Russo-Ukrainian War Video Tank Update for May 26, 2022
It’s been three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, and there’s more tank news coming out as the main theater has shifted to eastern Ukraine. Here’s a (mostly) video roundup of the news:
We hear a lot about Russia has 20,000 tanks (or some other crazy high number) in reserve. This guy went through satellite photos of all Russian tank storage yards and came up with an estimate of 6,000, only 3,000 of which appear as if they could be made battle ready. (A lot of the photos show hulks with their turrets off).
Did Russia’s First Tank Army lose 130 tanks in the Battle of Kharkiv alone?
Ukraine appears to have knocked out a Russian T-90M tank, the most modern Russian tank that’s actually been fielded:
(There’s still no sign of Russia’s T-14 Armata in-theater.)
Update: As of this writing, Russia has lost 729 tanks in Ukraine, and a total of 4,134 “vehicles” (including helicopters, UAVs, and even towed artillery pieces) in theater.
Is Russia demothballing T-62s to send to Ukraine?
Remember, the Soviets stopped manufacturing the T-62 in 1975, the same year that the Captain & Tennille and “Rhinestone Cowboy” topped the charts and The Rocky Horror Picture Show debuted in theaters…
Ukraine has also taken delivery of the Brimstone anti-tank missile from the UK:
Not a tank, but built on a T-72 chassis, is the Russian T-2 “Terminator,” which sports duel 30mm auto-cannons for close support of tanks in urban warfare.
That does look like it would but a world of hurt on urban defensive positions, but won’t be any more immune to NATO-sourced Ukrainian antitank weapons, and they reportedly only have a handful in-theater.
Also not a tank: Ukrainian forces take out a thermobaric (AKA “vacuum bomb”) missile launcher:
Turns out that the Russian military’s catastrophic performance in Ukraine is not a great advertisement for its weapon systems, and India is canceling some big deals.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2022 at 2:16 PM and is filed under Foreign Policy, Military, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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3 Responses to “Russo-Ukrainian War Video Tank Update for May 26, 2022”
It would be my read on this whole situation that what is going on is the invalidation of the entire Soviet and post-Soviet Russian military paradigm, that of the motorized rifle unit.
The Soviets conceived of the Infantry Fighting Vehicle as a means of conducting warfare on the contaminated chemical/nuclear battlefield. That’s the “why” of the BMP, which the US and others immediately copied as a means to “Keep up with the Jones’s…”.
My belief is that the entire IFV concept is itself a false path, an error in “how to conduct warfare”.
The root problem is this: There’s a series of compromises you have to make when designing a vehicle. The more crap you load on one, in terms of mission, the more you have to compromise the design. Which inevitably leads to compromise of the missions you can do, based on the inadequacies of the vehicles you’re issuing the troops.
The Bradley is quite often referred to as “The Bradley Fighting Barn”. Those bastards are huge. Park one next to a BMP, and the BMP looks like a Miata parked next to a Suburban. Ride around in a BMP for an afternoon, and you’ll think you’re in hell, especially if the vehicle is simulating what it would actually be doing in combat. You spend a day in a BMP, you’re probably combat-incapable for a good deal of time, which is why you see the crews all riding outside. They’re that small, uncomfortable, and intolerable. Bradleys, on the other hand, are a lot bigger. They’re tolerable, but not “great”.
The real problem is that multi-mission thing. You have a vehicle with a weapons system that can theoretically tackle tanks, a cannon you can blast smaller vehicles and positions with, and you’re hauling troops around. This leads to a set of interlocking issues, not the least of which is that by virtue of the fact you have a vehicle that can do anything, it can’t do anything particularly well. They have to be big enough to carry significant numbers of infantry; they have to haul enough ammo to be worthwhile; they have to be armored well enough to survive combat. This leads to a big ‘effing vehicle, no matter how you slice it.
The other problem is mostly tactical. I never once saw a situation while in training at the National Training Center wherein you’d want to have your Bradleys dropping the ramps and debarking infantry in the same location where you’d want to be doing your supporting fire for that infantry element on the assault of a position. For a commander, the IFV leads to a set of poor choices: Do I compromise my fire support with my organic assets, or do I make my infantry walk across the death zone between where I can fire from best and the objective…?
Then, there’s the question of what you do with the dismount infantry that belongs to the Bradleys doing fire support. Obviously, you can’t simply cross-load them over to the Bradleys assaulting the objective, because those are already full of their own infantry, and those vehicles will almost certainly not be in a good position to contribute to your fight with their weapons when they do drop their dismounts…
The whole concept is flawed, fundamentally so. We never should have copied the idiotic idea the Soviets had, with the IFV idea. You can see how well it works in Ukraine–There just aren’t enough infantry in those BMP units to do infantry tasks worth a damn, which is why those units are getting eaten alive by Ukrainian infantry in combat.
You need infantry. You don’t need an IFV, per se. What we should have done was plumped down for two different classes of vehicle–Something that could actually carry and protect significant numbers of infantry, and something else that could provide supporting fires separately. You almost never encounter a situation where you would want to be doing both missions from the same platform, but here we are. Idiocy abounds.
If it were me, we’d have an actual APC that could carry a minimum of an actual 12-man infantry squad, the size God intended. It’d be capable of moving fast, being uparmored for different threat levels, and only be armed for local protection when moving or dropping troops. There’d be something like a Russian Terminator built on a tank chassis with the missile and autocannon support weapons built in, and it’d be capable of actually going toe-to-toe with a tank, if need be. Plus, carrying a shed-load of well-protected ammo.
That’s the path of wisdom, as I see it. The Swiss Army Knife approach to vehicle design ain’t it. At. All.
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It would be my read on this whole situation that what is going on is the invalidation of the entire Soviet and post-Soviet Russian military paradigm, that of the motorized rifle unit.
The Soviets conceived of the Infantry Fighting Vehicle as a means of conducting warfare on the contaminated chemical/nuclear battlefield. That’s the “why” of the BMP, which the US and others immediately copied as a means to “Keep up with the Jones’s…”.
My belief is that the entire IFV concept is itself a false path, an error in “how to conduct warfare”.
The root problem is this: There’s a series of compromises you have to make when designing a vehicle. The more crap you load on one, in terms of mission, the more you have to compromise the design. Which inevitably leads to compromise of the missions you can do, based on the inadequacies of the vehicles you’re issuing the troops.
The Bradley is quite often referred to as “The Bradley Fighting Barn”. Those bastards are huge. Park one next to a BMP, and the BMP looks like a Miata parked next to a Suburban. Ride around in a BMP for an afternoon, and you’ll think you’re in hell, especially if the vehicle is simulating what it would actually be doing in combat. You spend a day in a BMP, you’re probably combat-incapable for a good deal of time, which is why you see the crews all riding outside. They’re that small, uncomfortable, and intolerable. Bradleys, on the other hand, are a lot bigger. They’re tolerable, but not “great”.
The real problem is that multi-mission thing. You have a vehicle with a weapons system that can theoretically tackle tanks, a cannon you can blast smaller vehicles and positions with, and you’re hauling troops around. This leads to a set of interlocking issues, not the least of which is that by virtue of the fact you have a vehicle that can do anything, it can’t do anything particularly well. They have to be big enough to carry significant numbers of infantry; they have to haul enough ammo to be worthwhile; they have to be armored well enough to survive combat. This leads to a big ‘effing vehicle, no matter how you slice it.
The other problem is mostly tactical. I never once saw a situation while in training at the National Training Center wherein you’d want to have your Bradleys dropping the ramps and debarking infantry in the same location where you’d want to be doing your supporting fire for that infantry element on the assault of a position. For a commander, the IFV leads to a set of poor choices: Do I compromise my fire support with my organic assets, or do I make my infantry walk across the death zone between where I can fire from best and the objective…?
Then, there’s the question of what you do with the dismount infantry that belongs to the Bradleys doing fire support. Obviously, you can’t simply cross-load them over to the Bradleys assaulting the objective, because those are already full of their own infantry, and those vehicles will almost certainly not be in a good position to contribute to your fight with their weapons when they do drop their dismounts…
The whole concept is flawed, fundamentally so. We never should have copied the idiotic idea the Soviets had, with the IFV idea. You can see how well it works in Ukraine–There just aren’t enough infantry in those BMP units to do infantry tasks worth a damn, which is why those units are getting eaten alive by Ukrainian infantry in combat.
You need infantry. You don’t need an IFV, per se. What we should have done was plumped down for two different classes of vehicle–Something that could actually carry and protect significant numbers of infantry, and something else that could provide supporting fires separately. You almost never encounter a situation where you would want to be doing both missions from the same platform, but here we are. Idiocy abounds.
If it were me, we’d have an actual APC that could carry a minimum of an actual 12-man infantry squad, the size God intended. It’d be capable of moving fast, being uparmored for different threat levels, and only be armed for local protection when moving or dropping troops. There’d be something like a Russian Terminator built on a tank chassis with the missile and autocannon support weapons built in, and it’d be capable of actually going toe-to-toe with a tank, if need be. Plus, carrying a shed-load of well-protected ammo.
That’s the path of wisdom, as I see it. The Swiss Army Knife approach to vehicle design ain’t it. At. All.
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