holoween

Ok so uranuim enrichment is now a military installation? Just wondering about the actual distinction you want to make because once you open up from only uniformed soldiers being military targets you quickly run into a slippery slope where eventually your oponents population is a military target because they could contribute to a war effort.

Do you like arguing strawmen or do you simply not read what i write? To requote myself To clarify my overall position. I think this war is the best study case for a peer war in the near future and wed be well served carefully analyzing it and taking its lessons to heart. And in regards to AFVs there are 2 overarching lessons learned 1. AFVs are vulnerable 2. AFVs are essential for offensive operations The first lesson learned really doesnt need further explaination just look at the losses The second one aparently does need so lets deal with that. The core issue starts at another lesson this war reemphasises namely determined infantry cannot be shot off an objective with firepower alone. You can cause casualties but you still need to clear it with your own infantry. This point i dont think i need to elaborate on. The next iussue is that infantry has difficulty gettin onto an objective using its own firepower and artillery only slightly changes that. This difficulty increases and decreasess with force density. Just compare the charkiv to the kherson offensive. Or if you want to experience it yourself atka a random cm map and fight a series of attacks starting at tiny size and eventually going to huge. What tanks do is provide the firepower to get infantry onto an objective. They also provide supression via the threat of applying their firepower but thats a secondary effect they share with several other weapons systems. Their morale effect obviously decreases with at weapons available for the oponent but if they dont have any that can on its own win the fight. This is the core reason why tanks exist now for over 100 years and are quite likely to continue existing for quite some time. Id love to see your argument for how this is weird twisted logic and what your suggested replacement is and please tell ukraine aswell because right now theyre still asking for tanks. Im not going in detail over the rest of the post because it basically boils down to whatever you can think of to kill the tank it usually kills infantry easier and at greater rate, AFVs evolve with the threats, Soldiers dont.

I assume this takes current western units as a starting point? If not what is the starting baseline of assumptions?

yea but for the locking on process at the very least they have to be exposed. watch the video i linked. they are in an ambush position waiting for the bmp2 and are exposed for some time because they dont just go from being in full cover to locking on to full cover again. and at the quoted 350m even on 2nd gen thermals they are glowing dots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJSfEEdV76k if they have to move youre even going to find small teams and even if you dont to attack you need more than just a small team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw8RDpS1uOE To give some idea what kind of accuracy were talking about in this video im aiming at the trees with inert rounds. They are max around 30cm thick and im opening fire at 1500m hitting them reliably. If i spot a target i have no problem getting an he round close enough to cause them significant problems. but you cant see every point from every point out to 2500m or differently put terrain exists and interferes with theoretical max range otherwise the tank beats the atgm in range any time. you know the tanks are 20km back from the frontline. They can relocate at 60km/h so any place at roughly an 80 km long frontline is in the 1 hour timeframe for an attack. no because there is a limit to where infantry that wants to live can actually be. NLOS atgms are functionally similar to guided artillery except they are easier to intercept. And a walking mine is far less scary than a normal hidden mine because if it walks towards me i can see it. additionally you dont know where i will attack so how many millions of walking mines do you want to spread over the entire border to be able to intercept an attack and why arent dumb mines cheaper and easier for the same purpose? yea no I really wonder how their tanks moce and shoot if they are dismounted You might want to talk to literally any infantryman who wants to live light infantry moves at 4km/h sustained rate especially if you load them with loads of atgms if your defense cant even stand up to a simple light infantry company you might want to reevaluate your choice of defense. Or differently said if your defense cant stopp light infantry from attacking then Your oponent doesnt even need to use anything else. Only once you mass enough combat power to prevent this does he need to do more.

Ill make the case that the power of at weapons is overstated mostly due to bad tactics and a tech disparity. We know since WW1 that tanks or rather generally AFVs are vulnerable in low numbers. And at the latest since WW2 we know that you have to protect tanks with infantry from close range at. It seems however that the russians have unlearned these lessons. This experience report seems to suggest this and this video equally seems to confirm this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpx7TWc58PI And in general ive not seen any good infantry armour combined arms from the russian side. The ukrainians seem to do this much better and id argue that this on its own massively contributes to the loss disparity between russian and ukrainian afvs. There is also a massive disparity between most russian afvs and western afvs that is hard to overstate: thermals. Take the video ive linked and imagine just replacing the bmp2 with any modern western ifv. Once the mobility kill happens (even NLAW isnt perfect) youd have 2 independently swung thermal imagers searching for them. And given they were in line of sight and repeatedly firing from the same position for 10min just 350m away even with 2nd gen thermal imagers they would have been spotted. If we now pair this with proper AFV tactics so no continuous fighting from the same position, supporting infantry, a seconf IFV to support, and maybe some squad or platoon level spotting drones overhead this entire situation suddenly becomes practically impossible for the infantry. And if you add an active protection system they are screwed either way. This has some quite significant caveats. 1. unless you have lock on after launch capability youre still limited to los engagements and that dramatically lowers the area a vehicle has to keep track of. It also means to engage the vehicle you have to be in los to the vehicle itself putting you at potential risk. That risk is quite low if youre 1000m away in complex terrain shooting at a single t72 but it becomes much higher if its a platoon of modern mbts. 8 high qualits thermal imagers scanning for you have a quite good chance spotting you even at distance. 2. And if you use lock after launch missiles you can keep yourself safe but still need something to tell you where the tank is. And especially if used at longer ranges its time of flight is significant enough that its better compared to organically called precision artillery. A tank is definitely easier to find than an infantryman but both can be found and the ammount of drone footage of arty destroying infantry directed by drones is proof of that. A tank however is far more difficult to actually fix in place once spotted compared to infantry. And this leads to The main reason why AFVs are unlikely to ever go away: As demonstrated in this war to gain grund you have to take it from the enemy and to hold it you have to defend it with infantry. No matter the firepower be it precision in cae of the ukrainians or mass in case of the russians can clear an objective. It has to be taken and cleared by infantry. And once you have to take ground you have to be exposed and you will be detected and you will be shot at. And infantry is vulnerable to literally everything on a battlefield and it cant move at any significant speed on its own. So With drones everywhere the infantry is likely to be spotted and shot to pieces before they can even reach the jumpoff point for an attack or at the latest once the attack actually happens. Try intercepting this with arty:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw8RDpS1uOE If AFVs were truely obsolete Ukraine wouldnt ask for hundreds of tanks and ifvs to enable them to attack.

This i think is the main takeaway lone tanks are extremely vulnerable and have always been.

For the regime to survive the end of the war it needs a peace that can be spun into a victory somehow. Ukraine is unwilling to give any concessions. So what could convice ukraine to concede. Only by becoming imagined or actually unable to achieve their goals through further fighting. this could happen through - Running out of suppliess if the west stopps supporting them which is outside of russian control - Running out of manpower which they arent close to - Battlefield success shifting in favour of the russians The only part that russia can affect and arguably the one with the most room for improvement is the performance of their army. There the focus should be finding and training competent leaders and getting rid of bad ones as quickly as possible, establishing a lessons learned flow from the frontlines and using both to properly train their new recruits and create competent units with them. It might also be best practice to only reinforce good existing units and otherwise create fresh ones where bad practices can be eliminated from the start.

At least the us player has one covered aproach into the valley. But agreed this isnt the best designed battle.

The onmap Priest is in the single vehicles selection. it cant use indirect fire if its onmap though iirc.

So for the question of tanks being obsolete. What is a tank supposed to do? Why cant it do that currently? Why does this not apply to other AFVs? What do you replace it with?

Every other mineclearing vehicle si going to be a slow and obvious target. So preemtive smoke and covering units are essential. If you want to go fast use explosives.

Since all my hands on knoledge of the t72 comes from steel beasts i dont feel qualified to give a indepth comparison. Lack of reverse speed is probably the t72s biggest failing. lack of thermals is equally significant. laser dot not being in line with the primary sight really limits long range engagement speed and moving target accuracy. Biggest quality is probably the HE-FRAG rounds. they make them far more effective vs infantry targets compared to 120mm HEAT. 120mm HE airburst will flip that but that isnt in widespread use. Agreed The issue with snorkeling is there are only limited places where its even viable. For germany they were mapped out during the cold war but ukraine? if not you need specialists that know how to scout a site and prepare it. Bridging equipment seems like a better way to go at least generally. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiler_(Panzer) We use speciualized equipment for specialized jobs. The tank you posted isnt going to go at any speed during an attack so youre spending far more time in the open. If you know there is a minefield breaching it with a specialized vehicle is better. Leo2 is actually equipped for indirect fire. Noone ever trains it but its in the manuals.

I cant speak for the Abrams but id be surprised if its much different. The issue the Poles had were more that they were sold for very cheap with the agreement that KMW gets to do all upgrades. The Poles want to do their own which KMW sais they have to certify with them which the Poles dont like hence the switch. If they really didnt like them why would they ask for more during the Ringtausch programm?

So during 2 years ive seen 4 issues that stopped tanks from running. 1 was a blown cylinder on a driving school tank (failure at 9am back in action at 2pm with replaced powerpack at the slow workpace of civilian contractors), one was the engine controll unit failing on one of ours. And 2 hydraulic pump failures. one caused the tank to go to depot becaue the tc decided to ignore warning lights and caused the breaks to overheat and burst into flames and one was fixed in 15min. Yea they require constrant maintenance but that depends on a lot of factors. usually we simply take one day per week on exercise as maintenance day but that has a big margin of error for wear so skipping it isnt a big deal.

Neither exists as an upgrade to the leo2 in the german army thats done by specialized vehicles and crews. Snorkeling is not something usually trained. Its got quite limited use cases and if you want to use it for an operation you have to peplan it in advance quite a bit so training the crews on it then is the way to go. 1 they arent easily damaged. Outside of enemy action a freshly trained crew isnt going to damage the tank much more often than a seasoned crew. 2 you dont. your readiness rate is simply going to be lower as you have to ship them back until you have managed to train up the maintenance crews. If you want to create essentially a armoured brigade from scratch yes youre going to take well over a year if you want to get them to nato standards. However noone is doing that. All the training for ukrainian soldiers in western countries is training up seperate pieces. Giving them equipment they are already used to is done with priority (ringtausch) but there is only so much kit around. Getting ukrain 100leo2s is also incredibly unlikely give the generally low inventories. Realisitcally were looking at a western battlaion size (44 tanks) with 10-15 spare tanks to keep the battalion up to strength while the damaged ones are send to the west. No that doesnt give ukraine a formation that can run over the russianss as the us was running over iraq but that still gives them a fairly powerfull unit.

Gotta love how youre not even bothering to read or understand completely. 1 week is for taking a ukrainian tanker and retrain him on a leo2. As ive written 3 weeks drivers course and 3month loder/gunner course . Qualifying a unit for deployment takes 6 month on top. Those times include a lot of downtime and non tank related stuff which could be cut down. NCOs and officers would take far longer to train from scratch but even here simply cutting out all nonessentials cuts down the required time a lot. So ultimately the question is does a tank unit equipped with western tanks need to be trained to 100% the same training standard as a NATO tank unit for deployment. Id argue getting them to 80% is easily enough to have a massive impact so cutting corners to get them to that point quickly is far more valuable and has a higher impact overall. That also how it was done with Western artillery given to ukraine. It didnt take a year for pzh2000 to be in use and that system is certainly not less complex compared to a leo2.

Ive only seen them ask for actual tanks. That depends entirely on circumstances. ex adding a pzgren platoon to our company tooka a day of ncos and officers talking out what they each could do and it worked ok from that. Slotting a leo2 company in place of a t72 company should equally be fairly easy especially if a depleted company goes for refit so command structure remains largely intact and just new equipment and its capabilities have to be trained on (this is what happened with western arty btw.) If you take 150 civilians and have to train them into a tank company youre obviously taking far more time.

To use your analogy youre not asked to write a bestseller youre asked to write a 3page essay. as said noone asks to set up essentially a nato style armoured brigade from scratch. Youre looking for at best company sized units and those are far faster to stand up even from scratch.

Ive given you the time i was trained on the leo2 by the german army condensed to actual training on the tank. So no youre not going to stand up a brigade from scratch in a few weeks but thats a matter of the command structure not the equipment. A platoon you can make function by the time the training on the equipment is done. add a few more weeks per company and you have a fairly powerful unit you can slot into existing structures.

Yea ill call bs on that. At least on a Leo2 teaching a crew the essentials of using and maintaining the tank takes maybe a week. And even if were talking full training were way below your mark. It takes 3 weeks to train a driver fully. For gunner/loader it takes 6 weeks max. And for the tc getting proficient at their station shouldnt take more than a week with the overall training time just being determined by how much tactics they have to be tought. Higher level maintenance obviously takes longer but that doesnt really matter much since you can simply do it like its currently done with western systems. ship them back and have proper repair shops outside ukraine.

As a german tanker weve had a query in our company about russian speaking soldiers we had to help train Ukrainians. If, when and how the one guy we have is going to be used remains to be seen.

Yea now how did it collapse. But they were able to generate the btgs. the degrees to where they werent capable were selfmade russian issues (low morale, manpower, desertions) They then however did get stopped by ukrainian resistance. from what ive seen the usual was infantry ambush to disrupt the attack then holding them at a village and artying them when they were stuck on the road. So the core failure point during the early stages was not being able to break through such positions. The ways to fix that would be to bring enough and trained infantry first, proper arty support second but at third the afvs weren able to perform.

But thats not what happened in ukraine. the russians got their system set up although badly and got stopped at the sharp end. To go back to the earlier analogy the spear tip got stopped not the shaft broken.

Destroy enemy weapons factory Destroy logistic network attack where the enemy hasnt massed supress with arty APS exactly the same armour Its the same chain. Notice how operational art does: Attack at weakest point, surround so cut logistics, occupy production centers

That is an entirely different situation compared to early war where afv attacks were stopped by infantry ambushes with atgms and rpgs Sure but these would all be very heavy compared to a "simple" javelin. they would work but thats no longer a weapon for every squad. And that doesnt adress rpg type weapons who are essential for closer range engagements. the tank unit is easy to see, the individual tank more difficult. And what makes it difficult is that it constantly moves. A big issue with russian tank tactics from the videos ive seen is that they dont move for very long times. Also do note that with the ISR in ukraine they still arent able to fully shut down logistics. and they are just random trucks and rail. So your deep strikes can degrade supply but not stop it entirely. The big deal is that currently the spearhead gets stuck not that the shaft gets broken first. It doesnt but without it afvs are pointless. There are still other layers that mater on who wins but at the same time ultimately the battle is won on the ground and survivability matters.