Tervell

take a walk in the open and clear their heads... The rain is wonderfully invigorating,

Kadyrov says "touch grass". Or rain, I guess.

Ukrainians are still so strapped for artillery they're having to cobble together viable replacements for their dwindling forward artillery support

You know who anticipated the need for large amounts of self-propelled artillery? This obscure little country called the fucking Soviet Union, which developed a whole lot of SP artillery systems, like the 2S1 Gvozdika (over 10k manufactured) & 2S3 Akatsiya (around 4k). If only Ukraine was a former Soviet republic or something...

I actually decided to check this, since I assumed they must have inherited a whole lot of stuff from the Soviets, and was wondering what had happened to all of it:

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited one of the largest armies in Europe. Its armed forces had 780,000 troops, 6,500 tanks, 1,100 combat aircraft, and more than 500 ships

Wikipedia also adds a 7,000 figure for other non-tank armored vehicles (APCs and IFVs and so on, I assume these self-propelled guns would be counted towards that as well), although I'm not sure what the source for that is.

At the beginning of 2013, the Ukrainian military had downsized compared to its Soviet predecessor, comprising 184,000 soldiers, roughly 700 tanks, 170 combat aircraft, and 22 warships

They actually do still have around 300 of the 2S1, and another 300 of the 2S3, but I assume they probably had a lot more in 1991, given that the Soviets made over 10k of the 2S1, and it was even designed in fucking Kharkov, so they must have inherited some of the factories and tooling for it too.

So, uh, yeah, don't do capitalism kids, it's bad for both your health and your supply of tanks. Ukraine probably got rid of more military equipment in the 90s than they've received as military aid now. And yeah, sure, it was Cold War Soviet vintage, but if you're going to be using your tanks as improvised artillery anyway, what would you rather have - a hundred fancy Western tanks that weight like 60 tons and burn a whole lot of fuel, or a thousand economical Soviet ones? (and I don't think they've even gotten that many modern Western tanks, most of the heavier military aid has just been upgraded Soviet equipment anyway! stuff that Ukraine would already have if it hadn't disappeared in what I assume were various Lord of War-esque shenanigans)

love how western media spent months going on about how Bakhmut is totally strategically insignificant, and now suddenly every tiny village and farmhouse in Bakhmut's general vicinity is somehow supposed to be important

literally doing "it's only strategically significant if Ukraine captures it"

Maybe he doesn't like planes?

embrace Belden-Juche thought

um actually he's not a conservative, he's a fascist

genocide is when there's camps

Uyghurs? well, there's camps, so it's genocide

dropping over half a million tons of bombs, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure until you've basically razed the entire country to the ground and bomber pilots end up just dropping their payloads on random fields since there literally isn't anything left to bomb? no camps, so it's all fine, just a bit of collateral damage

incredible enviromental destruction system (for the time)

I's honestly still pretty incredible, even today - it occasionally overpowers the game's engine when you blow up an entire building and have to wait like a minute for the game to recover (and running it on a modern system doesn't help, I assume it's single-threaded like a lot of older games, so modern CPUs in practice don't provide any extra power for it), but it's still very impressive.

I wish we lived in the timeline where simulationist stuff like this was further developed instead of everyone focusing on graphics fidelity, and Silent Storm and Red Faction: Guerilla were early examples that have since been surpassed, but unfortunately, they kind of are still the top-of-the-line, even after all these years... there's Teardown, I guess, but I don't know of many other modern games to have particularly extensive destruction.

Hammer & Sickle is a relatively obscure Russian turn-based tactics game, sort of a quasi-sequel to Silent Storm, which is somewhat better known.

It's 1949, you're a Soviet agent infiltrating into the Allied Occupation Zone and stumbling onto a neo-fascist plot to do a bunch of false-flag attacks and start WW3. It's pretty cool, but kind of janky and obtuse, and needs a bunch of mods to even run on a modern operating system.

"No two countries ruled by cousins have ever gone to war!"

I think something important to note with regards to the question of tanks' continued relevancy is: relevancy in what role? As the main battle tank, by definition, fulfills a bunch of different roles, its relevancy could be different depending on the role we're talking about. In the mechanized offensive role, indeed tanks face a lot of issues and are highly vulnerable - the reason why Western tanks are so heavy is precisely because they've realized how vulnerable tanks are, but are essentially stuck in the bargaining stage, continuously strapping on more and more armor and other upgrades, and kind of skipping over the question of "yeah, but how many of these fancy tanks can you actually field, given how much they'll cost with all these features?".

For the infantry support role, however, tanks are still relevant - during assaults, you'll always want to have some kind of cannon so you can fight harder targets, like bunkers and the like, and because indirect fire support is slow, difficult to coordinate and not necessarily the most accurate, you'll want the cannon to be on a vehicle so it can actually get close enough to the target for direct fire, and if you're going to be approaching the enemy, you'll want armor - and thus you've just reinvented the tank. The only thing that could truly make them obsolete in this role would be massive advances in the capabilities of indirect fire support - and admittedly, advances are happening, artillery has improved massively in range and accuracy, missile technology has allowed the development of a new form of artillery which can be even more precise (but admittedly, also a lot more expensive), and the profileration of drones now allows artillerymen to directly observe their targets, instead of having to rely on a guy kilometers away calling them on the radio, holding a crumpled map and trying to figure out which coordinates the enemy is at. So one might envision a future scenario where a high degree of digital integration and automation allows soldiers to actually do the Call of Duty thing of pulling out a little tablet, pointing at a target on it and having ordnance immediatelly delivered from cannons kilometers away, but sci-fi stuff like that is probably still a long way off, if even possible.

This predicament, however, entirely vindicates Soviet rather than Western tank design - making a tank that doesn't have all the fanciest capabilities, but is good enough, cheap, simple, reliable, something you can make a whole lot of, so that you have enough to attach a few to every infantry brigade and give them organic fire support capabilities. Westerners love to mock the Russians for pulling out various older tanks - except that for supporting infantry, those older tanks, with a few upgrades, are quite alright, and the key thing is that the Russians actually have equipment to pull out of reserve. Western militaries other than the US have absolutely fuck-all - most of their tank fleets are like 200-300 at most, and as this war is showing, you will suffer losses, it doesn't matter how fancy your wunderwaffe tank is, it's still going to get blown up. And if you have barely 300, your military industry has been thoroughly neoliberalized and can barely even make a dozen tanks a year, and those tanks are dependant on highly complex and fragile supply chains which will inevitably be disrupted in the event of a global conflict (and how much would these tanks really be worth without all their electronics and optics?), then... you have basically no means to actually fight a protracted war, your equipment will dry up in a month and then you'll just have nothing. Perhaps the Western obsession with fighting lighting-fast "shock and awe" wars is because they, deep inside, realize that they have no capability to actually fight a serious peer conflict for more than like a few weeks.

I doubt they'll be able to take that much weight off - the original pre-A1 Abrams was already 54 tons. I'm not too familiar with bridge weight limits, but the Japanese needed to bring their newest MBT down below 50 tons in order to make it viable for 84% of their bridges.

Americans realize that maybe making your tank weigh 65 tons isn't such a good idea

The U.S. Army is scrapping its current upgrade plans for the Abrams main battle tank and pursuing a more significant modernization effort to increase its mobility and survivability on the battlefield

“We must optimize the Abrams’ mobility and survivability” ... Weight is a major inhibitor of mobility, Norman said last fall. “We are consistently looking at ways to drive down the main battle tank’s weight to increase our operational mobility.”

American equipment in storage turns out to have been improperly maintained

Equipment drawn from the U.S. Army’s Kuwait-based pre-positioned stock bound for Ukraine was not ready for combat operations, the Pentagon’s inspector general has found.

All six of the M777 howitzers and 25 of 29 M1167 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles were not “mission ready” and required repairs before U.S. European Command could send the equipment to Ukraine

issues with poor maintenance and lax oversight of the [APS] equipment could result in future delays for equipment support provided to the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” the report read. “In addition, if U.S. forces needed this equipment, they would have encountered the same challenges.”

When the team arrived at Camp Arifjan in March 2022, the contractor provided a howitzer that it said was fully mission capable. But the weapon system was not maintained according to the standard technical manual, per the mobile repair team, and “ ‘would have killed somebody [the operator],’ in its current condition,” the report stated.

the commander stated the contractor “is not contractually obligated or appropriately resourced to maintain [APS] equipment” at standards laid out in the technical manual the inspector general followed to make determinations regarding mission-capable readiness of the equipment.

lol what the fuck? how can someone who's been hired to maintain your shit not be obligated to follow the manual for maintaining said shit? also imagine leaving the maintenance of your military equipment to fucking private contractors, truly capitalism is the most rational system