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War Got Weird

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32 pointspaulpauper10 comments

The whole anti-tank missile thing is far from new, the Israeli army used US dragons to fend off invading tank battalions during one of the $day wars. The only real difference is the dragon was wire guided while the newer ones are fire and forget (presumably).

And the type of small unit tactics the Ukrainians are using is pretty much all we trained on when I was in the 82nd Airborne at the tail end of the Cold War. Platoon/company level harassing actions was our bread and butter, light infantry isn’t well equipped to slug it out in open battle with armored units so hit and run is the name of the game.

Once the first gulf war rolled around they decided we needed to adapt our tactics and, as they say, you always train for the last war…

On a weird side note on my last trip over to Iraq as a civilian contractor we rolled through a sizable ambush and I couldn’t help but think my old platoon from the 82nd would have utterly destroyed our convoy but the attackers only managed to disable one vehicle with an RPG and got a couple minor hits on two others and there were a lot of tracers and RPGs flying around.

I mean, how hard is it to actually aim after spending all the time to set up a pair of sequential ambushes?

Which is probably the difference in the Ukrainians are actually using the gunsights they helpfully provide on all modern weapons.

Every serious change in the balance of offensive and defensive armament signals another sea of bloodletting, until some new balance is established making operations too dangerous to try. And then somebody executes on another idea, and off we go again.

The only thing that has ever stalled the gushing blood for long is commerce.

Uniquely, the cities of the Harappan culture in Pakistan and eastern India 5000+ years ago betray no hint of any military activity throughout their range, while wars of conquest raged in Mesopotamia.

Probably the Javelin missile could be made 10x cheaper and work just as well, but people don't want them to be that cheap.

I feel like I ought to note that there's no evidence of military activity (that I know of) in the IVC, but certainly evidence of violence: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/G_Robbins_Schug_Peaceful_2... . I wish it weren't the case, but it seems early Harappan scholars made the same error that early scholars of the Minoans did in concluding that the absence of evidence of violence implied the absence of violence itself. Of course, this doesn't mean that the IVC wasn't a relatively peaceful place compared with places like Sumer or Elam, like you said.

Military activity is not the only kind of violence.

I think evidence of military activity would involve obvious weapons and armor, which have generally been easy to recognize and easy to distinguish from e.g. hunting or ranching equipment. The paper linked notes a prevalence of head trauma, presumably with clubs. It doesn't suggest to me any pattern like religious sacrifice or criminal execution. So, the nature of the violence is hard to discern.

> The only thing that has ever stalled the gushing blood for long is commerce.

And religion.

Religion seems as or maybe more frequently to have been a driver of massacres. Ask the Albigensians.

The Chieftain recently had a video that discussed the relative effectiveness of anti-tank weapons in Ukraine: https://youtu.be/W9pVEP0AzZ4

TL;DW: too much is being made of the death of the tank when Russia's ineptitude at combined arms and the realities of urban warfare is likely a much larger factor.

The recent change of tactic from Putin makes sense. It's crazy to think that Russia can lose all tanks present in Ukraine due to advances in anti-tank weaponry.

The next phase would be the risk of losing all fighter jets over Ukraine due to anti-air advances.

If that doesn't scare Putin I'm not sure what will.

The British Starstreaks are looking very promising to do just that to ground support A/C.

https://nitter.net/Osinttechnical/status/1510094022970417160...

Starstreak is a terrifying weapon against the Russian helicopters in Ukraine. The Russians have 0 countermeasures they can use against it (if any exist at all).

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