Back when I reviewed The Beast, I said “While the Russians have been demothballing old Soviet tanks to send to Ukraine, they haven’t become desperate enough to send T-55s to the front lines, assuming they still have any that are able to run.”
Guess what?
Russia is demothballing T-54s/55s and sending them to Ukraine. Maybe not for front-line duty (or at least I bet that’s what they’re telling the probably green tankers they’re stuffing into them). Maybe they’re putting in new thermal sights, and maybe not. Some have suggested they’re also adding explosive reactive armor as well, but since much of the stuff found on captured newer tanks turned out to be fake, I rather doubt it.
Does this mean Russia is running out of tanks? Not necessarily. Maybe they’re saving more modern tanks in reserve for a spring or summer offensive and sending all this old crap in as a stopgap. But a whole lot of slightly less ancient T-62s are up on Oryx, so I suspect we’ll start seeing Ukrainian forces take out T-55s in Ukraine sooner rather than later.
Given how antiquated T-54/55s are on the modern battlefield, I would suggest that the U.S. government demothball a goodly number of original M1 Abramss, maybe with some slight equipment upgrades, and ship them to Ukraine, assuming enough 105mm rounds can be scrounged up. They were effective enough to destroy Soviet armor in Desert Storm, and the stuff Russia is currently shipping to Ukraine is considerably older than that.
Tags: Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Soviet Union, T-54, T-55, tanks, Ukraine, video
My guess on this is that they’re going to stick them into static defense positions the way they did all the IS-2 and IS-3 tanks they put along the Chinese border, back in the day. Don’t look for these to be runners; they’re likely someone’s bright idea for use as fixed strongpoints along the defenses they’ve built up.
Thing is, they’re still going to be incredibly vulnerable to top-attack munitions like the Javelin.
I’m not overly impressed with the Russian leadership, these days. I suspect that this ain’t going to end well for Russia, and it may end a hell of a lot sooner than we think. I just spotted reports that they’re having huge issues with paying the troops across Russia, right now, and there are thousands of complaints about missed pay and not getting what they were owed.
Putin is likely going to be gone before very much longer. It’s all a question of how they decide to work out the cosmetics of the whole thing. For the love of God, by reports I’ve seen, he just locked himself into a thirty-year 70% discount on oil to the Chinese… That alone means Russia ain’t never coming back economically under his leadership. Their only hope is a total collapse and a new regime being able to abrogate that crap.
In an environment lacking capable portable anti-tank weapons, T-55 series tanks were a series threat and nearly unstoppable. Now, 60 some years later, not so much.
Digging obsolete tanks in as pill boxes may make some sense, but immobile defenses are easily outflanked and good infantry with good combat engineers will go through them. Remember, the Atlantic Wall was breached in less than 12 hours. Dien Bien Phu likewise demolished by tough infantry and massed artillery. Russians can’t do combined arms.
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OT question for y’all.
Are depleted uranium rounds ethical? Why or why not?
If you’d like to see some of the legal wrangling around the question over the past few decades, Wikipedia shows this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Legal_status_in_weapons
@Earth Pig,
I wouldn’t say that the Russians can’t do combined arms. They can, the problem is just that the way they currently have their military set up, they are functionally incapable of doing it with any proficiency.
Here would be the key issue: You have to have a trained force, and the training is extremely perishable. In peacetime, you only maintain readiness for war with incessant, difficult, and expensive training that nobody wants to pay for. In wartime, you have to have your incentives set properly, and that’s something that today’s Russia is apparently incapable of. They don’t learn; they don’t implement fixes to things, and they apparently don’t even identify the things they need to fix.
You have to have low-level leadership. Preferably, low-level leadership that comes up the ranks so that it knows what the hell is going on, and where all the skeletons are buried in terms of getting things done. Some kid you hand a commission to after four years in some military academy ain’t got the knowledge they need to do the job that a senior NCO in a Western army does. The experience is key; you have to build those guys up, and then carefully nurture them. You do not want to do like the US military did in Vietnam and basically expend your entire NCO corps the way they did.
Russians have done pretty well at combined arms in the past. The problem is, they simply lack most of the enablers they need, right now, and they’re not going to get them anytime soon. You don’t grow an NCO corps out of a vacuum, and you also don’t fix a broken military culture overnight. So long as they have problems with Dedovschina, they’re not fixing any of their issues with low-level leadership. The Russians have ceded the barracks to the delinquent scum, and because of that, they’re never going to fix the root problems in their military.
Perhaps these obsolete tanks are cannon fodder to deplete Ukraine’s supply of anti-tank arms?
On the 105-gunned M1 tanks, the word is they have been looked at, and the issue is apparently fluid seals. Pulling and replacing overhauled turbine power packs is not _easy_ but at least takes care of all the old fluid seals in that module, but there are apparently a lot of “oh, that did not age well” seals in the rest of the tank, replacement of which drives some long delivery times for the supposed deep wartime reserve 105mm M1s – and if they need extensive work, that fact reflects poorly on how they were being kept in “reserve”.
About the decomissioned M1’s with 105’s: Alot were run through rebuild and upgunned. The 105’s found their way into Stryker vehicles. Which worked well as long as you fire the gun no more than 10 deg from straight forward. If you fire to the side it has a tendency to roll the vehicle over. Ooops.
I think what they’re actually talking about doing is taking M1 tanks out of POMCUS stocks, and the whole “OMG, we’re giving the Ukrainians old tanks…” is epically stupid. The reality is that the POMCUS M1 tanks all have the depleted uranium packages in their armor, and they’re actually better than the “new manufacture” M1 tanks we were talking about giving them. Those were supposed to be the “monkey model” armor packages like we sold the Egyptians…
Why the hell they’re giving those to the Ukrainians, where they’re almost certain to wind up captured and dissected in Russia? No idea, but that’s about what I expect the Biden Krime Krewe to be getting up to.
The really important stuff that goes into what makes a US Army armored unit so dangerous won’t be on the shipping lists, and that would be all the logistic enablers and accessory items like actual encrypted frequency-hopping radios like SINCGARS. God help the poor Ukrainian bastards trying to integrate all that crap across the mixed force of things they’re getting; I don’t think there is a single unified standard for comms across NATO; the encryption on those Leopards ain’t likely to be compatible, from what I remember.
Still, it’s better than trying to take on Russian stuff with what they had, although… From appearances, this whole thing may well turn into “Modern NATO against Russian Soviet-era crap pulled out of cold storage…” I can’t see them actually being able to even refurb these T55s to anything useful. The seals are probably long out of production, the transmissions are manual, and there’s a whole host of other issues with them. The whole thing is just going to be epic freakin’ theater-of-the-absurd.
Anyone remember playing Twilight 2000? Didja ever think you’d get to watch that play out, somewhere in Eastern Europe in your lifetime, and the nukes wouldn’t have fallen? In a way, it’s kinda-sorta cool, in a sick and macabre way.
Swear to God, if I had a time machine and went back to about 1985 and tried selling any of this crap that’s actually happened over the last 37 years to the folks running the intelligence agencies as even “speculative predictions”, I’d have been put right into a damn rubber room with a straight-jacket and hot-n-cold running Thorazine on tap…
@ Howard,
The whole “depleted uranium” thing is a stalking horse. The fact is, that “depleted” thing should be a clue; the stuff we’re talking about is what’s left over after they enrich it to get the good stuff out to use for fuel. It’s non-radioactive…
What it is, however, is a heavy metal. And, breathing that crap ain’t good for you, once it’s been powdered by running it into a tank’s armor at high speed. It also has wonderful pyrophoric effects as it penetrates armor.
Main reason you use it is the density; you can also put it into shaped-charge liners, if you like.
The wonderful thing about the depleted uranium sabot rounds is that you can do a hell of a number on even the frontal arc of a T62 with the 25mm ones you fire off of a Bradley. There was a platoon of Bradleys that blundered into a reinforced company of Iraqi tanks (mostly T62 models, some T72s…) that were dug into a date palm orchard. The Iraqis were waiting to ambush an American armored unit, but they unfortunately didn’t account for that unit’s commander off-handedly telling their attached infantry platoon to stay busy while the grownups were talking, and check out yon date palm orchard… Which they did, and discovered said Iraqi unit. Cue about a half-hour of “Holy sh*t!!!!!” frenzy, and when it all shook out, said Bradley platoon had whacked the Iraqi tank company that the unit they were attached to was looking for, all by themselves and while Captain Danger was trying to work out his perfect operations order for his epic attack on them… The whole thing was sorta humorous, if you thought about it the right way. It was mostly terrifying for the Bradley guys, especially the dismounts. They had no idea what was going on, because the turret crews and drivers didn’t have time to tell them they’d found an Iraqi company, so all they knew was that the four Bradleys they were in were running and gunning like maniacs in the middle of this palm orchard… Backs of those Brads looked like they’d been Mixmastered when it was all over.
Best part of it was, that LT took out the Iraqi element that the unit he was attached to had been tasked with, all by his lonesome and purely by accident.
DU ammo, even in 25mm? Deadly stuff. Also, serious health hazard if you don’t treat it like asbestos and encapsulate the vehicles you shoot it into after the fact. The particulate DU is very no bueno to be breathing or eating… Can you say “Heavy metal poisoning”, which requires some seriously nasty chelation therapy to treat, if it’s bad enough?
What happened to all those field marshals who told us the war would be over in a week? AQlso recall Biden offered sanctuary to the Kiev regime.
I predict that by this time next year the Russian military will give Putin the Mussolini treatment.
Everything I’ve read suggests that exposure to battlefield depleted uranium is not particularly dangerous unless you’re on the kinetic receiving end. That paper says there are concerns, but likens the toxicity to lead. So no, you don’t want to sleep in it or make water pipes from it, but it can take decades of low-level exposure before adults experience notable negative health effects.
Maybe there will be slightly elevated levels of cancer in Ukrainians who eat wheat from contaminated wheat from old battlefields some 20-50 years hence, but I actually doubt it would show up at levels distinguishable from statistical noise.
Lawrence, I honestly don’t know about the “not particularly dangerous” thing, but I observed them going from devil-may-care about M1 hulks that they’d fired up to destroy up in Iraq to “Uh… Hey, let’s just encapsulate this thing, before we ship it back…”
So, I speculate that there is something there, in terms of hazard. It’s about like “really nasty asbestos” so far as the way they treat it, not due to radioactivity but due to the chemical toxicity.
@Old Ranger,
I gotta be honest… I didn’t expect the Russians to keep this folly up for as long as they have. I thought they’d have the sense to abandon an obviously unwinnable war, but they keep right on doubling down on the stupid.
Strategically, Putin has been a disaster. He’s done nothing in the entire time he’s been running Russia to address the things that are killing Russia and Russians, namely by addressing the economic and demographic issues. Instead, all that he’s done is build a bunch of tacky gold-plated palaces and build yachts with his buddies while playing cut-rate Hugh Hefner. Russians are going to look back on his tenure as Supreme Leader and think of him as the king of lost opportunities, if there are even any Russians left when he’s done with it all.
This war is going to be remembered as the one that killed the last vestiges of the Russian Empire, I suspect. All Putin keeps doing is throwing more good money after bad, in terms of manpower, material, and international good will. Not like Russia had a lot of that to spare, but…
[…] couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece on how Russia was pulling ancient T-55s out of storage to send to Ukraine. In the interest of balance and fairness (to my readers, not to Russia), […]