Here’s an interesting follow-up to that two Bradleys wreck one T-90M post and video a few weeks ago. In this video, Task & Purpose provides more detailed breakdown of the engagement.
“In the interview with the Ukrainian Bradley commander Siri, he indicated that the three Bradleys made the conscious decision to seek out the Russian tank. However, one of their vehicles had issues and was not able to effectively engage the tank.”
The first Bradley engages the T-90M from a 90° angle, then both vehicles retreat.
The T-90 fires and misses. “Aiming at a target close to you in a tank becomes more difficult because you have to traverse the turret faster, and objects will move across your line of sight faster due to its close proximity.”
One under-appreciated factor: Turret turning speed. “In the 30ton MSA2 Bradley, the turret can spin 360° in about 6 seconds, or 60° per second…The most often cited metric I see [for the T-90] is about 9 seconds to do a full 360°, or about 40° per second.”
“They’re just 50 meters apart. This fight was essentially a ticking time clock for the T-90, because they had a very limited amount of time before the Bradley would manage to knock out their optics and blind them.”
“The T90 only had enough time to get off three cannon shots. The T90 has a stabilized turret and autoloader that can fire on the move with up to eight rounds per minute. The T-90 backed away from the road intersection while blindly firing through buildings.
“The Ukrainian Bradley does the same thing here, with its 25mm chain gun firing dozens of rounds while flooring it along the road away from the tank.”
The encounter took place in the town of Stepove, which is about 12km NW of Avdiivka, where some 40,000 Russian troops have been trying to take the pocket for months.
“Forbes reports that Ukraine’s knocking out 13 Russian vehicles here for every one that they lose.” But Ukraine may still have to fall back here.
“Most of the buildings are completely destroyed, but the rubble is going to be a major advantage for the Bradley’s to fire and then duck and weave behind for cover.”
“The next thing that happens is the T-90M fires off a smoke canister, which is a textbook act to conceal its position and disrupt the thermal sites in the Bradley. There different perspectives on what exactly happened when the smoke was set off. It appears like maybe one of the T-90’s explosive reactive armor pieces might have blown at about the same time, causing that large explosion that we see here. It could have also been from a misfire from the smoke grenade.” I’ve also heard the theory that the Bradley’s 25mm fire may have already damaged the smoke dispenser at this point, triggering the explosive misfire.
The physical damage to the T-90s turret may appear minimal to us, but to a Russia tank crew, it would like being inside a large bell being hit by a hammer. “The Russian tank crew would have been extremely disoriented by the blasts, even if the chances of that smaller caliber round penetrating was very unlikely. It’s easy to forget the human factor in these fights.”
The Bradley’s “M242 25mm bushmaster chain gun fires roughly 200 rounds per minute at the highest cyclical setting.”
“Inside the turret are two ready boxes which feed the linked ammo into the receiver. This gives you the ability to fire two different types of ammo on the fly. That includes the M919 APDST, or armor-piercing discarding sabo tracer depleted uranium round, and the M792 high explosive incendiary tracer rounds.” There’s a switch to change between the two.
“The Bradley’s anti-armor 25mm cannon round can penetrate between 30mm to 100mm of steel, depending on the angle at which the round strikes the target.”
“However, the Russian T90 reportedly has 400 to 900mm” of armor. Unmentioned here is that the T-90M (like the US, UK and Germany) uses composite armor rather than just steel.
So how did the Bradleys disable the T-90? Theory #1 is they destroyed both the commander and gunner’s optics. “If you’re able to hit them, then the crew is completely blinded and essentially combat ineffective.” Ukrainian commander Siri said he learned the tactic from War Thunder. (Are American tanks taking sufficient precautions to keep this from happening to them? To be fair, the chance of enemies getting a 25mm auto-canon this close to an Abrams seems…remote.)
Theory #2: Turret ring connection destroyed (much more likely electronics than hydraulics) sent the turret into auto-rotation as seen at the end of the video.
Why wasn’t the TOW missile not used? Maybe it wasn’t working, or maybe it was just too close for the TOW to arm properly.
The Bradley crew might have run out of APDST and switched to high explosive.
Russian tanks have slower reverse speeds than American armored vehicles.
There are some 78 Russian attacks a day in this sector. “Ukraine counterattacks with Bradleys, raking the tree lines with 25mm cannon fire. Bradley’s also transports small assault teams that clear out Russian stragglers from time to time. Once Stepove and the tree lines by the railroad are clear, or mostly clear, of Russian troops, Ukraine pulls back to their functional defensive positions and waits for the next Russian attack.”
There’s lots more interesting technical and doctrinal details I’ve cut for the sake of brevity.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2024 at 8:27 PM and is filed under Media Watch, unions, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Assuming the Brad(s) had TOWs on board and loaded in the launcher, the most likely reason they didn’t use them is that they didn’t want to sit still long enough to raise the launcher and then fire the missile when they were in such close proximity to the Russian tank.
Raising the launcher is powered, but it’s not exactly quick. And once it’s up, you can’t drive very fast. The Brad’s TOW is really meant to be used from defensive positions, behind cover (the sight is on the very top of the turret, and the launcher is at the same height when in the firing position, so you can fire with everything except the sight and launcher behind cover), and at range.
Seems like my analysis of what was going on in this fight when we first covered it was a bit more accurate than other commentators wanted to admit…
Bradleys can do a lot of damage to a tank, given enough ineptitude on the part of the tank crew and their commanders. That T-90 should never have been in that situation to begin with, and the fact that it was? Sheer stupidity/ignorance of how to use that tank in combat.
People do not give enough credit to the intermediate level of military operational art, that above squad/crew drills and below the strategic/logistic level. This tank should never have been put into that situation to begin with, as a single vehicle out operating on its own without infantry screening or another tank to act as a wingman. The crew should have been smart enough and empowered enough to say “Yeah, time to go…” when they found themselves on their own… But, that ain’t the Soviet/Russian way of doing things.
That T-90 needed to operating as part of a platoon of three to four tanks; there should have been a “wingman” tank present to provide overwatch and supporting fire, at a minimum. That the Russian Federation forces are this inept is a bit frightening, because that ineptitude implies that the nuclear threshold is probably a lot lower than our calculations would put it.
This is of a piece with what I was saying when all this began; the utter lack of low-level self-organized discipline in the Russian Federation ranks is an indicator of just how inept and unprofessional their forces are. The logistics columns entering Ukraine from Belorussia demonstrated remarkably inept march discipline, zero situational awareness, an inability to navigate, and issue after issue. They weren’t even disciplined enough to put out air guards during movement, herringbone their convoys on stops, or put out local security. They allowed Ukrainian civilians to come up on and mingle with the convoys, answering questions and asking their own, like “Just where the hell are we…?”
That they’re still doing this sort of crap two years into a war? LOL… Yeah, tell me all about how the Russians are this “second army in the world”. World of Warcraft, maybe… Not this one. They take that crap up against even a badly trained and equipped NATO force, their lunches are going to be taken away and eaten wholesale. I can’t even begin to imagine what their invasion of the Baltics or Poland would look like… Same with Finland. They take that crap to the big leagues, and the Finns alone are going to turn even more of their armies into scrap metal and sausage grindings.
I don’t know what Putin was told before the 24th of February 2022, but whatever it was, he was lied to. Badly.
The one photograph available of the T-90M after the action, from an outfit called TG:WarArchive on Oryx, is not consistent with any of these video tales:
The Relikt tiles on the glacis are gone, but undisturbed elsewhere. The integrity of the hull and turret were not breached anywhere in this three-quarter view. The commander’s RWS and panoramic sight were not damages, nor were the meteorological staff or gunner’s SOSNA-U sight. There is no evidence of any internal fire at the open commander’s hatch.
The Ukrainians now claim that three Bradleys were involved, after initial claims of only two. One purported Ukrainian gunner now claims in another video that only HEI-T rounds were fired due to frozen ammunition switch gears on their chain guns.
Previous comments are all very astute. I see very little video evidence of Russian deployment of armor or mech forces in other than “onesies and twosies”. Even the most elementary of Western military training focuses upon Combined Arms. I thought the Penny Packet theory of armor was dashed in May of 1940.
“Previous comments are all very astute. I see very little video evidence of Russian deployment of armor or mech forces in other than “onesies and twosies”. Even the most elementary of Western military training focuses upon Combined Arms. I thought the Penny Packet theory of armor was dashed in May of 1940.”
The Russians in 2022 and the Ukrainians in 2023 initiated massive attacks with concentrated armor formations. All of these attacks ended in abject disasters, with the losses of almost all the AFVs employed, mostly due to mines and PGMs.
Both militaries abandoned NATO combined-arms tactics after these heavy losses. Both now subscribe to P.S. Smirnov’s recommended tactics in his 1941 seminal work “Breakthrough of Fortified Defense Lines” (Прорыв укреплённых линий обороны). Smirnov emphasizes dismounted combat engineers, massive artillery strikes, and dispersed, sparing use of armor to breach heavily fortified defensive lines.
Ever greater dispersal of forces has been the response to the increasing lethality of weapons since antiquity.
USAR is in the process of revising FM 3-34.2 “Combined-Arms Breaching Operations” to account for the lessons learned in Ukraine.
Assuming the Brad(s) had TOWs on board and loaded in the launcher, the most likely reason they didn’t use them is that they didn’t want to sit still long enough to raise the launcher and then fire the missile when they were in such close proximity to the Russian tank.
Raising the launcher is powered, but it’s not exactly quick. And once it’s up, you can’t drive very fast. The Brad’s TOW is really meant to be used from defensive positions, behind cover (the sight is on the very top of the turret, and the launcher is at the same height when in the firing position, so you can fire with everything except the sight and launcher behind cover), and at range.
Seems like my analysis of what was going on in this fight when we first covered it was a bit more accurate than other commentators wanted to admit…
Bradleys can do a lot of damage to a tank, given enough ineptitude on the part of the tank crew and their commanders. That T-90 should never have been in that situation to begin with, and the fact that it was? Sheer stupidity/ignorance of how to use that tank in combat.
People do not give enough credit to the intermediate level of military operational art, that above squad/crew drills and below the strategic/logistic level. This tank should never have been put into that situation to begin with, as a single vehicle out operating on its own without infantry screening or another tank to act as a wingman. The crew should have been smart enough and empowered enough to say “Yeah, time to go…” when they found themselves on their own… But, that ain’t the Soviet/Russian way of doing things.
That T-90 needed to operating as part of a platoon of three to four tanks; there should have been a “wingman” tank present to provide overwatch and supporting fire, at a minimum. That the Russian Federation forces are this inept is a bit frightening, because that ineptitude implies that the nuclear threshold is probably a lot lower than our calculations would put it.
This is of a piece with what I was saying when all this began; the utter lack of low-level self-organized discipline in the Russian Federation ranks is an indicator of just how inept and unprofessional their forces are. The logistics columns entering Ukraine from Belorussia demonstrated remarkably inept march discipline, zero situational awareness, an inability to navigate, and issue after issue. They weren’t even disciplined enough to put out air guards during movement, herringbone their convoys on stops, or put out local security. They allowed Ukrainian civilians to come up on and mingle with the convoys, answering questions and asking their own, like “Just where the hell are we…?”
That they’re still doing this sort of crap two years into a war? LOL… Yeah, tell me all about how the Russians are this “second army in the world”. World of Warcraft, maybe… Not this one. They take that crap up against even a badly trained and equipped NATO force, their lunches are going to be taken away and eaten wholesale. I can’t even begin to imagine what their invasion of the Baltics or Poland would look like… Same with Finland. They take that crap to the big leagues, and the Finns alone are going to turn even more of their armies into scrap metal and sausage grindings.
I don’t know what Putin was told before the 24th of February 2022, but whatever it was, he was lied to. Badly.
The one photograph available of the T-90M after the action, from an outfit called TG:WarArchive on Oryx, is not consistent with any of these video tales:
https://postimg.cc/PNTvhfKD
The Relikt tiles on the glacis are gone, but undisturbed elsewhere. The integrity of the hull and turret were not breached anywhere in this three-quarter view. The commander’s RWS and panoramic sight were not damages, nor were the meteorological staff or gunner’s SOSNA-U sight. There is no evidence of any internal fire at the open commander’s hatch.
The Ukrainians now claim that three Bradleys were involved, after initial claims of only two. One purported Ukrainian gunner now claims in another video that only HEI-T rounds were fired due to frozen ammunition switch gears on their chain guns.
This looks like a CBN event.
Previous comments are all very astute. I see very little video evidence of Russian deployment of armor or mech forces in other than “onesies and twosies”. Even the most elementary of Western military training focuses upon Combined Arms. I thought the Penny Packet theory of armor was dashed in May of 1940.
“This looks like a CBN event.”
Exactly! Criminals Being Neutralized…
“Previous comments are all very astute. I see very little video evidence of Russian deployment of armor or mech forces in other than “onesies and twosies”. Even the most elementary of Western military training focuses upon Combined Arms. I thought the Penny Packet theory of armor was dashed in May of 1940.”
The Russians in 2022 and the Ukrainians in 2023 initiated massive attacks with concentrated armor formations. All of these attacks ended in abject disasters, with the losses of almost all the AFVs employed, mostly due to mines and PGMs.
Both militaries abandoned NATO combined-arms tactics after these heavy losses. Both now subscribe to P.S. Smirnov’s recommended tactics in his 1941 seminal work “Breakthrough of Fortified Defense Lines” (Прорыв укреплённых линий обороны). Smirnov emphasizes dismounted combat engineers, massive artillery strikes, and dispersed, sparing use of armor to breach heavily fortified defensive lines.
Ever greater dispersal of forces has been the response to the increasing lethality of weapons since antiquity.
USAR is in the process of revising FM 3-34.2 “Combined-Arms Breaching Operations” to account for the lessons learned in Ukraine.