Couple the attack with strikes on the hqs and you also dramatically reduce the reaction times when it matters. Have reserve forces ready to push further oncr the first wave has taken the forward lines. You never have forces more densely packed than currently, can dilute the defenders support and potentially cause a catastrophic failure of the defense. Maybe ukraine is already doing this and were just not hearing it or they arent for some reason. And i would be cautious with assuming ukrainians are doing everything as they should from a nato perspective. I wasnt particularly impressed with the performance of the ukrainians we trained so im skeptical their officers are generally much better.

Id say the biggest question regarding the war if the offensive fails is why it failed. So far it seems ukraine does mostly company sized bite and hold attacks which are at best simultaniously done but not coordinated. (feel free to correct me if i have the wrong impression) So why didnt they run larger attacks? - lack of c&c? - lack of support assets? -too high russian force density? Whatever the cause if ukraine can figure out how to scale up their attacks over the winter and implement it it stands a good chance to overrun the russian defenses next time.

These are simple canvas sheets for camoflage. They remove the obvious shaddow line at the front and below the vehicle. Its standard practice for all german combat vehicles. Though the ones pictured are otherwise really low on camoflage.

If i had to bet id say HEAT shell hit ERA and failed to pen.

Do you have any specific documents you could point to for NATO doctrine? Because non of the german documents ive read and nothing ive been taught leads me to believe there is anyone expeting not to take heavy casualties in a comparable war.