Expensive and terrible. Who said enshittification was limited to tech?
i saw this article on
and WOW the sheer cope in the comments…chiding ukraine for not appreciating the wunderwaffe enough
So, not only Ukrainians are “reverting to the soviet past” but also ask the same of the west? Ha.
welcome to another episode of “turns out, the communists were right all along”
Or the lib version: “The communists were wrong but here’s why it worked for them but won’t work for us”
Is this the same armour that these hawks plan to use in their war with China? These people can’t avoid telling on themselves. Everything they say is a contradiction.
To be fair, nobody ever claimed they were smart or good at what they do.
yeah turns out it doesn’t work as well when you don’t have uncontested air supremacy.
Seriously, check out recent US wargames where the simulate a war with China. They lose, and badly. NATO knows it’s strategy is outdated, the thing is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, capitalism and progress do not mix
NATO has really exposed itself as a paper tiger in this war.
I call bullshit. Leopards were created while Cold War was still running hot. What else were they designed for, if not for a direct confrontation with USSR?
What else were they designed for, if not for a direct confrontation with USSR?
They were designed to funnel tax dollars into the shareholders of defense manufacturers.
Whether the tanks work or not is irrelevant.
I think what the article is getting at is that they are “designed” for certain conditions, but it seems that there was limited testing done against mines, constant fire from AT guns, artillery, and drones like the article mentioned.
“designed for a direct confrontation with the USSR” is vague, it tricks you into missing the point. Those tanks were created when the main fear was that the USSR would try to steamroll all of western europe, because it objectively had the means to do so. Thus, Leopards were designed with a more defensive role in mind - one example of this is the lower reliance on autoloaders. Those tanks were thought to be fighting near home, where the benefits of having one extra crew member (the loader) far outweighted the downsides (the tank needs to be bigger and heavier to name one).
Russian tanks on the other hand make ample use of autoloaders. Russia also designed tanks that were meant to be fighting at home, but their thought process was different - Autoloaders allows for smaller tanks, which means more armor for less overall weight and better firerate.
But now, both those types of tanks are fighting on the offensive. In that condition an autoloader is a big advantage, and so is being smaller and lighter. Which means that Russian tanks are comparatively faring better than NATO vehicles.
This is just one of the many aspects that make western tanks perform worse than expected, i’m sure others can mention more. Just to name another issue for them, NATO always assumed that they would have air superiority while fighting - and in Ukraine they don’t.
What else was Russia’s military designed for, if not a direct confrontation with NATO
ATGMs and shaped charges on drones are always going to slice right through armor, especially the stripped down versions Ukraine is getting
And NATO knew of those, and has (supposedly) taken steps to counter them - just look at the huff and puff about “chobham armour”, and calling active protection “cope boxes”. But now apparently that doesn’t apply!
They were designed for WW2 style armour battles against numerically superior enemy. Note that this philosophy is exact the same one that failed in WW2 itself because it is exact same one that stand behind Tiger, Tiger 2 and even Maus, but considering the continuation between III Reich and West German military and industry i don’t think it is surprising.
Current war shows that the direct confrontation with a peer power look entirely different, like the article says, 5% of tanks are destroyed by the enemy tanks. NATO just didn’t had any opportunity to check their 50 year old projects, all the wars they’ve been waging were against much weaker militaries, and even their originally pretty faulty “against the T-XX” projects been influenced and changed by that.
