Western-made armor is failing in Ukraine because it wasn’t designed to sustain a conflict of this intensity, a military analyst told The Wall Street Journal.
Taras Chmut, a military analyst who’s the head of the Come Back Alive Foundation, which has raised money to purchase and provide arms and equipment to Ukraine, said that “a lot of Western armor doesn’t work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity.”
“If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn’t perform,” he said.
Chmut went on to say Ukraine’s Western allies should instead turn their attention to delivering simpler and cheaper systems, but in larger quantities, something Ukraine has repeatedly requested, the newspaper reported.
So… Basically, it’s not designed for use in a peer engagement?
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How’s that working out in Ukraine?
The Abrams was basically designed to take down insurgents in the Middle East lol
Considering the project that led to the Abrams was approved in 1973, it’s pretty clear who it was designed to fight.
The modern M1A2 came out in 1992, after the Gulf War. It’s something like 10 tons heavier than the original M1.
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The Abrams has seen action in… Iraq? Afghanistan? Both places where the US had complete superiority fighting against decidedly non-Soviet and non-Russian crews.
You could have put a Sherman covered in modern armour and with a modern gun and it would have done fine in Iraq and Afghanistan.
no, it’s because the core doctrine and design (at least of the leopard 1/2) is to use them in defensive battles against larger numbers of tanks - that was the entire NATO strategy in western Europe during the cold war, when all of that hardware was designed
not for rolling into unknown territory and getting hit by entrenched infantry AT, as Turkey discovered a few years ago
But… Isn’t that LITERALLY the exact doctrine the Nazis used to design their Tigers and Panthers?
The same tanks that, by the end of the war, were both outclassed and outnumbered by Soviet and American designs?
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If you trust what Congress keeps trying to ram down your throat, China.
First of all a “military peer” just means a nation that has similar military capabilities/power as oneself. And right now China is the only military peer to NATO, that is just a fact.
Second China is also positioning itself as a military adversary to NATO and its allies in many ways. And that is not the interpretation of “congress”, that is geopolitical reality.
China lacks capability to project power basically anywhere. Their north is covered by Russia (lol) and Mongolia (neutral and without significant marginal value). Their south is a dense jungle that’s basically impossible to properly invade (see: Vietnam, Korea, Vietnam 2). Their southwest is boxed in by the Himalayas that are literally the world’s biggest wall. Invading the west would basically be asking for ETIM 2. Invading over the ocean to the east is essentially impossible, and going from that straight into a densely-forested mountain or densely-populated city is even less possible.
China has no ways of being a military adversary because they, by geography, have no offensive options. The only thing China can feasibly go after is unpopulated “land” that’s basically free to claim.
You know the US is flanked on either side by oceans? Literally invading over an ocean is a thing we have been doing for over 100 years at this point.
Yeah, how’s that worked out?
Pulled out of Korea, pulled out of Vietnam, pulled out of Iraq, pulled out of Afghanistan.
The US achieves nothing through its invasions except (when successful) overthrowing a government and allowing a more corrupt and despotic government to take it’s place. Why would China want to do that?
Yeah, we didn’t pull out because it was impossible to wage a war there. We pulled out because it became clear that we can’t win the hearts and minds of a populace by bombing them into the stone age.
War has never been a problem for the US. Understanding local customs, elevating popular representative leaders and providing resources for reconstruction… that’s typically been the weak point.
Said right in the same paragraph without a hint of irony
War isn’t about killing people, it is about achieving strategic objectives. The former is literally how the nazis viewed warfare and was antiquated back then.