Thanos Thanos:
xerxes xerxes:
Agree with most of that. But it's far too soon in history & technology to say armour is redundant. The US, Britain, Germany, France, Israel, or any other Western power would certainly not use their armour in the completely moronic way the Russians, Arabs, and Chinese too (probably) have used their. The latter still thinks of armour as nothing more than a hammer to bash an opponent to death. Their thinking hasn't evolved beyond the Third Reich's blitzkriegs of 1939 to 1943, even though it was obvious that defense-in-depth, combined-arms, massed anti-tank guns, and infantry armed with the first generation of tank-killing MANPADs had made the blitzkrieg obsolete. The infantry-protecting-armour & armour-supporting-infantry reality is still as alien to the Russians and their wasteful attitude today as it was in 1945 when German troops with panzerfaust RPGs laid waste to thousands of Soviet vehicles during the final drive from Warsaw to Berlin. The Soviets only won their part of the war due to overwhelming numbers and from the Germans running out of fuel, not due to any superiority in battlefield tactics. The only thing more fatal to the average Soviet soldier in WW2 was than their Nazi opponents was their own destructive and wasteful leadership.
The Russians haven't learned a thing since 1945, mostly because they don't care to. The image still stuck in their heads, courtesy of their own bullshit WW2 propaganda films, is the one of their tank armies overwhelming Germany in 1944/45. And they gave that same mentality to the Arabs they supplied weaponry too, who despite their own sizable strength (on paper anyway) were consistently shredded to pieces when their armour got annihilated by the Israelis and the Americans/British. And, also, despite the never-ending panicky warnings put out in our own defense-related media over the last six decades about the "overwhelming" danger presented to us by new Soviet/Russian equipment, it invariably turns out that Russian-built vehicles are complete & total shit fit only for terrifying civilians. When they encounter Western-built armour they get destroyed in the same overwhelming ratios of 10/12/15 to one, just like they were in World War Two against the Germans.
The battle tank will be around for a very long time. The American depleted-uranium and British Chobham armour dictates that Western armour will be superior in protecting for the conceivable future. Ukraine is turning out for the Russians just like the Arab-Israel wars or Desert Storm/OIF did for the Muslim dictatorships. Western-built will always beat Russian crap, period. And the former superiority the likes of the Russians had in terms of numbers is something of the long ago past, and something as well they're not capable of returning to because they no longer have a gigantic industrialized war economy to provide them those numbers. Russia is a state in a massive decline on all levels, including in their ability to win a fight against a determined & much better armed opponent.
Agreed, and unlike the Russians, I'm sure most western armies also noticed how Turkey lost a company's worth of Leopard 2s a few years back when they sent them into an urban area in northern Syria unsupported by infantry.
The other issue is that Russian air defence completely sucks - they should have complete and utter air superiority over Ukraine, yet somehow despite a roughly 10 to 1 advantage in aircraft and SAM defences, they do not. In theory, there should have been no Ukrainian aircraft or drones in the skies a week into this conflict, nevermind a month later.
This war doesn't prove that armour is obsolete - it shows that the Russian Army is a paper tiger, with lousy doctrine, poorly trained troops, and terrible logistics.
CKA Moderator 
CKA Moderator 
