So the US is not willing to export tanks with depleted uranium armor to UK, Germany (or France)? These tanks will not be going to UKR. In this case Challenger 2 tanks and Leopard 2 tanks would be going to UKR instead of the Abrams tanks with the depleted uranium armor.
It's not a matter of willingness, it's a matter of US law. Only the US military is allowed to operate vehicles with depleted uranium armor. Any vehicle with it has to have the armor replaced with something else before it can be exported. The US doesn't have a bunch of extra Abrams armor sitting around so it needs to manufacture more regular armor for every Abrams exported.
Or we could do both Bradleys and MBTs... Do you think the Ukrainians would turn them down? It seems quite a lot of Western MBTs have to be rotated out regularly for various degrees of maintenance and repairs...
Ukraine will take anything offered. They are using donated passenger cars for moving troops. Ukraine is rotating all their equipment out for maintenance. Lighter vehicles like Bradleys require less maintenance than tanks which have always required a lot of maintenance.
The Ukrainians do like the western MBTs they have gotten because they can engage Russian tanks beyond the range of the Russian tanks. They call the Challenger a sniper tank.
They like all western vehicles because those were built more with survivability in mind than Russian vehicles. The US gave a way a lot of MRAPs which were built for Afghanistan and Iraq. They have a hull designed to protect the crew from IEDs. They have proven a literal life saver when dealing with Russian mine fields. The MRAP might be destroyed by a mine, but everyone inside lives to fight another day.
Yeah I'm starting to wonder if maybe sticking with Bradleys is the way to go. I'm assuming it's cheaper to operate and maintain, not a well founded assumption but maybe it's true. They seem capable. I imagine the Ukrainian mechanics would have less aneurisms from having to learn how to fix 12 different tanks and apcs. And if it can take out a t-90 then what do they need tanks for?
We can donate the ones we can get approval for and the EU can buy the rest and donate it to Ukraine. I admit this is an uninformed plan and maybe there's problems with it.
There are times when you need the armor protection of a tank, so they aren't going away, but APCs are very capable vehicles and the 25mm Bushmaster is a very effective gun. Tanks are not that common on the battlefield. There are quite a few other, more lightly armored vehicles out there for every tank. And the Russians now have a limited number of good tanks, they are deploying a lot of older tanks with poorer protection now.
The Bushmaster can defeat the armor on almost all Russian vehicles. And when used correctly, they can at least give a T-90 fits.
One area where the west exceeds and the Russians fail is the ability to hit moving targets and the ability to shoot on the move. Many western systems have computerized targeting systems that can hit a target that is moving, or you're moving or both. The Russians are generally not that good at hitting anything on the move or hitting moving targets.
This is where a Bradley can run rings around a T-90. In those videos of the Bradleys engaging the T-90, the Bradleys moved around a lot and the T-90 couldn't get a targeting solution while the Bradleys were able to keep the pip on the T-90 while zipping around. Even if the Bushmaster couldn't penetrate the armor of the T-90, all those hits blew off anything outside the armor, set off some of the reactive armor on the tank, and pretty much blinded it.
The ability to fire off lots of rounds in a short amount of time also increases the chances of a critical hit or hitting a track and blowing apart the track links. An immobilized tank alone in enemy territory is going to have a pretty low morale crew who is likely to abandon the tank than sit there waiting for something lethal to kill it.
A Bradley may not be able to effectively kill a T-90 like a Challenger could, but it would give it a very bad day and render it ineffective.
The Twitter clip shows the same smoke grenade explosion. Are you saying the Twitter clip has two engagements edited together?
Here's a more extended video I found:
Good video that shows the whole thing. The Bradleys definitely did some damage the ultimately resulted in the loss of the tank. It doesn't look like they got a clean kill though.
Another thing that is going on at this point is the crews of Ukrainian vehicles are mostly seasoned veterans now, or the green crews have been trained by seasoned veterans. While the Russians have lost a significant number of their pre-war crews and have been unable to train replacements because they sent all their instructors to Ukraine and those people were subsequently killed.
A lot of the Russian tank crews barely know the basics of how to operate the tank. There were also stories a year ago of tanks operating with only two crew due to shortages of trained crew. It looks from the video that at least that tank had three crew, but who knows how well trained they were.
The T-90s are probably getting their better crews, but at this point a lot of Russian tank crews are not that good.
I think it was in 2022 I read an article about the realities of having vehicles with good crew survival built in. Western militaries have always tended to focus on crew survival. A crew who knows their chances of surviving a hit are good have better morale than those who know they are in a rolling death trap. The humanitarian angle is also part of it too. Western militaries tend to value human life more than say Imperial Japan or Russia/the USSR did.
But the humanitarian aspects aside, it also makes good sense to focus on crew survival. It takes time, effort, and money to train a soldier. The more technical the skill, the more it takes. Fighter pilots are walking gold.
Compared to the machines, the crew is a more valuable asset much of the time. Plus a crew who has their machine knocked out and lives to fight again has learned something and will perform better the next time.
The article used an example of T-90s vs Abrams in an extended war where both sides lose a lot of tanks. Most knocked out T-90s have a complete loss of crew while each Abrams only loses one crew per knocked out tank. If both sides are losing tanks at the same rate, the side with Abrams are preserving 75% of their crews while the T-90 side is losing all their crews.
Assuming both sides have effectively unlimited reserves of tanks, after replacement cycle of tanks, the T-90 side has all green crews while the Abrams side only has 25% green troops. With so many surviving veterans, the green troops can be slotted into crews with three veterans training them up much faster and more effectively than the T-90 crews who are all trying to learn on the job.
This is what has happened in Ukraine. The vehicle crews on the Ukrainian side are mostly experienced now because they have survived and the Russians have a preponderance of green crews who can barely drive their vehicles. Add in the disparity in training regimes between the two sides and the difference gets even greater. Ukraine's green troops have a reasonable level of training while most of the Russian troops have barely any training.
This also happened with airpower in WW II. Both Germany and Japan lost the bulk of their well trained pilots in the early part of the war and didn't have good training regimes set up, so the replacement pilots tended to be much worse than the veterans they replaced. Both Germany and Japan tended to keep their best pilots on the frontline until they were killed. The top fighter aces in Germany ran up some staggeringly high scores compared to the Allies. Erik Hartmann shot down 352 aircraft while the top aces in the RAF and USAAF had 40 each.
The reason the top aces in the west had fewer victories was because the US and the Commonwealth rotated pilots through combat positions. The British were even doing this through the Battle of Britain. Experienced pilots were sent back to train the next generation of pilots. As a result the green pilots by 1944 on the Allied side had been trained by combat veterans and knew more about their job than their opposites on the German and Japanese side.
Compared to the top veterans on the Japanese and German side these green pilots were not as good, but they were better than the bulk of the pilots they were encountering. Veteran Japanese fighter pilot Suburo Sakai encountered USN Hellcats over Iwo Jima (in 1944, many months before the invasion) and he was not impressed with the quality of the US pilots, but he was one of the few remaining pre-war trained pilots in the IJN.
A few days after Sakai's encounter the Battle of the Philippine Sea saw the USN down hundreds of Japanese aircraft in one morning of fighting for only a couple of aircraft lost and one bomb hit on the USS South Dakota which caused no damage of note. The battle got called the Marianas Turkey Shoot. One Hellcat pilot found he had a faulty engine shortly after launch and while lining back up on the carrier for landing he encountered a Japanese strike group. He shot down five of them before returning to the carrier. The Japanese could barely fly their planes and were not prepared for combat.
This collapse in skills on a side is called a Lancaster Square Collapse. Russia is there. After a collapse a military can keep fighting for some time, but their losses are going to be catastrophic for minimal or no gains.
