How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[holoween]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

How does one provide cover from smart-DPICM raining from the sky?

C-RAM, mobility to make targeting problematic. How do you want infantry to deal with it?

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

1) The technology to defeat any counters is moving too fast.  As Steve notes every time a solution is found, two more pop up.  Ok, we layer APS on everything to counter those pokey and vulnerable ATGMs.  Then someone builds an ATGM with sub-munitions, so Javelin 2030 (tm) splits into 6 smart attack vehicles and APS can't keep up.  Oh wait there is more...standoff EFP.  Worked very well for insurgents in Iraq and is aching for a comeback.  Now you could have a ATGM that essentially explodes 50m out and drives a slug thru your tank.  Now APS needs to push out even further.  The trends of lighter, smaller, cheaper and smarter are accelerating anti-tank weaponry to the point that the tank is trending towards marginalization.

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.

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

2) The entire tank system is too damn fragile.  Even the tank itself is pretty fragile.  The thing need only take a few sub-munition hits and one can knock out the engine, or the gun, or the track.  Then all of the support systems from forward repair, to recovery, to logistical support are also heavy, hot and easily spotted.  So now one has to bubble wrap that entire system just to keep the tanks in motion - even assuming away all the threats to the tank itself.  I am pretty sure our gas trucks burn as well as Russian ones  

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.

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

The tank is being squeezed, along with the rest of mech.  And it is also being replaced.  If the job was to hurl energy at targets from 2kms+ back, well we kinda got that covered off without needing 50 ton behemoths to do it.  Infantry support...this one is interesting especially in this war.  Between ISR and UAS, infantry and artillery have formed an unholy union.  Add in UAS attack capability and if infantry need something under cover to die there are ways to do it not involving a multi-million dollar vehicle that needs a Broadway production just to keep it rolling from A to B.

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.

[photon]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I am sure people will still buy tanks.  They built battleships for years even after they were pushed out.  But the trend will be lighter, longer, lethal and cheaper.  We will see militaries de-aggregate into lethal mist.  If someone brings expensive, big, hot and heavy to a fight that mist will simply rust the entire heavy system to ash.  No, mist on mist is where this is going.  

I think the battleship analogy here is on point. Prior to 1941 both the IJN and USN thought that the main contest would be a slugging match between their battle lines somewhere near the Philippines. And naval architecture bore that out. Ships were designed around their large main armament to combat peers.

But an asymmetrical threat arose in the form of torpedo boats. Their torpedos could outrange the battleship main batteries, and their launch platforms were cheap and nimble. So battleships got wartime passive -- torpedo bulges -- and active -- secondary batteries -- protection upgrades. It turns out that neither of those really works all that well, so smaller more agile ships called torpedo boat destroyers were added to the fleet to provide standoff screening from that threat.

Submarines provided a similar asymmetrical threat, and the only solution for them was a screening force. No upgrade to the battleship could deal with that threat.

But then a second asymmetrical threat arose in the form of carrier launched aircraft. They outranged the battleship main batteries by a factor of something like 10x and were comparatively dirt cheap. So again, passive and active wartime upgrades. Better armor on superstructures, more torpedo bulges. Replacement of secondary batteries with dedicated radar controlled AA batteries (5", 40mm, 20mm, .50 cal).

By this point, everyone realized that a BB on BB engagement was suicidal because you couldn't get a battleship force to a battle without it being whittled down to a nub by longer range fires, so battleships role transitioned to being a sponge for kamikaze aircraft (which got through both the upgraded active and passive defenses alarmingly much). Their role on the battlefield was to distract and absorb enemy fire away from more valuable targets. That's a big shift in three years.

Of course, battleships are expensive, so that duty was again pushed down to smaller more nimble ships that acted as radar pickets.

So you see an evolution: role drives design -> can't deal with asymmetric threat environment -> ad hoc upgrades -> protection transitions to screening force -> role changes in ad hoc way -> new (unrecognizable) design to reflect new role.

Happened to battleships. Has happened to tanks once. Will happen to tanks again.

[danfrodo]

1 hour ago, Haiduk said:

UKR PzH2000 hit Russian 2S3 in Novoprokopivka area

 

I never, ever get tired of watching RU assets w secondary explosions.  Congrats to UKR on every hit and may RU collapse soon.  Another artillery asset out of the game, some number of daily shells not flying toward UKR.

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

2) The entire tank system infantry system is too damn fragile.  Even the tank infantryman itself is pretty fragile.  The thing need only take a few  one sub-munition hits and one can knock out  hurt the engine the heart, or the gun an arm, or the track a leg.  Then all of the support systems from forward repair hospitals to recovery, to logistical support are also heavy, hot and easily spotted.  So now one has to bubble wrap that entire system just to keep the tank infantry in motion - even assuming away all the threats to the tank infantryman itself.  I am pretty sure our gas trucks infantrymen burn die as well as Russian ones.

Oh very clever.  Ok let’s have it out on infantry vs tanks moving forward.  Infantry are extremely cheap.  Putting human life aside, Russia has demonstrated that infantry, though soft and squishy can be replaced in the tens of thousands.  Tanks are big expensive and hard to manufacture at scale.  Infantry as humans do need a lot of support - likely why we will see more unmanned.  But they also do not need a recovery vehicle that also weighs 40tons, nor do they burn tens of thousands of gallons of gas per day.  An infantry soldier can survive on a few kilos of support per day (food, water and ammo), a tank needs hundreds of kilos all on vulnerable trucks.  Infantry can be pushed to keep going, when 50tons decides to stop moving it is done.

This whole “infantry can die to” as a counter argument to the continued trajectory of obsolescence of heavy mech and armour is not only illogical it is deflecting.

Infantry can disperse, dig in and hide.  They are able to cross terrain impassable to tanks.  They break down but are easy to replace.  They can fight in built up areas.  They do not weigh 50 tons each and give off enough heat to be seen from space.  They are cheap, light and now armed with ISR, comms and weapons systems that can kill a tank out past 4km (and with NLOS tens of kms).

Infantry have completely different roles on the battlefield and we have yet to find technology to replace infantry…we may never.  So come on the board and bleat all you want about the life left in heavy armour but for the love of gawd can we put that stupid “infantry die too and we are not getting rid of them” argument in the ground?  As soon as we can produce thousands of fighting tanks per week out of a global civilian tank population of 8 billion you may have a point.

[Battlefront.com]

A bunch of posts are proving my point that tank defenders can only pursue the "whack-a-mole" debate to justify tanks staying on the battlefield.  This is an indication that the argument in favor of heavy AFVs is lost.

I will demonstrate:

1 hour ago, holoween said:

1 An APS allows protection to keep pace with attacking munitions development because it doesnt require fully redeveloping and building hulls.

This is the most common response -> spend tons of money on R&D to create a more expensive vehicle that is more complicated to maintain.  Most importantly, presume this will work and that something else won't come about that can't be countered.

As for the APS suggestion, there is a false premise here.  The premise is that some sort of new APS solution can not only deal with everything that the current system can, but also everything new coming to the battlefield.  This is a premise I do not think is very safe or realistic.  APS is already a limited solution even today and it is not even feasible for many armored vehicles. 

1 hour ago, holoween said:

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.

The math is already very bad for tanks.  A single US Squad is armed with enough weaponry to destroy a tank platoon before the tanks are even within effective range.  So the side that needs to change the math dramatically is the proponents of tanks.  Yet the war in Ukraine is showing that the methods for cheaply and effectively destroying tanks is expanding rapidly. 

1 hour ago, holoween said:

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.

Heh... check a mirror before you say something like this, because you will definitely see your reflection

Again, your proposed solution is to engage in expensive R&D for an uncertain result.  Even if the result is technically successful it will add costs and complications to an already expensive and complicated vehicle. On top of that, the system would then be vulnerable to EW and EW is something nobody is having a good time with.  So you'd also have to invest heavily in EW protections and workaround on top of the cost of a more expensive APS.

 

The bottom line is the trend lines for heavy AFVs are terrible.  The cost curve of AFVs are facing a steep increase, the cost curve of its destroyers is going steeply downward.  This will put the AFV onto an ever worsening availability curve while its destroyers is going in the opposite direction.  If we were talking about any other product, you'd see this is a losing proposition.  Just ask people that thought mainframe computers would always outmatch personal computers

Steve

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

proposed solution is to engage in expensive R&D for an uncertain result. 

It appears the U.S. Army intends to keep trying, according a to a very recent press release from the team in charge of Abrams development. The video does a pretty good job of breaking down the bureaucratese into something intelligible, and fills in a lot of details.

 

Edited September 23, 2023 by dan/california

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, holoween said:

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.

Tank Fight!!!  Steve already beat up on a lot of this.  To which I would add:

- C-RAM.  If technology becomes mature that allows a force to shield hundreds of small sub-munitions coming in at 100s of m/s then the tank will be long gone already.  In fact with that level of resolution and precision targeting anything larger than a field mouse (with a little helmet on) above ground is dead.  You may as well cite Gandalf and the League of White Wizards.  C-RAM tech is currently big, heavy and effective against very few incoming at a time, largely in a COIN or low level conflict context.  To upscale to what we are seeing in Ukraine is…well…just not happening anytime soon.

- ATGMs and RPGs are nowhere near the limits of lethality to weight.  Do just a bit of reading on nano-treated explosives. https://www.army.mil/article/243587/army_argonne_scientists_explore_nanoparticles_for_future_weapon_systems.  And that is not science fiction, prototypes are already in the works.

-Integrated APS at platoon level - I should freakin hope so!  You mean we don’t have this already?!  It will buy some time I am sure but as we have seen sticking a lot of tanks close to each other is not smart on this battlefield, let alone the next one.  A whole platoon popping off APS is going to draw a lot of heat (tee hee) but hey if it get you to sleep at night.

- Logistics.  This will be the fight for the next decade at least.  How does one protect logistics lines?  Self loitering and longer more precise artillery is going to push fights over the horizon (well out of tank fire range) and protecting logistics is going to be really challenging.  Guns have the advantage because they are already well back.  As to tank “driving back”…see movement=spotted=dead on the modern battlefield. Right now in Ukraine the tanks are largely already back near the guns.

- Mech infantry and their kit: “You are always creative unless it is stuff you don’t like”.  So you think all those unmanned systems might take some of that load off.  I mean you are ready to lean on freakin Iron Dome force fields to hold off DPICM but somehow having unmanned offset infantry loads is just science fiction?

-How have infantry been doing against ISR and artillery?  Well better than armour but not by enough on the offensive, yet.  But hey we get it infantry screwed, armour forever!  Look everyone can go hug their stuffed tank while sporting their armoured corps pyjamas.  I frankly don’t have a dog in this fight.  What I am very interested in is ensuring we chart a military capability course based on reality and not culture or history.

[The_Capt]

5 minutes ago, dan/california said:

It appears the U.S. Army intends to keep trying, according a to a very recent press release from the team in charge of Abrams development. The video does a pretty good job of breaking down the bureaucratese into something intelligible, and fills in a lot of details.

 

Militaries are living breathing monuments to the Sunk Cost fallacy.

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-sunk-cost-fallacy
 

[dan/california]

14 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Militaries are living breathing monuments to the Sunk Cost fallacy.

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-sunk-cost-fallacy
 

I wonder if the upcoming performance test for the Abrams we have sent to Ukraine might make a dent in the denial. There is also a nonzero chance the Abrams get there just as the the Russian lines fracture, and are very useful in the resulting maneuver phase. This would be fantastic for Ukraine, but very bad for getting NATO/The West to really change the current approach.

[danfrodo]

54 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Tank Fight!!!  Steve already beat up on a lot of this.  To which I would add:

- C-RAM.  If technology becomes mature that allows a force to shield hundreds of small sub-munitions coming in at 100s of m/s then the tank will be long gone already.  In fact with that level of resolution and precision targeting anything larger than a field mouse (with a little helmet on) above ground is dead.  You may as well cite Gandalf and the League of White Wizards.  C-RAM tech is currently big, heavy and effective against very few incoming at a time, largely in a COIN or low level conflict context.  To upscale to what we are seeing in Ukraine is…well…just not happening anytime soon.

- ATGMs and RPGs are nowhere near the limits of lethality to weight.  Do just a bit of reading on nano-treated explosives. https://www.army.mil/article/243587/army_argonne_scientists_explore_nanoparticles_for_future_weapon_systems.  And that is not science fiction, prototypes are already in the works.

-Integrated APS at platoon level - I should freakin hope so!  You mean we don’t have this already?!  It will buy some time I am sure but as we have seen sticking a lot of tanks close to each other is not smart on this battlefield, let alone the next one.  A whole platoon popping off APS is going to draw a lot of heat (tee hee) but hey if it get you to sleep at night.

- Logistics.  This will be the fight for the next decade at least.  How does one protect logistics lines?  Self loitering and longer more precise artillery is going to push fights over the horizon (well out of tank fire range) and protecting logistics is going to be really challenging.  Guns have the advantage because they are already well back.  As to tank “driving back”…see movement=spotted=dead on the modern battlefield. Right now in Ukraine the tanks are largely already back near the guns.

- Mech infantry and their kit: “You are always creative unless it is stuff you don’t like”.  So you think all those unmanned systems might take some of that load off.  I mean you are ready to lean on freakin Iron Dome force fields to hold off DPICM but somehow having unmanned offset infantry loads is just science fiction?

-How have infantry been doing against ISR and artillery?  Well better than armour but not by enough on the offensive, yet.  But hey we get it infantry screwed, armour forever!  Look everyone can go hug their stuffed tank while sporting their armoured corps pyjamas.  I frankly don’t have a dog in this fight.  What I am very interested in is ensuring we chart a military capability course based on reality and not culture or history.

If we need infantry we also need mobility for that infantry.  Are you thinking future is more MRAPS & CV90/stryker -type vehicles?  Something else?  and for firepower it would be artillery & attack drones?  Plus maybe some weapon the mobility platforms?

 

Edited September 24, 2023 by danfrodo

[kimbosbread]

26 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

If we need infantry we also need mobility for that infantry.  Are you thinking future is more MRAPS & CV90/stryker -type vehicles?  Something else?  and for firepower it would be artillery & attack drones?  Plus maybe some weapon the mobility platforms?

I’m definitely a proponent of bushwar-style mobility (MRAPs + CV90s + hilux/LC70s), but I think UGVs and/or powered armor will change the game if it ever becomes a thing (I think end of decade it will be feasible, but not fielded, based on current state of battery technology). I would posit the balance that has to be struck involves:

1. How much material can be carried?
2. How much destruction can said material cause?
3. How likely is material to get destroyed in a variety of attacks?
4. How fast does this move over roads?
5. How fast does it move on the battlefield?
6. How hard is it to sustain?
7. How easy is it to detect?
8. How easy is it to hide?

If tank-level firepower can be carried in a smaller package, say an IFV (manned or not), or some futuristic powered armor suit, then why do you need the tank? Anything from the tank to the soldier can be taken out with the same ease by small, NLOS precision munitions, but the logistics and stealthiness are dramatically different.

[A Canadian Cat]

1 hour ago, dan/california said:

I wonder if the upcoming performance test for the Abrams we have sent to Ukraine might make a dent in the denial

Why would an Abrams fair any better than a challenger or a leopard 2? I know they are a good tank but they have all the same limitations and are just as vulnerable as any other tank.

[dan/california]

23 minutes ago, IanL said:

Why would an Abrams fair any better than a challenger or a leopard 2? I know they are a good tank but they have all the same limitations and are just as vulnerable as any other tank.

I don't think they are different/better enough to matter. What I was trying to say is that they may show up just as the Ukrainians finally, REALLY break the Russian mine belt. Thus they would join the fight at the exact moment that heavy armor becomes truly useful, perhaps for the last time in history.

Rather like the denouement of the battleship at Suriago Straight, where the U.S. battle line crossed the T of the approaching Japanese fleet almost perfectly, and smashed the Japanese thoroughly. This did NOT change the fact that battleships were obsolete.

[Kinophile]

5 hours ago, photon said:

I think the battleship analogy here is on point. Prior to 1941 both the IJN and USN thought that the main contest would be a slugging match between their battle lines somewhere near the Philippines. 

I've seen this idea many times and I've never bought it, specifically the trope that the Navies though this or that. They didn't. Certain factions or leaders thought this or that but not having dominance over naval budget they were able get their particular ideas built but not change or maintain the service's ideology as a whole.

Post PH, it's not like suddenly everyone at the top  was OMG - Carriers, Dude! Amiright?! If only we'd known! They had both already built bloody large carriers in large enough numbers to rapidly start dukeing it out with the opposing carriers. There was already a gigantic future financial commitment to carriers. People already knew what they could potentially do. 

The Battleship boys were entrenched beaurocratically but out-maneouvered strategically. The top brass in both Navies were correct in viewing both arms as mutually dependent and supportive, amplifiers of each other's effects. It wasn't that the battleship would decide things,  but that without them you were vulnerable to a force that did have both carriers and battleships. 

What was certainly a surprise to many in the IJN was just how overmatched Battleships were on their own. But was that because the idea of a battleship was "stupid"?  Or because they hadn't yet developed the idea of AAA Cruiser escorts? Because those US escorts sure kicked the guts out of many IJN air attacks while the USN flyboys eviscerated the jap carriers. Towards the end of the war US Battleships themselves had vastly improved onboard AA defences, as well as local squadron & Fleet coordination - while IJN stagnated and only incrementally improved. 

This to me is where the echoes are with tanks today. It's not that tanks are doomed,  it's that in their current iteration and handling they are extremely vulnerable to an opposing force that has both tanks and drone swarms. If you both do then it gets down to a software/BioWare contest, coming up with the next idea that gives temporary advantage until countered. Oh look - war as its ever been. 

Tanks need to change (both formatting,  size, power source and weapons) and they will properly warp into something new under the pressure of a true drone war.

But there will always be a use for a fast moving ground platform that can send an insanely fast and heavy projectile downrange. 

Possibly a primary need with Future Tank will be the ability to drastically and rapidly shift/change its production processes in response to evolving battlefield realities. The current behemoths take too long to design,  build and get into service -  just like ye battleships of yore. 

Give me a lighter platform that can morph its form within a few months and still shove a 125mm shell up a Russian's arsehole from 3km away. 

 

 

Edited September 24, 2023 by Kinophile

[Harmon Rabb]

 

Looks like the AFU are as excited to unleash these bad boys on the battlefield, as we are to see how they perform. 

Just thought the tank buffs here would enjoy this meme from the Ukrainian MoD. I love their sense of humor.

Edited September 24, 2023 by Harmon Rabb

[MikeyD]

We're still in danger, as the old saying goes, of 'planning to fight the last war' (this war, in the future, being the last war). Insights we take away from this conflict are valuable but will those lessons be applicable to unimagined future war X versus opponent Y in country Z? 6-ish years ago there was a (perplexing) push, in some quarters, to have the US invade Venezuela(!), a country a third larger than Ukraine with a population of 30 million, two mountain ranges and a large portion covered in triple canopy rainforest. It would be difficult to imagine how Ukraine war 'lessons learned' would apply to such a conflict.

[Kinophile]

8 minutes ago, MikeyD said:

We're still in danger, as the old saying goes, of 'planning to fight the last war' (this war, in the future, being the last war). Insights we take away from this conflict are valuable but will those lessons be applicable to unimagined future war X versus opponent Y in country Z? 6-ish years ago there was a (perplexing) push, in some quarters, to have the US invade Venezuela(!), a country a third larger than Ukraine with a population of 30 million, two mountain ranges and a large portion covered in triple canopy rainforest. It would be difficult to imagine how Ukraine war 'lessons learned' would apply to such a conflict.

Yarp.  Context matters. 

[Battlefront.com]

34 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Yarp.  Context matters. 

Which dooms the tank even more   For the last 20 years people who questioned the value of spending billions on tanks kept getting told that we need them because some day we might have to do a large scale conventional war.  Well, we have the biggest one since WW2 and the tank isn't coming out looking so good.  So yeah, context matters.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Kinophile said:

Tanks need to change (both formatting,  size, power source and weapons) and they will properly warp into something new under the pressure of a true drone war.

And here's where we get into the fantasy whack-a-mole arguments again.  You could say this about horse cavalry or pikeman or whatever... "there will always be a reason for them, so they will forever evolve to stay relevant".  And that gets us right back to the correctness of the battleship's death.  It died because it was too expensive, too vulnerable, and rather pointless because there was far better ways to deliver on what the battleship used to perform.  Their supporters evolved them as much as they could, and yet there are none on the waters today except as floating museums.

1 hour ago, Kinophile said:

But there will always be a use for a fast moving ground platform that can send an insanely fast and heavy projectile downrange.

Absolutely, but it won't be the tank doing it.  I know you've seen me arguing that UGVs, especially when combined with UAVs, can achieve this already despite a fraction of the funding that MBTs receive.

Which gets us back to the battleship analogy.  The reason the battleship held on for so long, despite aircraft carriers and subs, is because nothing else could do certain things the battleship could do.  As soon as there were equal or better ways to satisfy those requirements, the battleship disappeared.

MBTs and heavy IFVs are replaceable by systems that are vastly cheaper, just as deadly (if not more so), can be produced far faster, deployed anywhere with minimal notice, and once in the field require ungodly less to sustain.  I have seen no proponent of heavy armor has even tried to argue against these things because they can't.  Instead all I've seen is faith based "it has always been so, it will always be so" arguments and flawed technologically based whack-a-mole counter arguments.  Which is the clearest sign to me that heavy armor needs to be phased out.

Well, game over logically and rationally.  Practically, the military industrial complex makes too much money off of heavy armor to give up just because they're wrong.  Tanks and impractical armored vehicles of all types will be with us for a very long time.

Steve

[dan/california]

In the very near future submunitions will be delivered to the nearest warm body by a VERY unfriendly version of Bittle here. Imagine them landing in a circle just like the DPICM we have seen a zillion videos of, and then walking to the center while looking for something that meets the criteria to go boom.

[dan/california]

 

Quote

 

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-23-2023

ISW is now prepared to assess that Ukrainian forces have broken through Russian field fortifications west of Verbove in western Zaporizhia Oblast. These fortifications are not the final defensive line in Russia’s defense in depth in western Zaporizhia Oblast, but rather a specific series of the best-prepared field fortifications arrayed as part of a near-contiguous belt of an anti-vehicle ditch, dragon's teeth, and fighting positions about 1.7 - 3.5 km west of Verbove.[1]

 

It may be an interesting week.

 

[kimbosbread]

2 hours ago, Kinophile said:

Give me a lighter platform that can morph its form within a few months and still shove a 125mm shell up a Russian's arsehole from 3km away. 

I’m not convinced a 125mm shell from 3km is any better than a 120mm mortar bomb, or an FPV drone carrying an AT mine, or Brimstone/Spike or all the “heavier than a man can carry” weapons (and a lot of the man-portable weapons, including smaller FPV drones, are as capable in my mind). Dropping a big *** mine from the top is going to destroy almost anything, and is really hard to stop. 

The process of getting any of these munitions to make a hit is radically different, from manufacturing to transport to firing to quantity needed to destroy the target to training required to use it to future improvements to all of these aspects. I don’t see any part of this where any sort of 125mm shell fired out of a big heavy gun is anywhere but the bottom for all of these categories.

I’m not gonna touch the morphing part, because that’s nowhere in the near future, unless you are talking something like a palletized tank module that can be stuck on skateboard ugv chassis, which I think is certainly useful.

[Kinophile]

Game over? A little bit of over-assured circular logic there. 

The modern MBT is the current iteration of whatever it is that needs to be fast, hard to kill and dangerous at long ranges. Current war is proving they're very vulnerable to UAS,  but is that a failure of tactics and thought,  or of the platform as a tactical concept. 

The need for something with those traits won't go away.

We can call it UGS or whatever but it's role will be Longe Range Heavy Accurate Direct Fire, itll need to take some hits (because it's front line unit) or else you're dancing on tactical eggshells to keep the ****er alive (hello,  AMX) and it'll need to be fast- fast to move,  fast to replace, fast to build. 

Currently,  MBTs are NOT fast,  on those counts.  They're getting to the preciousness of Battleships for sure. 

Really it's "MBT" that are facing erasure. 

But a tank-type platform that is fast on those three levels? How is that not going to be useful? It'll just have a different acronym. 

Also,  as Long as there are infantry,  there will be IFVs and APCs. Some kind of mobile armored and armed box to get them from ATO B and with organic supporting fires. 

Edited September 24, 2023 by Kinophile

[Kinophile]

29 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

I’m not convinced a 125mm shell from 3km is any better than a 120mm mortar bomb, or an FPV drone carrying an AT mine, or Brimstone/Spike or all the “heavier than a man can carry” weapons (and a lot of the man-portable weapons, including smaller FPV drones, are as capable in my mind). Dropping a big *** mine from the top is going to destroy almost anything, and is really hard to stop. 

The process of getting any of these munitions to make a hit is radically different, from manufacturing to transport to firing to quantity needed to destroy the target to training required to use it to future improvements to all of these aspects. I don’t see any part of this where any sort of 125mm shell fired out of a big heavy gun is anywhere but the bottom for all of these categories.

I’m not gonna touch the morphing part, because that’s nowhere in the near future, unless you are talking something like a palletized tank module that can be stuck on skateboard ugv chassis, which I think is certainly useful.

Shell or rail gun or laser,  whichever. A linear direct fire weapon will always be of use. 

Ref battlefield modable ugv,  that's actually exactly what was on my mind, where a heavy weapons platform is literally that, it can support rapid change to fit tactical needs. 

Edited September 24, 2023 by Kinophile

[JonS]

3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

You could say this about horse cavalry or pikeman or whatever... "there will always be a reason for them, so they will forever evolve to stay relevant". 

But ... didn't they? The roles of the light and heavy cavalry (screening and recce on the one hand, and shock action on the other, exploitation for both) are still being fulfilled today. Hell, the squishies have even gone back to wearing breastplates

Light horsed cav -> armoured cars -> light tanks -> heavy tanks -> light tanks/IFVs

Heavy cav -> infantry tanks -> cruiser tanks & infantry tanks -> universal tanks/MBTs

The equipment evolution has been pretty dynamic, but the role evolution hasn't been nearly as exciting. In most militaries the relevant units have also kept the traditions (hats, spurs, etc) and naming conventions (trooper, squadron) from the past, to emphasise the continuity within the change.

Edited September 24, 2023 by JonS