Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohgodplsno | Hacker News Reader

France has 222 active Leclercs, with 260 more in storage. Around 400 AMX variants too. Russia has around 300 known T90s, which are the real threat that matches a Leclerc. The rest are T80s, T72s and older, which, while absolutely dwarfing the french numbers, forgets about a tiny thing: they are absolutely _awful_ tanks compared to modern stuff. A Leclerc will happily shrug off T72s.

Additionally, Rafales are more than a strong contender to Russia's Su35. A dozen Reapers too, for good measure.

France isn't the world's fifth military power and one of the biggest seller of weapons for no reason.

View on HN

> forgets about a tiny thing: they are absolutely _awful_ tanks compared to modern stuff.

The USSR beat the much better Nazi tanks through sheer numbers, at some point the numbers advantage overcomes the quality advantage.

Numbers, yes, but also quality. The T-34 when it appeared shocked the Germans. While it had significant flaws the basic tank characteristics like armor, firepower and mobility were very good for the time.

The Germans thought so highly of the T-34 that they thought of cloning it, but came to the conclusion that designing a new tank to counter it was in the end a more feasible idea. This process eventually resulted in the Panther, often thought to be the best tank of the entire war. Although in practice it was beset by reliability issues, and of course it was too little too late in general by then.

Getting back to the original topic, the lesson seems that for tank vs tank combat, large numbers of good enough tanks win the day. Now, the T-72 did disastrously poorly in the Gulf war, but OTOH apparently 'domestic' USSR T-72's have better armor to begin with than the export versions used in Iraq, and further upgraded ones with more armor and modern sensors might be a much harder nut to crack.

Germany also had huge problems getting fuel for anything, really. They used a lot of horses for artillery. Building a huge number of tanks may not have worked out for them. When they couldn't reach Soviet oil fields, it was over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com