Dragon’s teeth – Stopping tanks in their tracks
tankhistoria.com
tankhistoria.com
Typically, you use obstacles in engagement area development as part of a defense. An obstacle that's not observed isn't valuable because it's easy to circumvent. You can probably use a bulldozer (guessing, I was light infantry, not a tanker) to breach the dragon's teeth relatively quickly so the obstacle doesn't have the intended effect. However, it's much harder to breach the dragon's teeth if someone is shooting at you. Now you need an armored bulldozer, or enough suppressing fire to cover the breach.
However, on top of the shame for what Russians are doing in Ukraine, the shame for how they are doing it is almost as disgracing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_Minefield_Breaching_Sys...
https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1590087764070268928
Video description: Drone video of a Russian armored column advancing when a mine-clearing vehicle gets hit, suffers earth shattering kaboom when the mine-clearing charge goes up.
> One of the best methods of overcoming these obstacles was by bulldozing soil over them.
I also thought about it before that point. But
> However, in many situations this was much easier said than done while under fire.
I didn't consider this. I'm only a keyboard tactician.
I'm not sure what the soldiers in the tank expected. Maybe they missed the "don't drive over obvious mines" day in tank school.
Drivers in cars in best conditions fail to notice things, so it is not all that surprising that Russian army soldier would not notice things.
Gotta show the grandpa the pretty picture. Grandpa loves war movies.
So the dragon's teeth are really just for show.
There's something very, very seriously wrong with the Russian military. Although that's really not a bad thing as far as Ukraine and the West are concerned.
I am pretty sure they've had them for a long time, not least because they did multiple river crossings, many successful. Their army is quite capable, and was already quite capable prior to the post-February wave of foreign support. For example in the air defense department, as far as Europe goes they were only second to Russia (though the missiles are starting to run out).
Ukraine was deeply integrated into the USSR and even Russian military industrial complex - shipbuilding (after Moskva sank the remaining best ships in the Black Sea Fleet are made in Ukraine, Mykolaiv I think), engines (both turbojet/turbofan and rocket), whole aircraft manufacturing (Antonov), assembly of armored vehicles ... The lead designer of R-7, the first serious space rocket and the reason why Russians think they won the space race, was a Ukrainian.
Still a very nice piece of history.
If you go town through Krefelderstraße there is a bunch of them on the buildings. The cathedral has some places with grenade shrapnel as well. Some iron gates around the city have little indents from bullets as well. There are a bunch of tanks abandoned in one of the forests to the south, near Brand. Some streets have "gaps" where houses were never reconstructed.
70 something years later and the destruction is still very much visible.
https://jessicalynnwrites.com/2021/03/see-tanks-in-germany-a...
They don't treat it as something ancient though, there is also modern part of it integrated into road [1], but nothing I could notice on highway though. Bear in mind this would protect Switzerland from an attack from France, which these days seems... unprobable.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toblerone_Line_road_...
All I can say is I would rather be an infantryman than a tank operator. Seems way too easy to be a sitting duck given the effectiveness of anti-tank missiles. Honestly I don't really understand the need for manned tanks in any case. Why couldn't they just be operated remotely, and then put your actual soldiers in more nimble forms of transport?
You're only asking part of a question. It's not whether the tank as a piece of equipment is universally useful, but does an army have a battlefield doctrine that uses tanks well.
A tank in general is a useful piece of equipment. It's a bunch of firepower, sensors, and radios all under armor while being highly mobile. A tank can see enemy forces a long ways away, shoot at them, then coordinate with friendly forces to also shoot at the enemy.
Tanks however aren't invulnerable. They also end up with poor situational awareness when the crew is all buttoned up under armor. So tanks just sent out by themselves with no infantry support find themselves big obvious targets for enemy infantry with effective anti-tank weapons.
If an army's doctrine keeps tanks in good repair, well supplied, and uses them in concert with supporting forces they can be amazingly effective. If instead an army's doctrine doesn't value logistics and presumes tanks are invulnerable they can be laughably ineffective.
Russia has been demonstrating laughably terrible battlefield doctrine. They're losing as many tanks to their own ineptitude as they are to enemy action. Their performance isn't an indictment against tanks as a weapon but Russia's particular doctrine and military practices.
The Russians are really bad at doing the things necessary to protect themselves. They're all buttoned up. There are a ton of pictures where they're essentially ambushed while in parade formation, rather than how you'd be on a road in a hostile area.
I feel like the next major war will be swarms of Slaughterbots[1] but with thousands of anti-materiel drones, as well as the hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel ones.
If you can't achieve a near-hermetic control of the airspace, anything outside, and much inside is minutes from bring speared by jets of molten metal.
And even then, the cost of intercepting them is far higher then the cost of sending multiples until the anti-drone ammunition runs out (and meanwhile any electronic warfare emitter is being hammered by radiation-seeking weapons).
As for unmanned tanks, these have been explored time and again but they don't really work well. Truly autonomous tanks are extremely difficult to implement compared to say UAVs because it's very difficult to navigate. Remote control relies on reliable communication which is pretty difficult to achieve, especially if your adversary is being supported by a more technologically advanced superpower. You basically need a tank crew in another armored vehicle very nearby. This armored vehicle is still vulnerable so you're risking soldiers lives and those soldiers are basically doing twice the work operating and maintaining two vehicles instead of one, plus consuming twice the fuel, without doubling the firepower.
Because that is their doctrine, the rest is inconsequential. It's how they train to fight, how they are supposed to fight, what they produced to fight.
There is no infantry push in Russia doctrine, it is developed around crossing Europe in debilitating strikes. You push gaps with mechanized units, filtrate deep and leave town behind you, keeping the front moving and causing the enemy line to fragment, while infantryman behind deliver the siege to the cities as needed. It's built around being the aggressor, stocks deep and then consolidate.
What people see happening here it's just their doctrine playing out exactly as written.
It is quite outdated and it's receiving lot of attrition, but still.
The rest is the logic behind why they chose that doctrine.
I can make as concession that their doctrine mutated in the 00s, incorporating parts of the full spectrum warfare system of battle, even if it's a partial adoption since there doesn't appear to be a full loop between the different corps, and it that they aimed at superior firepower integration with other corps. but while the operations are planned and executed in cooperation with differnt systems of weapons but without the flexibility of a closed loop between the infantry advancing and the other supporting weapons system
that russia planned it's doctrine around not being able to support logistic is, well, wrong. their doctrine focus on aggressive pushes to keep enemy weapons systems away from the major cities, which all are westward of it's territory, and aim to push away the front line so that russian defensive lines can advance and have time to intercept whichever threat the enemy launches. they don't have the luxury of oceans, so the idea is push aggressively irregardless of attrition, occupy with reservist and deploy forward defences, because otherwise the cities, along with the infrastructure and factories needed for the war effort would be at risk.
their doctrinal documents are available, btw, so one just need to find a traduction and read it.
In general, I don't disagree with your post, but even "cheap" RPG-7 (or a more modern, NATO equivalent) would be an effective method of, if nothing else, slowing enemy tanks. In general, "boom wtf was that" is going to stop an advance even if it doesn't kill the tank.
The premise of a tank is: it can move rapidly through almost any terrain, it carries heavy firepower, and it's armoured enough to be more-or-less invulnerable to a typical opposing infantryman. The first point remains as valid as ever. The second is more or less valid - there are more missiles flying around today's battlefields than ever before, but missiles are expensive; a tank gun doesn't make for cool videos but it can put fire on the target all day long. Artillery is also stronger than ever, particularly with drone spotting etc., but it's not really a replacement for direct fire.
So the big question, and the one that may ultimately spell the demise of the tank (at least in its current form), is how common weapons that can take out tanks are. Right now IMO the tank is still valid - anti-tank missiles are more common than ever, but it's not like they're standard-issue equipment. And defensive technology is improving too - modern ERA is very impressive, and can only really be fitted to armoured vehicles. If we reach a point where every infantryman carries a missile launcher then the tank will probably stop making sense, but we're not there yet.
Keep in mind that anything operating in battlefield conditions must be resilient. The entire situation is a constant stream of edge cases.
Also, don't look to Russia in Ukraine for an example of how tanks are used. Tanks are generally not meant to act alone. Either they're operating with a lot of other tanks, substantial supporting infantry, or both.
There are tons of other reasons as well, The Chieften, a former Tanker, has a good video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7T650RTT8
There's a guy who has been fighting on the Russian separatist side since 2014, who is responsible for comms and drones in his unit. He regularly makes long-winded posts about the specific issues that they face, and he had posted about tank/infantry comms several times, even before the all-out war:
The title of the second blog post that I've linked to is literally, "The story of how comms (and UAVs) were stolen from the Russian army".
How is this not an issue for airborne drones?
That's one of the main reasons why the US military continues to spend heavily on manned tactical aircraft. The Air Force is actually decommissioning some MQ-9 and MQ-4 drones in order to free up funds for purchasing more 5th and 6th generation manned fighters. Airborne drones will continue to play a role, but until we make some major leaps in AI they will only be able to handle very limited missions.
The main point seems to be that it is not about vulnerabilities. It is about capabilities.
No current system can do what a tank can. A pickup full of Javelins can’t roll over, take, and hold ground. An infantryman is about as vulnerable it gets. And yet, humans continue to run about and will do so for a long, long time.
You still should be tank operator rather than infantryman.
If you are in a tank people who have AT missiles can shoot at you. If you are outside the tank ANYONE can shoot and kill you.
Yes there's a lot of videos of tanks blown up. But that's because of their high propaganda value and relative ease of capturing videos (new AT have command center further away = safer)
Fun interview with a Vietnam-era vet here:
https://operationcode.org/podcast#dick-sonderegger-link
He said he wanted to fly close air support in 'Nam. The Marines said, "No, you're going to be a computer programmer."
Maybe tanks will still have a place in warfare, but I doubt they'll be as ubiquitous as before?
Destroying buildings takes a lot of shots so it is often very hard to push those structures. Since the damage is not used on the more dangerous units.
Actually that is quite similar to the real thing because obstacles like dragon teeth need active protection from troops behind as well.
Otherwise it is quite easy to move some engineers up end place some explosives or dig dirt over them.
From watching pros play, an early wall-off can be vital. At their level of play, slipping in 1 to 3 combat units can have devastating early effect. Terrans can easily solve this by including a supply depot in their wall, which can be raised or lowered at the push of a button. Or a building that can lift off and reposition.
Another take: Especially in a Terran vs Zerg game, the Zerg's creep kind of acts like an inverse blockade. Since Zerg units move faster on it, and the Zerg player will have vision of what's on the Creep, the Terran will often prefer to slow-crawl their siege tanks and etc closer, and be forced to use resources to clear out the Creep before moving too far in. Stronger Terran players can often be proactive about pushing back Creep, and have an easier time applying pressure.
For those who don't know, Creep is a purple-ish goop that covers the map terrain (requires active effort to propagate), and Zerg are bug-looking alien things that grow out of eggs. Terrans are the humans.
I always thought this was why Starcraft didn't have those: why complicate things when people can just use supply depots anyway.
But it's easy to over generalize what he's saying.
It's absolutely best practice for modern infantry to improve their defensive posture while staying in place. You can see this by the extensive trench system both sides of the Ukraine war have constructed whenever positions get fixed for even a relatively short period of time.
What is often forgotten about the Maginot Line is that... it worked, it did exactly what it was supposed to. The failure was in French military leadership, largely for reasons that probably would have played out the same without the Maginot Line (e.g., refusal to believe intelligence reports, slowness in response, etc.).
Nowadays it's still used as a French expression to describe a "seemingly impassable defense that's useless in the end".
It's kind of like building a giant fence around an area, then leaving an opening in the middle of it, and then deciding that you don't need to have people guard that opening. And when people inevitably get through the large unguarded opening, you declare that fences are idiotic and useless.
Just because political concerns ruin your tactic, doesn't mean those political concerns aren't real. The Maginot line was great tactically, but worse than useless strategically, because it completely failed to achieve it's big-picture objective - keeping the Germans out of France.
Either way it's a moot point. As I said, the Ardennes would have been an effective barrier if it was better defended. You can't leave an unguarded opening in your fence and then declare that fences are useless.
Yes, France still fell in the end. Static defenses weren't able to overcome weak leadership, but - importantly - it's mobile forces weren't able to overcome it either. In the end the mobile forces ended up being _much_ more susceptible to poor leadership than the static defenses, leading to a large chunk of the army getting disastrously cut off (and the need to get evacuated from Dunkirk).
For a little bit, anyway. But what does that actually mean? I often wonder what would have happened had Germany not pursued genocide, and just stopped at France. It's not like the French people would magically turn German overnight. Would the resulting entity end up like a confederacy?
Same reasoning with Napoleon, too. What if they had stopped before the Russia disaster?
Though I wonder if Hitler could have made things worth if he had not started the Eastern front. (I'm not clear on how that started, and Stalin wasn't to be trusted)
It wasn't a game ender for WW2. But could it still be useful now to supplement a modern approach?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France#Central_front
Quick summary: The French Army's high command was stuporhumanly slow and weak in their response to the German attack through the Ardennes (just north of the north end of the Maginot line). Especially considering how quickly the German Army had conquered Poland less than a year earlier. And had conquered Denmark just one month before. And was wrapping up the conquest of Norway at the same time as they started attacking France...
If you know in advance that your soldiers are solid (and the French soldiers were) but your military high command will be worse than useless - then relying on fixed fortifications is actually the best possible national strategy. Your good soldiers can hold out for a while in the fortifications, taking (mostly) not-too-horrible casualties, without needing any orders from or action by your brain-dead high command.
For Lord Gort - it wasn't his country, he'd only been appointed to command the B.E.F. the prior September, and he'd been shuffled through a lot of different jobs in the prior decade. (Including time spent in China and India - hardly useful experience for WWII in Europe.) Still, Gort and his immediate subordinates got their sh*t together, moved fast and made good decisions in very new, chaotic, and challenging circumstances, and did extremely well.
For Gamelin & Co. - it was their country, defending it against a German invasion had been their d*mn-obvious Job # 1 since at least the German invasion of the Rhineland (March 1936), and they'd been building the Maginot line since 1930. Yet their performance in the event was laughably slow and weak even by the 1914 standards of French General Joseph Gallieni. (Who had been recalled from retirement, was in obvious poor health, and had served most of his career in French overseas colonies.)
The naive analysis just looks at the military effectiveness of the options. But there may be political implications. Perhaps if country B spends the money on tanks, that gets noticed in country A. That changes the politics in country A and lets the Fighters there persuade their own Peace-niks that more "defense" spending is needed. Whoops! The money that country B spends on tanks doesn't help defend country B as much as you would expect, if in unleashes counter-spending in country A.
What about country B spending the money on static defenses? That could help Peace-niks in country A push for cuts in country A's "defense" spending. That would multiply the effectiveness of country B's spending on static defenses.
I don't think it worked like that with the Maginot Line. Nevertheless, what a General says about military effectiveness misses part of the story.
It denied the best line of attack to the enemy.
The mistake was relying on the terrain of the unfortified Ardennes to deny a line of attack through the Low Countries.
Patton hisself was rather caught out by the same thinking in the winter of 1944.
On a more serious note, while Patton wasm't in charge, he was still a high ranking General and had some influence.
Also, as sibling says, good luck hammer-drilling under fire.
Once placed into a hole or crack, you don't need to hang around to do anything.
The reason for the hammer drill is to make holes in the dragon's teeth to put the Dexpan into. For that, you only a minute per tooth, and it doesn't matter where you put the hole, so you can use the teeth as cover from defensive fire while you drill.
A snazzy demo video for an anti-personnel artillery round: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G18Rwoa7c1kt25
The demo starts at :20 or so.
Edited cause voice to text can be dumb
The ones near me even have a little plaque describing the date on which they were laid.
https://s.geo.admin.ch/9b8456f6ad (a topographic map)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niesen
I live not far away therefore I immediately knew it. I verified it with a reverse image search.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panzersperre_in_Wimm...
Plus, let's be honest...they really love blowing things up.
Weapon systems are not obsolete just because they can be defeated--warfare is not a case where one weapon system just totally creams everything else, but closer to a rock-paper-scissors scenario where nothing is truly dominant. Tanks are not useless because they are easily defeated in some scenarios, but rather, tanks are useful as "part of the complete package". For example, tanks proved to be a critical component to the successful Ukrainian operation that led to the Russian rout in Kherson Oblast a few months ago.
Not really. War is unbalanced and the metagame is strict. Weapon systems do get obsoleted if they can be defeated cheaply and easily. But, when you have weapons, you tend to use them. The Russian meta is to hide behind a wall of meat shields and blow shit up with artillery from further back. The Ukranian meta is to... blow shit up with longer range artillery and then when the enemy is so weakened, demoralized, underequipped, and dead; rush them with vehicles and artillery.
In this war long range artillery is the thing that matters. In a war against the US, you would see a lot of elements downplayed simply due to a capable airforce.
Also I think you meant Kharkiv
That was the primary tactical doctrine in 1919. In fairness it started with "rush them with infantry", but that was countered with static defenses. Which was then countered with tanks (your statement). Which was countered with anti-tank weaponry. Which was countered with infantry. Which was countered with mechanized infantry. Which was countered with mobile artillery. Which was countered by aircraft. Which was countered with.. Seeing a pattern here?
As I understand it, this is not quite accurate. Trenches are pretty resilient to artillery fire. Especially shitty WWI artillery. Trench rushes tended to be pretty effective, but it was very difficult to solidify any gains because the enemy would always have a second line of trenches to quickly counterattack while you were inevitably overextended. The modern precise artillery and intel of the west at least is effective on an entirely different level where supply lines far behind the front are in danger.
> Seeing a pattern here?
That military tech evolves? I mean, yeah, obviously. The claim being addressed here is that things don't become obsolete. Many things do.
Ah yes, I did mix up Kherson and Kharkiv.
You do everything you can to make your troops as mobile and fast to respond as possible, then you keep moving around and probing until you find a place where the enemy isn't ready for you. Exploit that, then move the battle somewhere else while the enemy scrambles to adapt.
Ukraine has been doing exactly that in this war. Russia has enough trouble keeping their units supplied when they're in neat deployments - expecting them to be able to respond to multiple probing attacks along an extended front while maintaining force in all the areas not currently under attach is impossible for them.
Infantry can disperse to defeat the weapon systems you're thinking about. That's where tanks currently really struggle.
Tanks have been overmatched for some time both in the open, and in the close, in both conventional and unconventional conflicts, and we don't really seem to have major ideas to solve that (with the exception of active protection, which only works against an unsophisticated enemy as you're broadcasting your position.)
Also - I said 'where they go forward from today' - I didn't say they were useless.
I predict that the "tank" of the future will have a smaller main gun and thinner armor. Instead of slugging it out toe-to-toe with enemy armored vehicles and fortifications it will hang back and locate targets using it's own drones plus data links from other platforms. Then attack those targets using indirect fire missiles and suicide drones. Crews will be smaller, probably just two, with the option to operate temporarily uncrewed under remote control or with some limited autonomy. Survivability will be provided through high mobility, some low-observability (stealth) technology, EW, and updated active protection systems. Think of a mini "frigate" driving around on land.
Missiles on tanks have been a thing for decades and really don't add much value. Main gun rounds are much cheaper, and you'll always need something that can blow up fortifications. And crew size can't really get much lower than 3 (four is really optimal) because of pulling guard duty, maintenance etc. Replacing a tread with two guys leaves no one to pull security watch.
Modern top-attack ATGMs have become so lethal that no amount of armor is going to be effective. So if tanks are going to continue having a role in high-intensity conflicts then they need to avoid getting hit. That means hanging back and using off-board sensors and stand-off weapons instead of direct fire cannons. This will be tremendously expensive, but still cheaper than the alternative. Again mimicking the evolution of surface warships.
Future armored units are going to contain a mix of manned and unmanned combat vehicles. So they're going to have to figure out a way to do maintenance on vehicles with zero crew. Probably by having extra maintainers follow behind in transport and engineering vehicles. Sure this will slow down some work, but what's the alternative?
And you can't wave away the flaws of the Leo 1 as being too early for its time. The trend has been 180º in the opposite direction.
Focusing on top attack weapons is missing the forest for the trees. There are numerous weapons that can destroy a tank:
- Mines - Artillery, both unguided and guided - ATGMs, whether top attack or side. All can penetrate most armor if they hit. - SMAW/RPG etc - Air launched unguided rockets - Anti-tank grenades dropped by COTS drones - Ad infinitum
Yet no military (including Ukraine) is saying they don't want tanks, only armchair generals who see another RMA in the mist. There's a saying "Ships are safe in a harbor, but that's not what ships are for." Trying to make sure a tank is invulnerable ends up being a fool's errand. Use them appropriately, and they'll be fine.
Right - at which point it's not really a tank and is more of a normal AFV.
Modern war (what NATO does, not what Russia does) has radar sharing, so one radar behind the lines, or in an airplane well behind the lines - shares the information to everyone. Just a few well hardened/defended radars it all you need, nobody else is using active radar.
No, these systems have vehicle mounted radars. You can't network that - they are responding in sub-millisecond times.
> nobody else is using active radar.
You're bonkers. Trophy. Arena. Quick Kill. All active radar.
The truth is the tank was never meant to be invulnerable piece of military hardware but one that can withstand small and medium calibre arms and shrapnel/fragmentation while also delivering direct fire to a front line location. In that regard there is nothing that can replace it yet and will continue to be used.
[0] https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/the-tank-is-not-obsolete-a...
When your weapon costs >10x more than the weapon needed to eliminate it with near-100% certainty, your weapon is obsolete. Tanks for the memories.
Humans are also vulnerable to bullets yet we still use them on the battlefield. Cost of bullet vs human is probably a bit more than 10x.
There are no perfect weapons, tanks are vulnerable to ATGMs but if used correctly will overrun an ATGM positions. Ita a game of rock papper sciscors but with more than three options :D.
There are cases within the the last few years such as the siege of Marawi where small arms attacking armoured vehicles sensors disabled the vehicles.
But an AFV can do this.
You may have meant an IFV, and in some cases those work. But that's like saying that a rifle and a machine gun both shoot bullets, so why would you want a machine gun?
https://www.forces.net/news/whats-difference-between-armoure...
Yeah many AFV are undergunned compared to a tank, and we can always want more firepower and more armour, but trade-off on support and things like that starts to break down.
The point is if you say you want ‘protected mobility and direct fire to support infantry’ then you don’t need a tank, you just need any AFV.
People normally want tanks for anti-tank - well that may well be better done by infantry for the foreseeable future - and for shock action, but that doesn’t seem to work brilliantly in the current environment either as in most environments it’s going to be the tank getting the shock not you.
Anti-tank can't be the only role for anti-tank, by the way, or they never would have been invented. I don't buy that line of argument at all.
I didn't say tanks only did anti-tank - I said they also do shock action. It's the only reason they exist in that it's the only thing that they are needed for that you couldn't do with another AFV.
> defeated by these basic WW2 obstacles, and currently completely overmatched by anti-tank weapons. The best chance of active protection systems from here rely on always-on active radar which means you're lighting yourself up.
does not apply equally well to AFVs? If the answer is "none", why are you talking about AFVs as if they're going to survive longer than tanks? Other vehicles than AFVs can be build to carry troops into battle, if it turns out armor is a bad tradeoff, just as surely as other machines could be designed to provide direct fire support. But a bunch of infantry in a can is always going to be a great target for a Javelin, right?
The reason the Russians are getting sandbagged is because they aren't doing combined arms; In some areas they have tanks, and infantry, but no artillery coordination. Arty is the best counter to ATGM teams, but you have to have the barrels, the field observers to aim it, all in coordination with the tanks and infantry (so you don't smack them). In other areas they have tons of infantry and artillery, but no tanks so they can't really advance.
Russia's BTG design isn't really around tanks, but instead AFVs. They use tanks as fire support for infantry, but the average battalion only started the war with around 10 tanks (vs 40 IFV). Of course some units were understrength, (and now much worse).
This makes the BTG very brittle when opposing forces have matching tanks and good ATGMs. Combine this with poorly trained infantry, and all those IFVs are just wasted.
Like what do you think they should do? Walk everywhere?
> Arty is the best counter to ATGM teams
I don't think so. These teams are tiny and dispersed. How would you find them, and how would you fix them, in order to bring on guns? Ability to FFS these teams is a major issue (also not solved well by tanks!)
Countering ATGM teams (whether crewed vehicles or dismounts) relies on scouting (both recon and UAV) to find them. That is hard. Often times you'll stumble into a cauldron where your advance turns into a reconnaissance by fire. Then you fix with artillery, and finally have your infantry kill them. This is hard when fighting a well-trained and well equipped opponent. But the Russians aren't even trying.
It's not like the Ukrainians have great gear. These are guys driving around in technicals and ATVs, lightly protected, and using ATGMs to great effect. They're not winning because they have great ATGMs, they're winning because they have the battlefield intelligence to be able to operate quickly and with less protection.
In areas where they have had less success (Kherson mostly until now) they've had trouble with scouting, and the Russians have been more fortified. As those defensive lines break down and they lose their LOCs, they become easier to exploit.
Ok.
But if you go back to the start of the thread I didn't say that and I'm not sure anyone else did either! I said 'interested to see where they go next'!
> It's not like the Ukrainians have great gear.
They do have Western MRAPP for example (saw a photo of an Ridgeback surviving a Russian ambush.)
Yes, the West has been slowly supplying vehicles[1], but most of the St. Javelin success was early during the assault on Kiev where TDF units crushed the Russian spearhead, riding in ATVs, trucks, whatever they could find. Since then they've been getting handmedowns from the West, which is glad to be rid of their MRAPPs due to high operating costs.
[1] The West has been terrible in general about supplying AFVs to Ukraine. Other than old M113 and ancient Soviet gear, they seem hesitant to supply anything remotely modern. Germany has even balked at supplying Leo 1s that have been outdated since the late 60's/early 70's.
Whoah there. That's not what I said. I don't think I've used that word once. I said I was interested in seeing where they go next.
The UK sent Ridgeback MRAPP, and Ukraine seem happy, based on Tweets, with the protection they're giving in practice. Yes they were sent as they were being withdrawn anyway due to restructuring, but they were only about ten years old!
In my opinion, AFVs are better suited for situations where speed is more important than the absolute firepower of a tank.
I (like a lot of people) don't see it adding up at the moment and are interested where they'll have to develop to add up again. I don't think that's even a particularly controversial opinion amongst experts?
Most experts actually believe that tanks are still valuable and that Russia's army is using them like idiots.
The Chieftan disagrees with you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7T650RTT8
I suspect he has more practical and theoretical knowledge on the topic than the sum total of all posters on this thread.
Other weapon systems do go completely obsolete over time - it's not a truism that all claims of obsolesce are wrong.
Also - I said 'where they go forward from today' - I didn't say they were obsolete.
Because these systems have to work in formation without interfering with each other, they use pseudo random noise like signals and correlation based receivers. They're also mmw systems working at short range. It's not quite the suicidal beacon you're assuming, because it ends up the folks who design this stuff are in fact aware of the principle of emissions control.
I misread your comment to mean flames/burning stuff (not weapons fire), and wanted to pause for a moment to admire your approach to life.
:)
The purpose is to force enemy to spend time and effort dealing with the obstacle, while you direct fire on them.
This doesn't seem accurate.
While searching for a video that shows a tank trying to go over (unsuccessful), I found a video showing three ways to get over them, and only the explosives would take a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRld768HDyc
Anchored concrete blocks can be made more difficult to move than the dirt under the tracks.
This occurred on many occasions during WWII.
So not really that good at stopping tanks?
Fwiw the idea here is bandwidth-minimisation. I.e.: you only incur the image download cost if you choose to scroll. It's common practice on a lot of article/blog/content websites.
That said it's possible to implement this in a "graceful" way (where the mechanism only kicks in if JS is enabled & JS-less users just download all images at once), but this best practice is sadly rarely followed as it is admittedly somewhat more complex to implement.
This can fail and increase the bandwidth used if you only have a couple of images or have users on very fast connections.
I've seen it done by sending the image tag, and at the end of the document scanning the DOM for marked image tags and changing the URL specified to a low-quality copy (much smaller data size but looks a little like the image) or a small place-holder (perhaps even a data:url image) with the original getting put back when the image is visible (or about to be). The issue being that with a small number of images or a fast connected user the main large files start loading before the HREF attribute is updated and the transfer is not aborted when it is changed so the user always loads both the main and place-holder image. You can improve this plan a little by emitting the JS to alter each relevant image tag immediately after it, but that can cause multiple-reflow/-repaint issues.
> admittedly somewhat more complex to implement
Aye, and sometimes it is simply worth losing a few viewers to save a bit of faf. Though care should be taken with regard to collateral damage: as with all methods that exclude people who have chosen to have JS turned off this can easily exclude those with accessibility issues which is far less acceptable.
> where the mechanism only kicks in if JS is enabled
Of course there is now a commonly available method of doing lazy loading built-in so that is the best way to go, for those few with an ancient or otherwise alternative browser that doesn't support the feature yet the images just load immediately: https://caniuse.com/loading-lazy-attr. You can augment this is JS for those that have it turned on if you wish, perhaps on long documents implementing early-lazy loading (start the load when the user scrolls to within on display-window of content rather than when first visible) by removing the lazy attribute at an appropriate time detected using the same methods as you do for entirely manual lazy loading support, or using the replace-with-low-res-copy method in place of attribute based lazy-loading when JS is available.
for (let img of document.querySelectorAll('img')) if (img.dataset.ezsrc) img.src = img.dataset.ezsrc