Iraq 2003 was the first
And that would have been against Russian/Soviet tanks. I think that went quite well from memory.
The C2 was deployed to Kosovo. Although not as kinetic as Iraq it was very quickly noted back then how reliable and maintenance friendly it was. An ex colleague was amazed at how little things went wrong with them. Although relatively new at the time, the trend continued through into Iraq.
As for the C2 that was immobile and received multiple hits in Basra, an ex room mate of mine was in charge of the recovery that day and received the CGC. I "think" it was that incident that resulted in plastic explosive demolitions being reintroduced (costcutting) into the recovery mechanice syllabus as the C2's track was jammed and it had to be cut with a blow torch.
Once it was recovered it was swarmed over by the mechanics and techs and pretty much the only things needing replaced were the optics, which can be swapped out relatively quickly.
I never worked on C2 but it's very highly thought of by the crew's and A mechs.
@cobrakai , your anecdotes are way more interesting than my armchair account 👍
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo were intended as peace keeping missions, but that doesn't mean that it was peaceful 🙂
And that would have been against Russian/Soviet tanks. I think that went quite well from memory.
A better indication of the vunribility of Russian equipment can be gained from the conflicts in Israel, specifically the Six Day and Yom Kipur wars. Arab forces used then Soviet tanks, Israel were equipped with amongst other things the British Centurion with its 105mm gun.
Two things stand out that can be directly compared to the war in Ukraine. Small numbers of trained and highly motivated troops with more capable equipment can withstand a far greater force. The Centurions were a game changer, the Challenger 2 is a direct descendent of that tank and has the potential to make a big impact. The Leopards are just along for the ride.
Anyone want to open a sweepstake on how long it’ll be before one/both of these have an unfortunate interface with an open window?
Joking aside though, evidence of how those who are assumed to be supporting Putin (and being sanctioned because of it) really feel about him and his cabal.
I reckon Vlad must be getting even more paranoid than he already is..
Some great info on the Challenger 2 tanks on this thread, thanks! Did a bit of extra reading and Wiki states that the C2 uses a mix of metric nuts & bolts for the turret, but imperial standards for the main chassis! Is that correct?
Western MBTs were taken to Afghanistan but primarily used for their sensors (optical, etc) and comms abilities
The Danes used the Leopard 2 as a very effective fire support element. Also really good at opening doors and compound walls when needed.
The Leopards are just along for the ride.
We're you wearing your Union Flag pants as you typed that?
inkster Free Member
Old tanks with big guns but with modern optics can still be effective, especially when probably less than one percent of shells fired from tanks are aimed at other tanks.
Nicholas Moran, AKA The Chieftain on YouTube, a tank historian and a US Army cavalry officer, has expressed the opinion that the best upgrade for older tanks is fitting thermal imaging equipment to them. In his opinion a T-62 with a thermal imager would be a more useful tank in Ukraine than a T-72 without one.
Don't want to knock these sorts, but it's not a new concept. The ability to find, fix and destroy your enemy without them being able to reciprocate via tech (which can be low or high) and tactics is the essence of warfare.
We’re you wearing your Union Flag pants as you typed that?
Nah always goes commando?
Pauly
Full Member
Some great info on the Challenger 2 tanks on this thread, thanks! Did a bit of extra reading and Wiki states that the C2 uses a mix of metric nuts & bolts for the turret, but imperial standards for the main chassis! Is that correct?
The C2 was basically an upgrade of C1. The main body of the tank had a lot in common with C1, (apparently 90% commonality) hence the imperial sizes as it was an older design, but the turret was a complete redesign with a mix of old kit (radios etc) and new kit (sights etc) so very possibly there would be a mix between imperial and metric. As I said, never worked on it. Our tool boxes had both metric and imperial tools. 13mm/0.5inch spanners/socket were like golddust.......
The Bradley IFV with 25mm chain gun destroyed T55s in Iraq with a tungsten round.
It's not the chain gun that will have Russian tankers worried, its the TOW missiles most Bradleys carry, they're terrifyingly effective tank killers.
It’s not the chain gun that will have Russian tankers worried, its the TOW missiles most Bradleys carry, they’re terrifyingly effective tank killers.
Especially if it's the wire-less version!
@cobrakai when I was a civi REME fitter back in the early 80s our tool boxes were a mixture of AF and Whitworth. You had to borrow from stores on the rare occasion that new fangled metric was needed.
This guy makes a reasonable speculation for what the T54/55s might be used for, which is to be dug in for a defensive position
The T-34 wasn’t an particularly brilliant tank, even in 1942.
True, but by the time the German army had managed to get well into Russia, their supply-lines were already being stretched to the limits, winter was causing all sorts of issues that the Russians were well used to, and they were turning out large numbers of tanks crewed by the teams that built them, including women. They were also being used in urban warfare as well, which the Germans weren’t used to doing, their tanks tended to be bigger and less manoeuvrable in urban warfare.
Fireflys would terrify the Russians, basically a Sherman with a 17pdr gun fitted, they were small and light enough for forest fighting, but could punch a hole through a Tiger. The barrel was counter-shaded at the end to look like it still had the little short barrel of the standard Sherman.
I think the Israelis were using them, maybe they’ve got a few kicking around they could send the Ukrainians.
It’s not the chain gun that will have Russian tankers worried, its the TOW missiles most Bradleys carry, they’re terrifyingly effective tank killers.
The Bradley only carries two TOW missiles, the 25mm chain gun is designed as a tank killer:
The M2/M3's primary armament is a 25 mm chain gun using either 100 or 300 rounds per minute, accurate to 3,000 m (approximately two miles). It is armed with a TOW missile<sup id="cite_ref-4" class="reference">[a]</sup> launcher capable of carrying two loaded missiles. The missiles, capable of destroying most tanks to a maximum range of 4,000 metres (13,000 ft), can only be fired while the vehicle is stationary. The Bradley carries a coaxial 7.62 mm medium machine gun to the right of the 25 mm chain gun.
A flock of AC130J Ghostrider gunships would be handy at night:
Armament: Precision Strike Package with 30mm and 105mm cannons and Standoff Precision Guided Munitions (i.e. GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb, GBU-69 Small Glide Munition, AGM-114 Hellfire missile and AGM-176 Griffin missile)
A flock of AC130J Ghostrider gunships would be handy at night:
Chances of that...
Shadow callsigns are hard to come by and reserved for use by a select group of troops.
A flock of AC130J Ghostrider gunships would be
handy at night:extremely vulnerable to modern air defences.
FTFY.
The internet fantasies about sending squadrons of A10s or AC130s are just fantasies. They would not survive long against Russian air defences.
Word, but there aren't many people that can publicly comment on the effectiveness of the countermeasures on most NATO aircraft, it's quite rightly secret, so conjecture is on both sides.
The Taliban however snagged a Spectre in Afghanistan, hence the night only operations since then.
Like I said, they only get used by a very specific group of units/TF's and controllers.
The internet fapping over this conflict never loses its rhythm.
Dug in tanks are are just sitting ducks for GPS artillery and drone attacks 🤷♂️
Aye, I can't remember our doctrine for establishing fixed positions, I'm sure I can get some out of date stuff from my uncle (He was CR1 Commander GW1 and Squadron Commander GW2, left as deputy chief of staff Royal Armoured Corps. He might know a little something about armoured doctrine.)
What I do know is it requires heavy engineer support (my old man was an Armoured Engineer) effective use of cam and thermal screens, but as you say drones have flipped this on its head and are a real game changer.
The old man was talking the other night about back in the 90's they experimented with massive drive in dugouts with overhead cover for tanks, but the work required needed a massive security presence for the engineers or they were established in positions that the enemy would advance to. They stuck to hasty dugouts utilising Trojans or the good old woods and forests.
Mobility is what keeps tanks alive, that and superior optics and range.
In the history of absurd, this is up there as really, properly absurd.
Some light relief
https://twitter.com/FCDOGovUK/status/1641852678106906630?t=pJaHlv1Yj-DBo0rxYSuxMw&s=19
Very good 👏👏👏
They should really let the Canadians join AUKUS too...
CAKUS?
Ha!, nice cafe, shame if anything happened to it
A proper Von Stauffenbergski moment.
He's all over twitter at thee moment... and some tables, doors, chairs....
To avoid confusion in other reports, Vladlen Tatarsky aka Maksim Fomin.
The owner of the bombed cafe and Wagner PMC leader Yevgeny Prigozhin "oddly stated on April 2 that he would not “blame the Kyiv regime” for the deaths of Fomin and Russian ultranationalist figure Daria Dugina, suggesting that Ukrainian agents were not in fact responsible." https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-2-2023
This fits the Ukrainian Government statement by Mykhailo Podolyak who "blamed the blast on a Russian "internal political fight", tweeting: "Spiders are eating each other in a jar."" BBC^^
Excellent article on the Cuban missile crisis.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/cuba/missile-crisis-secret-history-soviet-union-russia-ukraine-lessons
Terrified by those developments, Khrushchev understood at last that his reckless gamble had failed and ordered a retreat. Kennedy, too, opted for a compromise. In the end, neither leader proved willing to test the other’s redlines, probably because they did not know where exactly those redlines lay. Khrushchev’s hubris and resentment led him to the worst misadventure of his political career. But his—and Kennedy’s—caution led to a negotiated solution.
Their prudence holds lessons for today, when so many commentators in Russia and in the West are calling for a resolute victory of one side or the other in Ukraine. Some Americans and Europeans assume that the use of nuclear weapons in the current crisis is completely out of the question and thus that the West can safely push the Kremlin into the corner by obtaining a comprehensive victory for Ukraine. But plenty of people in Russia, especially around Putin and among his propagandists, defiantly say that there would be “no world without Russia,” meaning that Moscow should prefer a nuclear Armageddon to defeat.
If such voices had prevailed in 1962, we’d all be dead now.
Loosing in Ukraine won't somehow eliminate Russia will it 🤷♂️
The West has already self deterred itself because of Putins nuclear posturing. Our approach seems to be a gradualist one. A few tanks here, a few tanks there, some Bradley’s etc. no jets, no fly zones or long range missiles.
Yep. And there's a real issue there in that the truth doesn't really matter. There's no existential threat to Russia from the west, not militarily. The threats are economic, technological, societal and demographic and they've all been made much worse by the war, not better- there's nothing at all that they can do militarily to fix any of those issues. But the only military threat to "Russia" is when they're in someone else's country. The west is absolutely delighted to just sit back and grow and develop and shag russia into irrelevance.
The only people who doubt that, unfortunately, are Russians. Some russians who are crazy, some russians who are paranoid, some that are reliving past crises, some that realise that they've already lost the economic and demographic wars badly enough that they just can't get back into the game without spectacular changes and so are looking for distractions or excuses, some that are desperate and lots- oh god really lots- that have just been misinformed for decades.
None of that's necessarily incompatible with the reality but it makes it far harder to cut through to it. The actual threat to Russia is when everyone's old and poor and their only way out is to open up to foreign powers and end up owned by China and Amazon. And barring massive worldwide changes, that's pretty much inevitable within a generation or two.
Loosing in Ukraine won’t somehow eliminate Russia will it
No of course not but it's a rhetoric that is well received in some quarters in Russia. Putin's special operation was framed as Russia defending itself against Western (NATO) expansionism. Of course the outcome has been NATO expanionism. Finland joins tomorrow.
Putin’s special operation was framed as Russia defending itself against Western (NATO) expansionism. Of course the outcome has been NATO expanionism. Finland joins tomorrow.
Yes, it explains why President Putin looked like the junior partner when he and President Xi met last month, especially if you remember back to the Beijing Winter Olympics in early February 2022 and their joint declaration:
They opposed AUKUS; New Zealand has now expressed interest in a non-nuclear membership capacity
They opposed NATO expansion; see Finland ^^ and Sweden if they can sort out their Kurdish issue with Turkey
They opposed the US building conventional precision-strike weapons in high volume; see new contracts for Boeing-Saab GLSDB and production of various guided MLRS rockets will double because of the invasion of Ukraine (HIMARS, German MARS, UK M270, etc)
The only thing that has come true is Russia supplying China with oil and gas, the volume will be high but, because of sanctions, the price won't be.
The invasion of Ukraine isn't looking too good for Russia with a lack of "no limits" support from China. Russia has managed to wind western military partnerships and manufacturing up rather than down and China will be keen that Russia doesn't escalate matters more than it already has
Don't mention the war (on Twitter): https://gizmodo.com/twitter-musk-ukraine-crisis-open-source-code-russia-1850293386
Pootin, baby, how is that 3-day special operation going to secure more land for Russia and weaken NATO?
"Nato's border with Russia doubles as Finland joins"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65173043
Pootin, baby, how is that 3-day special operation going to secure more land for Russia and weaken NATO?
“Nato’s border with Russia doubles as Finland joins”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65173043/blockquote >
Feels like history is repeating itself etc with one empire replacing another. (248 years since the American Revolution/War of Independence)
Finland seem confident that Russia threat to militarise the new border with NATO isn’t so scary on the basis they don’t have the military material to do it effectively.
Does this push Putin over the edge to do something stupid, or does this push Putin over a window ledge? Does he feel stronger with the Saudi support…. Or not?
Finland seem confident that Russia threat to militarise the new border with NATO isn’t so scary on the basis they don’t have the military material to do it effectively.
Nothing will happen. Russia is not interested in Finland unless Finland starts arming themselves with missiles pointing to/at Russia. Finland has nothing the world desire apart from being a strategy staging post for NATO. Ukraine on the other hand is rich with resources.
However, this cannot be said of NATO because their strategy of encirclement has always been the top priority (slowly, slowly catchy monkey). NATO needs an excuse to expand and the war in Ukraine is a good way to expand. i.e. when there is risk, there is opportunity (for America/NATO of course).
Finns are just spooked into joining by NATO.
Does this push Putin over the edge to do something stupid, or does this push Putin over a window ledge? Does he feel stronger with the Saudi support…. Or not?
With the production of oil cut by 1.5 million barrels a day, I am afraid it will be a slow grind and eventually it will hurt. When the inflation (yes, caused by shortage of energy mostly) hit the roof, people go hungry then we shall see how many govts will be able to dig deep into their reserve.
Finns are just spooked into joining by
NATORussia.
FTFY