I’ve posted a lot of videos to help people understand the war in Ukraine. This is another one, though I’m not sure much understanding will ensue, as the tactics of both sides seem strange for those familiar with modern western combined arms combat.
It’s an interesting video because so much about it doesn’t make sense. (I believe it’s the one a commenter mentioned.) It shows a Ukrainian tank clearing a trench of Russian soldiers near a village with the mouthful name of Verkhn’okam’yans’ke (near Severodonetsk).
The video starts with two Ukrainian tanks advancing on a trench, one following the other’s tread tracks. (That part makes sense, as a way to pass through a minefield.) After that, a whole lot of the video seems very strange.
It’s a stark reminder, yet again, that the map is not the territory. We see the front lines on various map sites like Deep State, but the Russo-Ukrainian War is taking place across vast areas, some of which are quite thinly populated with troops. This tiny skirmish is probably more indicative of average troop density across the entire front line than dense urban areas like Bakhmut.
Save a trailing BMP and the hovering drone recording the footage, there’s no sign of Ukraine conducting any sort of combined arms operation for the trench clearing. (Though there are some artillery strikes in the background.)
In an age of automatic range finders and fire control computers, it’s something of a surprise to see both sides struggle to find their proper range, misses from each at about 3:45 in.
The tank continues to fire it’s main gun as it approaches, but doesn’t seem to use it’s secondary machine gun for supressing fire.
For those used to the mechanized maneuver warfare on display in Iraq, the approach the tank takes to the trench seems unusually slow and methodical.
Not sure what the tank is firing at 7 minutes in. Maybe part of the trench?
The same lack of combined arms is evident on the Russian side as well. Where are their own tanks? Their artillery support? Air support? Their own anti-tank weapons beyond that initial miss? None are in evidence.
In fact, nothing the Russians do as a tank approaches and blows up large chunks of their trench makes sense. They don’t run. They don’t use any anti-tank weapons. Maybe “vodka” is the reason they seem incapable of taking action.
They don’t retreat and flee, they only huddle further back in the same trench the tank has been methodically blowing up.
At around 10:07, one of them throws a grenade, which is not only a futile gesture on a tank, but the grenade isn’t even tossed in the right direction, but simply off to the side, like he was too scared to even look at the tank.
By the end of the video, I’m pretty sure every Russian in those trenches were goners.
As I was finishing this up, the Daily Mail put up a follow-up video. In that one the tank drove over the trench, just to make sure everyone there was dead…
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It’s actually not clear to me if all the back and forth-ing was actually aggressively demilitarizing the trench line or just the driver trying to get the tank up the muddy far side of the trench he was crossing. Perhaps a non-pixelated-for-delicate-sensibilities version would make it clearer.
Once the UA infantry arrives* they appear do their thing in good order, well spaced and covering the guys who start exploiting the Russian remains for intel. And then, finally, apparently after 15-20 minutes or longer, some incoming artillery lands close enough to make the UA infantry duck. Two whole rounds. One that looks like it could be WP waaay off along the tree line, and another closer.
Open source reporting has been reporting Russian complaints that artillery takes way too long after a call for fire, and this does seem to back that up.
* I note UA infantry rides on the outside of the BMP. If one ever has the chance to examine the aft doors on a BMP and imagine an assault exit one could posit why.
I think this is the video that FM was referring to. What you see, per some of the narration I’ve seen elsewhere, is that the Russians apparently fired a single AT system at the tank. You can see the impact at the lower left corner of the video at about the 3:48 mark. You can’t really see the launch signature, but the impact is there.
You can also see the impact that the automatic loader has on engagements, as the gun waves around and returns to azimuth after the reload sequence. There’s also an apparent mortar round impact later after the AT missile is fired.
The apathy and fatalistic Russian behavior is just… Baffling. Instead of unassing that trench position when the tank comes up on it, they seem to just go deeper into the dugout and await their fate. The only two signs of actual resistance were the AT missile being fired, and that grenade that didn’t even come close to the tank. You would think they’d have RPGs with them, or satchel charges… I mean, once you’re that damn close to the tank, why the hell not take the chance on being a hero?
On the Ukrainian side? The excessive use of tank rounds; I’d have expected our tankers to be liberally using the coax MG and the CROWS on top of the later M1A2s to deal with a situation like this. Wasting main gun rounds, especially when you only have 22 of them on-board in the carousel in the first place? Uhmmm… Not good tanking, that. I’d have expected a US combined arms team to have had the Bradleys hosing that trench down with 25mm while the tanks ran up on it and then pivot-steered on top of it, just as an economy of force/munitions move.
The later video you reference is also a little sus; you don’t crush positions like that. The way we taught it was you set the track on top of the roof of the dugout position and then pivot-steered until it caved in, and then you ran the track along the edge of the trench until it collapsed, burying whoever and whatever was in it. If you do it right, it’s pretty much a done deal for whoever is in that trench. The other thing is, if you’re the guy in the trench? That last minute, before the tank runs your ass over? That’s when it’s time for the desperation moves with the satchel charges…
Of course, if you let it get that far, you done f*cked up, anyway.
War at this level ain’t for the squeamish. When we transitioned from wheels to tracks in Germany during the mid-1980s, my Engineer battalion did the train-up for the M113. Our master driver was a guy who’d been with 11th ACR in Vietnam, and he set up a combat course for the drivers, teaching them how to use their vehicles as weapons in close combat. Complete with silhouettes, and all the rest of the sort of things you’d expect on a weapons qual range. By the time he got done, some of the drivers had PTSD from the training… And, he’d spent a considerable amount of time having flashbacks to when his night laager got overrun in the midst of Tet and a couple of other occasions. He had pictures of the aftermath, with the M113 tracks covered in blood and other human remains… Not for the lily-livered. As he put it, your tracks are your weapon, when you’re the driver, and if you let the enemy get close and live, you die. It’s that simple.
It’s also that the BMP is notoriously bad for surviving mine strikes… The doors warp, you ain’t getting out. Plus, the early versions have the doors filled with fuel, the bilges are filled with fuel from the leaking fuel systems, and… Well, let’s just say you don’t want to be inside one when it gets hit.
If an M113 or Bradley takes a hit, it rarely warps the frame where the ramp locks in to the point where it freezes… You hit the release, and you can get out. The BMP? Yeah; you’re f*cked.
Kirk, re the trench, I was never a tanker but my engineering brain kept saying “if collapsing the trench line is what they are trying to do, I think there’s a better way to do that that crossing perpendicular.” Driving with one track on the edge was one way that came to mind.
Internal comms on the tank intercom might be interesting. “I said CROSS the damn trench Sergei, not park in it. If you get my tank stuck here you are f-ing WALKING back to base from right here.”
Kirk, re the trench, I was never a tanker but my engineering brain kept saying “if collapsing the trench line is what they are trying to do, I think there’s a better way to do that than crossing perpendicular.” Driving along it with one track on the edge was one way that came to mind.
Internal comms on the tank intercom might be interesting. “I said CROSS the damn trench Sergei, not PARK in it. If you get my tank stuck here you are f-ing WALKING back to base from right here.”
Using your vehicle as a weapon in close combat is a bit of an esoteric art, and the Army does not teach it well. The guys who really knew their stuff about all the “best practices” were the guys from Vietnam that actually did it against NVA and Viet Cong sappers. The guy I mentioned who was with the 11th ACR had spent the intervening years between his time in Vietnam and his retirement deliberately seeking out non-divisional Combat Engineer units because the poor bastard started to twitch every time he got close to anything armored and tracked. If I remember right, the Battalion Commander at the time we switched over to Mech did a deal with him: He’d be the master driver for the transition training, and pass everything on, then they’d find him a job somewhere quiet for the year or so he had until retirement.
He managed to pass on a lot of what he’d learned in Vietnam, including some PTSD of their very own for the new drivers. That was about the time we had started getting in all the College Fund middle-class types, and the transition was rocky for some of them. The guys I’d joined with some five-six years earlier would have all found the whole thing immense fun, but burying mannequins and silhouettes in simulated trenches wasn’t on for their more sensitive successors. Also, being critiqued because you hadn’t quite crushed the bunker ceiling in on them…
Could have also been the expectation he had that you would manage to run over and grind all the silhouettes in your lane. Lotta guys had trouble with that.
The complaints that came out after Desert Storm about our guys burying Iraqi trench lines were quite humorous to a lot of us. Getting sealed into a bunker or buried in a collapsing trench is pretty much par for the course; the real horror is when that tank or other armored vehicle is rampaging around running people over deliberately while shooting everything that moves with the coaxial MG and anything else the crew can get up. The insanity that takes over when you realize “it’s them or us…”, and you’re worried about the guys on the ground getting enough of a break to organize a decent AT team…? Yeah; you don’t want to let that happen, so you don’t let them get a chance to think.
It’s rather like what it was probably like if your infantry square broke under a cavalry charge, back in the day, and you were running for your life while saber-swinging lunatics were chasing you around on horseback.
Way back in 95 I was documenting the initial testing of the digitization of the armored forces. We were at a training area in Western KY. Good guys from Ft Knox versus a NG armored unit. The first offense took half a day to accomplish its mission. These were well trained folks but with some new toys. Over the week each attack got faster, the final battle was over in less than 10 minutes.
This was fighting in trees and hills. All these folks from both sides are stuck not knowing where everyone is. Because of the lack of knowledge about the battlefield everything is way more personal.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from being an Observer/Controller at the National Training Center is just how poorly we really understand what the hell is going on in war down where the spear meets flesh.
Every eye-witness is observing what is going on around them through not even a soda-straw view of the battle, but more of a hollow grass stem. You have tunnel vision, the adrenaline is pumping, and you only see that which you can observe from your position, which is likely one you’ve deliberately chosen for its cover and concealment. So… You really have a very hard time figuring out what the hell is going on around you.
As well, there’s a lot of magical thinking going on: “Oh, that shot I just took? It must have connected, ‘cos the enemy quit shooting at me…”
You’d see this stuff all the time at the NTC; elements would be certain of their facts, only to be presented with reality as the Tactical Analysis Facility up on the hill captured it via sensors. All too often, what you’d find is that the training unit would have a very poor idea of what had happened; even the O/C team would have issues keeping track of real reality vs. what they thought had happened. You’d have a unit tell you that they took out X OPFOR vehicles, only to find out that, no, that didn’t happen, or someone else was actually responsible for tagging those vehicles from a flank that they didn’t have line-of-sight over.
Watched that unfold in real time in Iraq, in infantry combat. Division had a UAV up, overwatching a US platoon in contact. The UAV could clearly see where they were taking fire from, and it was a hillside that the platoon could not really see, due to terrain. The platoon apparently thought they were taking fire from another location, and were shooting at that one, maneuvering up on it. The enemy was clearly visible in the thermals, and headquarters was trying desperately to get communications with the unit leadership. Then, machinegun fire from some other area swept the hillside where the enemy was, and slaughtered all of them. The US platoon was certain that they’d achieved a victory, but it actually belonged to whoever it was that brought the machineguns to the fight… Which we are pretty sure was actually an enemy blue-on-blue, because of the color of tracers from those machineguns was green, rather than red. What appeared to have happened was that a predecessor to Abu Hajaar was running the enemy machinegun support-by-fire position, and managed to whack almost all of his comrades for us.
I’m pretty sure that to this day, that lieutenant thinks he won his engagement that night. Which just goes to show you that reliance on purely subjective recollections, experiences, and impressions ain’t the way to go when you’re talking about what happened during a given engagement. I used to think we had a reasonably good idea what went on in combat; I no longer believe that. I strongly suspect that if we ever get data from real combat actions that’s as good as we get from the instrumentation from the National Training Center, a whole bunch of assumptions and beliefs are going to be blown out of the water. I’m not even sure we know what we don’t know about these issues; there’s a huge component of unknown to a lot of things that we’ve confidently relied on for years and years that probably haven’t ever been true.
Ian McCollum (Forgotten Weapons) and Nicolas Moran (AKA The Chieftain), did a colab video on youtube a while back, where they went to Drive Tanks in Texas and went over all of the weapons of an M4 Sherman tank, right down to the small arms.
At one point, when they had finished talking about the various machineguns, Ian said something along the lines of “now for the main weapon”, to which Nick replied “You mean the tracks, ‘DRIVER-TROOPS-TRACKS-DRIVE AND ADJUST”. i think he was only half joking….Tankers do call infantry and others “crunchies” after all.
As for the video, I am completely mystified as to what the hell that was all about. Best I can figure is that the Russian group was completely cut off and l, and the small Uke detachment was sent in to mop up the irritation to whatever else was going on. I may be mistaken, but it looks like the guy hiding behind the tree was waving a white cloth and trying to surrender, and the tank rather wastefully uses a main gun round on him.
As for Kirk’s comments about nobody actually seeing what actually happened, yes, in spades. One of the reasons kill claims in air combat until very recently were always massively over-stated was because of this sort of thing. Pilot A fires at an aircraft, it starts to smoke and go down, so he claims it. Not noticing that he was missing by a mile and did not even SEE the other aircraft on his “victims” tail, who actually did the deed.
There is an excellent part in the book “Piece of Cake” where this is shown. The IO starts questioning kill claims, gets lots of pushback from the pilots, and to resolve it, they install gun cameras, and he is vindicated.
….”He stops firing…now, Skull said, and the frame froze. “That was a four second burst. The final range was just over two hundred yards. None of the shots hit the bomber.”
“But it’s on fire”, Mother Cox objected. “Look at that engine. You can see the smoke.”
“All the shots fired by this Hurricane fell below the target. Blowups of the film established that beyond a doubt. The damage you see was caused by another Hurricane that made a simultaneous attack from the port beam….”
I suspect the Russian who threw the grenade genuinely thought he saw something, or that something was were he threw it, or just tossed the grenade randomly in a panic reaction.
There is all sorts of psychology going on. I know that Dave Grossman is not well regarded by most (including me), but some of the physiological and psychological reactions he talks about in “On Combat” are correct. Tunnel vision, auditory loss, time dilation and so on. There are also phenomena like “contagious fire” where one cop shoots, and the rest automatically join in even though none of them saw a movement or weapon.
In Korea, the M2 carbine got a bad reputation in some quarters because of stories of it not stopping a charging enemy. Something along the lines of “I emptied the whole magazine at him, and none of the round penetrated his winter coat, I was a goner until my buddy Pete shot him with his rifle”. Reality is that a .30 carbine has as much energy a say a hundred yards than a .357 point blank. It will absolutely go through a quilted Chinese winter coat. An argument was made that some of the ammo was bad, but if that were so it would not have cycled.
No, the reality was that the soldier panicked when the enemy came around the corner at short range, and understandably so! I do not denigrate him by saying this, he genuinely believed that what he said is what happened, but in reality he emptied the magazine in a blind panic in the general direction of the enemy and missed with every shot. The rounds didn’t bounce off the winter coat, they never hit it in the first place!
One of the interesting things coming out of modern combat IS the increased use of drones and other recording sensors, so that we can get a better idea of what is actually happening. Data that the pioneers of operational research in WWII could only dream of…
What they really need to do is reproduce the same sort of instrumentation we have at the National Training Centers for a tactical unit, and then send that off to war with a full package of drones and other means to capture the data. Not to interfere with what’s going on, but just to try and figure out what the hell is actually happening.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the “conventional wisdom” will prove to be wrong, wrong, wrong. I don’t think that the process we have been using is necessarily a “learning process”, it’s more a “confirmation bias process”; garbage in, garbage out. You see what you expect to see, and your expectations are based on flawed and highly subjective data derived from highly questionable sources.
It’s a rare human being that goes into any situation without a script to hand, buried deep in their minds. You have to be very deliberate about cultivating an openness to the realities, and be willing to abandon all preconceived notions, taking in what is actually going on around you, in order to learn and synthesize the experience into effective action.
Boyd talked a lot about his OODA loop; Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. One of the things that he should have put a lot more emphasis on was that first step, Observe. That’s where a lot of errors creep in; you’re not really observing what is going on around you when you template past experience and prejudgments on top of things, obscuring that which is real from what you’re basing your decisions on.
Right now, I fear that an awful lot of what we think we know about war is actually the synthesis of layer after layer of other people’s purely subjective impressions of a highly stressful environment that hasn’t had much in the way of actual verifiable and reproducible data captured from any point in the process.
I don’t remember who it was, but one of the big military historians (Keagan?) had a paper comparing official war diaries of various units to actual verified info afterwards, and the war diaries were often completely wrong, and never corrected!
Air combat has always been rife with this sort of thing. You see it all the time, and on both sides. Kill claims were made, but looking at the actual loss reports, you get a fight where a half dozen kills are claimed, but records examined after the war show only one or two aircraft damaged.
I am absolutely fascinated by the concept of Operational Research as practiced by the Allies in WWII. The British pretty much invented it, and the Americans, as one would expect, put huge resources into it. There is fascinating stuff about theoretical impacts of strategic bombing, and what was thought to be the effects at the time vs. what the Operational Research people got afterwards. We also get things in mathematics and statistics like survivor-ship bias out of it, concepts still in use today.
Likewise, a lot of time and effort was spent interrogating captured German Generals after the war, but a lot of it was a waste of time, as the individuals in question were providing THEIR interpretation and recollection of what they did, and were really post-facto justifying themselves. Really effective research would have compared their version of events with reality, or as much reality as we could re-construct after the fact.
We have all seen the military aviation artwork of Typhoons and Thunderbolts destroying tanks by the boatload in Normandy. Reality was that pretty much NO tanks were ever destroyed by aircraft in that campaign. From a technical perspective, a German front line tank was pretty much immune to 20mm and .50 fire,and the rockets of the time had to score a direct top hit to be effective.
Ops Research teams did lot of work locating and examining wrecked enemy tanks in Normandy and actually measuring the holes, and comparing the various war diaries to figure out who and what actually killed the tank. Interviews with surviving tank crew showed that veterans knew to button up and wait it out, but new and poorly trained crews panicked and abandoned their vehicles. Despite the lack of direct kills, it turns out that the aircraft WERE very effective at neutralizing German armored columns, but did so by destroying the fuel and ammo trucks, and killing the support troops and mechanics, not by killing the tanks themselves.
You alluded to this in your criticism of the new US Army support weapon program, and how flawed the whole concept is. I love your concept of “What are we ACTUALLY TRYING TO DO?” . You see this with small arms dating back to the 19th century. The conflict between those who advocate the cult of the rifleman and accuracy, vs. those who advocate volume of fire, the latter often basing their argument on what little scientific date there is, showing that small-arms fire is not particularly important. A great book on the subject is Weapon of Choice, describing, as much as anything else, the INTERNAL politics of small-arms procurement in the US/UK/NATO.
As you correctly pointed out, nobody in Ukraine is complaining about “overmatch”, or the 5.45mm’s inability to penetrate body armor, because it doesn’t matter! Artillery and other direct fire support weapons do the work. Infantry small-arms are for local security of the support weapons doing the actual work, and close combat mopping up and self protection.
BTW, I loved the video of the Bundeswehr MG teams training that you referenced in your comment at Instapundit. A perfect illustration of your argument. I particularly loved how they still practice the concept of the team moving the gun still mounted on the tripod! I have seen WWII newsreel footage of German MG teams doing that, and the only real difference between that and the modern footage is the colour film and the uniforms, otherwise it is the same. Shame they are going to the newer MG5. I would be interested to know if they keep the same doctrine with the newer weapons. Ian had a video today on the MG3 and a number of the comments were from former German grunts, some of whom were lamenting the retirement of the MG3, and its replacement with the MG5.
I don’t know that I’d necessarily characterize it as “…advocate(s of) the cult of the rifleman and accuracy, vs. those who advocate volume of fire…”
The raw fact is, you really need both. You have to have an individual weapon that’s both accurate and capable of volume of fire, if only because “morale”. The problem comes in when you lose your ‘effing mind and decide that all you need are riflemen… Who cannot deliver the mass and volume of fire that a machinegun can, nor can they be controlled as effectively under fire by the leadership.
If you’ve got yourself a highly trained and exquisitely exercised element that has the confidence and knowledge of itself to do the “rifle dance”, then maybe you can get away with having all your small arms firepower diffused across a bunch of riflemen. If something happens to that element such that it no longer has that level of internal trust and experience… Then, what are you going to do?
The German solution of massing the firepower in nodes like the MG34/42 teams under the direct tactical control of the NCO leadership made a hell of a lot more sense in terms of being tactically anti-fragile and resilient. Add in some mortars, a nice direct-fire solution like the Carl Gustav, and you’ve got a winning combination. Especially if you can give them some of their own recon UAV assets…
I don’t like the path that the USMC went down with the M27, and I don’t like the NGSW concept. I think both of those are based on false premises that are going to get a bunch of guys killed finding out they don’t actually work.
After so many shots by the tank into the trench, I’m amazed each time I see someone still moving inside. Not that I’m rooting for the Russians, except … wow. And how?
It’s actually not clear to me if all the back and forth-ing was actually aggressively demilitarizing the trench line or just the driver trying to get the tank up the muddy far side of the trench he was crossing. Perhaps a non-pixelated-for-delicate-sensibilities version would make it clearer.
Once the UA infantry arrives* they appear do their thing in good order, well spaced and covering the guys who start exploiting the Russian remains for intel. And then, finally, apparently after 15-20 minutes or longer, some incoming artillery lands close enough to make the UA infantry duck. Two whole rounds. One that looks like it could be WP waaay off along the tree line, and another closer.
Open source reporting has been reporting Russian complaints that artillery takes way too long after a call for fire, and this does seem to back that up.
* I note UA infantry rides on the outside of the BMP. If one ever has the chance to examine the aft doors on a BMP and imagine an assault exit one could posit why.
I think this is the video that FM was referring to. What you see, per some of the narration I’ve seen elsewhere, is that the Russians apparently fired a single AT system at the tank. You can see the impact at the lower left corner of the video at about the 3:48 mark. You can’t really see the launch signature, but the impact is there.
You can also see the impact that the automatic loader has on engagements, as the gun waves around and returns to azimuth after the reload sequence. There’s also an apparent mortar round impact later after the AT missile is fired.
The apathy and fatalistic Russian behavior is just… Baffling. Instead of unassing that trench position when the tank comes up on it, they seem to just go deeper into the dugout and await their fate. The only two signs of actual resistance were the AT missile being fired, and that grenade that didn’t even come close to the tank. You would think they’d have RPGs with them, or satchel charges… I mean, once you’re that damn close to the tank, why the hell not take the chance on being a hero?
On the Ukrainian side? The excessive use of tank rounds; I’d have expected our tankers to be liberally using the coax MG and the CROWS on top of the later M1A2s to deal with a situation like this. Wasting main gun rounds, especially when you only have 22 of them on-board in the carousel in the first place? Uhmmm… Not good tanking, that. I’d have expected a US combined arms team to have had the Bradleys hosing that trench down with 25mm while the tanks ran up on it and then pivot-steered on top of it, just as an economy of force/munitions move.
The later video you reference is also a little sus; you don’t crush positions like that. The way we taught it was you set the track on top of the roof of the dugout position and then pivot-steered until it caved in, and then you ran the track along the edge of the trench until it collapsed, burying whoever and whatever was in it. If you do it right, it’s pretty much a done deal for whoever is in that trench. The other thing is, if you’re the guy in the trench? That last minute, before the tank runs your ass over? That’s when it’s time for the desperation moves with the satchel charges…
Of course, if you let it get that far, you done f*cked up, anyway.
War at this level ain’t for the squeamish. When we transitioned from wheels to tracks in Germany during the mid-1980s, my Engineer battalion did the train-up for the M113. Our master driver was a guy who’d been with 11th ACR in Vietnam, and he set up a combat course for the drivers, teaching them how to use their vehicles as weapons in close combat. Complete with silhouettes, and all the rest of the sort of things you’d expect on a weapons qual range. By the time he got done, some of the drivers had PTSD from the training… And, he’d spent a considerable amount of time having flashbacks to when his night laager got overrun in the midst of Tet and a couple of other occasions. He had pictures of the aftermath, with the M113 tracks covered in blood and other human remains… Not for the lily-livered. As he put it, your tracks are your weapon, when you’re the driver, and if you let the enemy get close and live, you die. It’s that simple.
@FM,
It’s also that the BMP is notoriously bad for surviving mine strikes… The doors warp, you ain’t getting out. Plus, the early versions have the doors filled with fuel, the bilges are filled with fuel from the leaking fuel systems, and… Well, let’s just say you don’t want to be inside one when it gets hit.
If an M113 or Bradley takes a hit, it rarely warps the frame where the ramp locks in to the point where it freezes… You hit the release, and you can get out. The BMP? Yeah; you’re f*cked.
Kirk, re the trench, I was never a tanker but my engineering brain kept saying “if collapsing the trench line is what they are trying to do, I think there’s a better way to do that that crossing perpendicular.” Driving with one track on the edge was one way that came to mind.
Internal comms on the tank intercom might be interesting. “I said CROSS the damn trench Sergei, not park in it. If you get my tank stuck here you are f-ing WALKING back to base from right here.”
Kirk, re the trench, I was never a tanker but my engineering brain kept saying “if collapsing the trench line is what they are trying to do, I think there’s a better way to do that than crossing perpendicular.” Driving along it with one track on the edge was one way that came to mind.
Internal comms on the tank intercom might be interesting. “I said CROSS the damn trench Sergei, not PARK in it. If you get my tank stuck here you are f-ing WALKING back to base from right here.”
Wow, triple-tap. Sorry.
Using your vehicle as a weapon in close combat is a bit of an esoteric art, and the Army does not teach it well. The guys who really knew their stuff about all the “best practices” were the guys from Vietnam that actually did it against NVA and Viet Cong sappers. The guy I mentioned who was with the 11th ACR had spent the intervening years between his time in Vietnam and his retirement deliberately seeking out non-divisional Combat Engineer units because the poor bastard started to twitch every time he got close to anything armored and tracked. If I remember right, the Battalion Commander at the time we switched over to Mech did a deal with him: He’d be the master driver for the transition training, and pass everything on, then they’d find him a job somewhere quiet for the year or so he had until retirement.
He managed to pass on a lot of what he’d learned in Vietnam, including some PTSD of their very own for the new drivers. That was about the time we had started getting in all the College Fund middle-class types, and the transition was rocky for some of them. The guys I’d joined with some five-six years earlier would have all found the whole thing immense fun, but burying mannequins and silhouettes in simulated trenches wasn’t on for their more sensitive successors. Also, being critiqued because you hadn’t quite crushed the bunker ceiling in on them…
Could have also been the expectation he had that you would manage to run over and grind all the silhouettes in your lane. Lotta guys had trouble with that.
The complaints that came out after Desert Storm about our guys burying Iraqi trench lines were quite humorous to a lot of us. Getting sealed into a bunker or buried in a collapsing trench is pretty much par for the course; the real horror is when that tank or other armored vehicle is rampaging around running people over deliberately while shooting everything that moves with the coaxial MG and anything else the crew can get up. The insanity that takes over when you realize “it’s them or us…”, and you’re worried about the guys on the ground getting enough of a break to organize a decent AT team…? Yeah; you don’t want to let that happen, so you don’t let them get a chance to think.
It’s rather like what it was probably like if your infantry square broke under a cavalry charge, back in the day, and you were running for your life while saber-swinging lunatics were chasing you around on horseback.
Lawrence Person’s analysis of the video covers the entire war.
Way back in 95 I was documenting the initial testing of the digitization of the armored forces. We were at a training area in Western KY. Good guys from Ft Knox versus a NG armored unit. The first offense took half a day to accomplish its mission. These were well trained folks but with some new toys. Over the week each attack got faster, the final battle was over in less than 10 minutes.
This was fighting in trees and hills. All these folks from both sides are stuck not knowing where everyone is. Because of the lack of knowledge about the battlefield everything is way more personal.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from being an Observer/Controller at the National Training Center is just how poorly we really understand what the hell is going on in war down where the spear meets flesh.
Every eye-witness is observing what is going on around them through not even a soda-straw view of the battle, but more of a hollow grass stem. You have tunnel vision, the adrenaline is pumping, and you only see that which you can observe from your position, which is likely one you’ve deliberately chosen for its cover and concealment. So… You really have a very hard time figuring out what the hell is going on around you.
As well, there’s a lot of magical thinking going on: “Oh, that shot I just took? It must have connected, ‘cos the enemy quit shooting at me…”
You’d see this stuff all the time at the NTC; elements would be certain of their facts, only to be presented with reality as the Tactical Analysis Facility up on the hill captured it via sensors. All too often, what you’d find is that the training unit would have a very poor idea of what had happened; even the O/C team would have issues keeping track of real reality vs. what they thought had happened. You’d have a unit tell you that they took out X OPFOR vehicles, only to find out that, no, that didn’t happen, or someone else was actually responsible for tagging those vehicles from a flank that they didn’t have line-of-sight over.
Watched that unfold in real time in Iraq, in infantry combat. Division had a UAV up, overwatching a US platoon in contact. The UAV could clearly see where they were taking fire from, and it was a hillside that the platoon could not really see, due to terrain. The platoon apparently thought they were taking fire from another location, and were shooting at that one, maneuvering up on it. The enemy was clearly visible in the thermals, and headquarters was trying desperately to get communications with the unit leadership. Then, machinegun fire from some other area swept the hillside where the enemy was, and slaughtered all of them. The US platoon was certain that they’d achieved a victory, but it actually belonged to whoever it was that brought the machineguns to the fight… Which we are pretty sure was actually an enemy blue-on-blue, because of the color of tracers from those machineguns was green, rather than red. What appeared to have happened was that a predecessor to Abu Hajaar was running the enemy machinegun support-by-fire position, and managed to whack almost all of his comrades for us.
I’m pretty sure that to this day, that lieutenant thinks he won his engagement that night. Which just goes to show you that reliance on purely subjective recollections, experiences, and impressions ain’t the way to go when you’re talking about what happened during a given engagement. I used to think we had a reasonably good idea what went on in combat; I no longer believe that. I strongly suspect that if we ever get data from real combat actions that’s as good as we get from the instrumentation from the National Training Center, a whole bunch of assumptions and beliefs are going to be blown out of the water. I’m not even sure we know what we don’t know about these issues; there’s a huge component of unknown to a lot of things that we’ve confidently relied on for years and years that probably haven’t ever been true.
Ian McCollum (Forgotten Weapons) and Nicolas Moran (AKA The Chieftain), did a colab video on youtube a while back, where they went to Drive Tanks in Texas and went over all of the weapons of an M4 Sherman tank, right down to the small arms.
At one point, when they had finished talking about the various machineguns, Ian said something along the lines of “now for the main weapon”, to which Nick replied “You mean the tracks, ‘DRIVER-TROOPS-TRACKS-DRIVE AND ADJUST”. i think he was only half joking….Tankers do call infantry and others “crunchies” after all.
As for the video, I am completely mystified as to what the hell that was all about. Best I can figure is that the Russian group was completely cut off and l, and the small Uke detachment was sent in to mop up the irritation to whatever else was going on. I may be mistaken, but it looks like the guy hiding behind the tree was waving a white cloth and trying to surrender, and the tank rather wastefully uses a main gun round on him.
As for Kirk’s comments about nobody actually seeing what actually happened, yes, in spades. One of the reasons kill claims in air combat until very recently were always massively over-stated was because of this sort of thing. Pilot A fires at an aircraft, it starts to smoke and go down, so he claims it. Not noticing that he was missing by a mile and did not even SEE the other aircraft on his “victims” tail, who actually did the deed.
There is an excellent part in the book “Piece of Cake” where this is shown. The IO starts questioning kill claims, gets lots of pushback from the pilots, and to resolve it, they install gun cameras, and he is vindicated.
….”He stops firing…now, Skull said, and the frame froze. “That was a four second burst. The final range was just over two hundred yards. None of the shots hit the bomber.”
“But it’s on fire”, Mother Cox objected. “Look at that engine. You can see the smoke.”
“All the shots fired by this Hurricane fell below the target. Blowups of the film established that beyond a doubt. The damage you see was caused by another Hurricane that made a simultaneous attack from the port beam….”
I suspect the Russian who threw the grenade genuinely thought he saw something, or that something was were he threw it, or just tossed the grenade randomly in a panic reaction.
There is all sorts of psychology going on. I know that Dave Grossman is not well regarded by most (including me), but some of the physiological and psychological reactions he talks about in “On Combat” are correct. Tunnel vision, auditory loss, time dilation and so on. There are also phenomena like “contagious fire” where one cop shoots, and the rest automatically join in even though none of them saw a movement or weapon.
In Korea, the M2 carbine got a bad reputation in some quarters because of stories of it not stopping a charging enemy. Something along the lines of “I emptied the whole magazine at him, and none of the round penetrated his winter coat, I was a goner until my buddy Pete shot him with his rifle”. Reality is that a .30 carbine has as much energy a say a hundred yards than a .357 point blank. It will absolutely go through a quilted Chinese winter coat. An argument was made that some of the ammo was bad, but if that were so it would not have cycled.
No, the reality was that the soldier panicked when the enemy came around the corner at short range, and understandably so! I do not denigrate him by saying this, he genuinely believed that what he said is what happened, but in reality he emptied the magazine in a blind panic in the general direction of the enemy and missed with every shot. The rounds didn’t bounce off the winter coat, they never hit it in the first place!
One of the interesting things coming out of modern combat IS the increased use of drones and other recording sensors, so that we can get a better idea of what is actually happening. Data that the pioneers of operational research in WWII could only dream of…
What they really need to do is reproduce the same sort of instrumentation we have at the National Training Centers for a tactical unit, and then send that off to war with a full package of drones and other means to capture the data. Not to interfere with what’s going on, but just to try and figure out what the hell is actually happening.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the “conventional wisdom” will prove to be wrong, wrong, wrong. I don’t think that the process we have been using is necessarily a “learning process”, it’s more a “confirmation bias process”; garbage in, garbage out. You see what you expect to see, and your expectations are based on flawed and highly subjective data derived from highly questionable sources.
It’s a rare human being that goes into any situation without a script to hand, buried deep in their minds. You have to be very deliberate about cultivating an openness to the realities, and be willing to abandon all preconceived notions, taking in what is actually going on around you, in order to learn and synthesize the experience into effective action.
Boyd talked a lot about his OODA loop; Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. One of the things that he should have put a lot more emphasis on was that first step, Observe. That’s where a lot of errors creep in; you’re not really observing what is going on around you when you template past experience and prejudgments on top of things, obscuring that which is real from what you’re basing your decisions on.
Right now, I fear that an awful lot of what we think we know about war is actually the synthesis of layer after layer of other people’s purely subjective impressions of a highly stressful environment that hasn’t had much in the way of actual verifiable and reproducible data captured from any point in the process.
Kirk,
Your last paragraph…absolutely!
I don’t remember who it was, but one of the big military historians (Keagan?) had a paper comparing official war diaries of various units to actual verified info afterwards, and the war diaries were often completely wrong, and never corrected!
Air combat has always been rife with this sort of thing. You see it all the time, and on both sides. Kill claims were made, but looking at the actual loss reports, you get a fight where a half dozen kills are claimed, but records examined after the war show only one or two aircraft damaged.
I am absolutely fascinated by the concept of Operational Research as practiced by the Allies in WWII. The British pretty much invented it, and the Americans, as one would expect, put huge resources into it. There is fascinating stuff about theoretical impacts of strategic bombing, and what was thought to be the effects at the time vs. what the Operational Research people got afterwards. We also get things in mathematics and statistics like survivor-ship bias out of it, concepts still in use today.
Likewise, a lot of time and effort was spent interrogating captured German Generals after the war, but a lot of it was a waste of time, as the individuals in question were providing THEIR interpretation and recollection of what they did, and were really post-facto justifying themselves. Really effective research would have compared their version of events with reality, or as much reality as we could re-construct after the fact.
We have all seen the military aviation artwork of Typhoons and Thunderbolts destroying tanks by the boatload in Normandy. Reality was that pretty much NO tanks were ever destroyed by aircraft in that campaign. From a technical perspective, a German front line tank was pretty much immune to 20mm and .50 fire,and the rockets of the time had to score a direct top hit to be effective.
Ops Research teams did lot of work locating and examining wrecked enemy tanks in Normandy and actually measuring the holes, and comparing the various war diaries to figure out who and what actually killed the tank. Interviews with surviving tank crew showed that veterans knew to button up and wait it out, but new and poorly trained crews panicked and abandoned their vehicles. Despite the lack of direct kills, it turns out that the aircraft WERE very effective at neutralizing German armored columns, but did so by destroying the fuel and ammo trucks, and killing the support troops and mechanics, not by killing the tanks themselves.
You alluded to this in your criticism of the new US Army support weapon program, and how flawed the whole concept is. I love your concept of “What are we ACTUALLY TRYING TO DO?” . You see this with small arms dating back to the 19th century. The conflict between those who advocate the cult of the rifleman and accuracy, vs. those who advocate volume of fire, the latter often basing their argument on what little scientific date there is, showing that small-arms fire is not particularly important. A great book on the subject is Weapon of Choice, describing, as much as anything else, the INTERNAL politics of small-arms procurement in the US/UK/NATO.
As you correctly pointed out, nobody in Ukraine is complaining about “overmatch”, or the 5.45mm’s inability to penetrate body armor, because it doesn’t matter! Artillery and other direct fire support weapons do the work. Infantry small-arms are for local security of the support weapons doing the actual work, and close combat mopping up and self protection.
BTW, I loved the video of the Bundeswehr MG teams training that you referenced in your comment at Instapundit. A perfect illustration of your argument. I particularly loved how they still practice the concept of the team moving the gun still mounted on the tripod! I have seen WWII newsreel footage of German MG teams doing that, and the only real difference between that and the modern footage is the colour film and the uniforms, otherwise it is the same. Shame they are going to the newer MG5. I would be interested to know if they keep the same doctrine with the newer weapons. Ian had a video today on the MG3 and a number of the comments were from former German grunts, some of whom were lamenting the retirement of the MG3, and its replacement with the MG5.
I don’t know that I’d necessarily characterize it as “…advocate(s of) the cult of the rifleman and accuracy, vs. those who advocate volume of fire…”
The raw fact is, you really need both. You have to have an individual weapon that’s both accurate and capable of volume of fire, if only because “morale”. The problem comes in when you lose your ‘effing mind and decide that all you need are riflemen… Who cannot deliver the mass and volume of fire that a machinegun can, nor can they be controlled as effectively under fire by the leadership.
If you’ve got yourself a highly trained and exquisitely exercised element that has the confidence and knowledge of itself to do the “rifle dance”, then maybe you can get away with having all your small arms firepower diffused across a bunch of riflemen. If something happens to that element such that it no longer has that level of internal trust and experience… Then, what are you going to do?
The German solution of massing the firepower in nodes like the MG34/42 teams under the direct tactical control of the NCO leadership made a hell of a lot more sense in terms of being tactically anti-fragile and resilient. Add in some mortars, a nice direct-fire solution like the Carl Gustav, and you’ve got a winning combination. Especially if you can give them some of their own recon UAV assets…
I don’t like the path that the USMC went down with the M27, and I don’t like the NGSW concept. I think both of those are based on false premises that are going to get a bunch of guys killed finding out they don’t actually work.
After so many shots by the tank into the trench, I’m amazed each time I see someone still moving inside. Not that I’m rooting for the Russians, except … wow. And how?
Collation of videos about this exercise and commentary on same.
Interesting to see the whole thing sequenced and confirmed to be a part of a single specific action.
https://youtu.be/A3kX1ek4tjo