Ukraine
- Thread starter Silvanus
- Start date
Musk would know. He's an expert on tanks. Just look at how he tanked Tesla stocks.
If he follows form, next week he'll announce Tesla are going to make electric tanks.
When he fired himself into space, why did we let the fuckwit come back?
Touche!
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Firstly, tanks have been used effectively in the war, but mostly by Ukraine, which doesn't have very many of them (so much for Russian air superiority). Russia has had a total disaster with armour, and Ukraine was dealing with them perfectly well before they got a load of fancy Western kit, largely with ordinary, boring artillery and old-school personal anti-tank weaponry.
There's plenty of analysis of this: the problem being that Russia reformed its units to be unusually vehicle-heavy, together with their units being seriously understrength meaning that it sent AFVs into combat without adequate (in some cases possibly any) infantry support. If there's no-one to flush out spotters, AT teams and the like, they are going to wreak havoc on armoured formations. Thus this war does not necessarily indicate the end of the tank so much as grotesque organisation and tactical inadequacy on the part of Russia.
That said, motorised units are hugely beneficial for Ukraine. Because Ukraine has the interior of a horseshoe-shaped frontline, it has the logistical advantage in being able to rapidly transfer units from one front to another where Russia has to go the very long way round.
I'm amused by the fact Musk forgets the Intersection of Infantry and Artillery is.....Metal Gear.
Skip to 3:15 for the relevant conversation.
Granted, even if Musk decided to make Metal Gears he's probably just create the Shagohod and promise the real thing is just around the corner to bump up the stock price while calling all his critics pedos. Because Elon is an expert on everything, by the sole virtue of being rich and having a twitter account and not pesky things like actual training or education on complex fields such as programming or warfare.
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"Of course metal stops bullets. Now get out there and die- I mean, fight for your country!"
Modern brigandine armour? Well, googling says that it was made in the 70s, so modern is pushing it.
To be fair to the armour, that probably could help protect the wearer from shrapnel, of which there is going to be a lot around, and maybe low powered stuff like SMGs, which have gone out of favour because it's relatively easy to make body armour that protects against them. In the 70s though, there'd be more of them around in first world militaries.
Rifle rounds are significantly more powerful, and tend to do exactly what the video shows.
To be fair to the armour, that probably could help protect the wearer from shrapnel, of which there is going to be a lot around, and maybe low powered stuff like SMGs, which have gone out of favour because it's relatively easy to make body armour that protects against them. In the 70s though, there'd be more of them around in first world militaries.
Rifle rounds are significantly more powerful, and tend to do exactly what the video shows.
That's surely a vest designed to protect against stabbing, not rifle bullets. I guess it would offer some protection against glancing hits and shrapnel, though.
Chances are it's something the poor sap brought on his own rather than was issued, because I suspect the Russian authorities have not been diligent about issuing body armour.
A bit of googling has people calling it a stabvest, yeah, but also others saying that it was intended to protect against light stuff.
And given that it was designed (and quite possibly that one was made) in the 70s, I could see the Russian military randomly throwing obsolete body armour in stock to people. Wouldn't have been to surprised if that bullet hole was from previous use years ago and the wearer was killed by something else, but that seems not to be the case this time.
Hopefully snow will melt before Bradleys arrive.
Sorry, had to to do that. Bradley is notorious in tanker circles for one thing: during Norway's IFV trials in 1990s Bradley was one of the contenders. Bradley was dead last in those trials after it got stuck in snow. They had to use CV90 (which won the trials) to tow it.
On a vaguely related note, Apparently the famous German Pickelhaube (the famous WW1 spiked helmet) was very useful at protecting soldiers heads from Cavalry sabers, which was a notable threat in 19th century warfare.
It was significantly less useful in protecting against shrapnel in WW1 and onward which is why it was eventually replaced. The little spike on top didn't even last that long, with it becoming detachable during WW1(and not to be worn at the front for obvious reasons) before they eventually just stopped making them with the spike entirely.
Huh, I always thought they were just part of the uniform, more to look cool than anything. Though, even without being not good against shrapnel, it's needlessly fancy and when cost cutting becomes important, time to get something else.
On another vaguely related note, sabres were still useful during WW1, the first British kill of the war was a cavalryman with a sabre. Apparently British officers stopped using sabres because it marked them out to German snipers, not because they were otherwise a bad idea. They switched to other, less fancy looking hand to hand weapons like trench knives.
Well, they were needlessly fancy pre-war some of the later models lacked the blingy adornment and were just regular helmets. Probably because it wasn't worth the effort to make them super cool looking when you really needed 50,000 helmets NOW!
WW1 is kinda fascinating because it started out trying to a regular big European type war and it wasn't long until new tech(like machine guns and quick loading artillery) showed that traditional tactics were extremely costly. And then somebody though it would be hilarious to start using poison gas just because things weren't
Even more interesting is a number of things that WW1 is known for was prototyped in the American Civil War(Ironclad naval combat, Submarine Warfare, Trench Warfare, Aerial Recon) and apparently the European Powers either didn't pay attention or didn't care. I know the US wasn't a world power in 1861, but damn if doesn't feel like there was a little bit of arrogance there of the UK and France and Germany watching the US civil war chew through like 1.5 million soldiers on both sides in 4 years and apparently thinking "Well the Yankees aren't fighting war the proper European way" or something.
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You're actually spot on with how the Europeans reacted. The various powers sent observers to see if anything interesting could be found in the American Civil War, and their reports all pretty much recorded how they thought the reason the body counts were so high was because the Americans were pretty stupid and shit with their tactics and obviously just didn't know how to "properly" conduct a war.
Apparently, a couple of the Prussian observers DID note how trenches were dangerous to attacking forces and could stalemate a battlefield, but they seemed to think if the Americans had just been smarter, then they could have just avoided the trenches and used more mobile tactics to get around them.
The arrogance was practically dripping off of their reports.
The American were so arrogant that they did not think it was possible for the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbour