Hope the llama is safe. We know not all of those goats are...
Armchair General's DonbAss Derailed Discussion Thread (Topics Include History, Traps, and the Ongoing Slavic Civil War plus much much more)
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Hope the llama is safe. We know not all of those goats are...
Dumping hundreds / thousands of expensive AF to run and maintain IFV's on the Ukrainians might not be the best idea any more than Abrams or other heavy NATO tanks would be. Probably better to grab all the T series tanks Angola and the rest of Africa are willing to sell.
Simpsons already did it!
But are they that expensive to run and maintain? With Abrams there is a bit of an argument due to the turbine, its fuel consumption and weight, but even that is not as strong argument as some think - after all Ukraine operates a small number of turbine powered captured T-80's too, and those are notoriously unreliable at that, unlike Abrams.
OTOH Bradley is lighter than a T-72 and has a diesel engine, so as far as fuel, bridges and engine maintenance go there should be no problems. Also no T series tank can do the job of an IFV, while the BMP variants coming from eastern NATO are just shoddy and obsolete as they were since decades.
Ukraine also already operates halves of a Bradley in small numbers in form of the M270 MRLS chassis and its ammunition carrier.
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The Bradleys aren't so much to replace T-series tanks.Giving Ukraine more IFV's would reduce Ukrainian infantry casualties from artillery and ground fire. The Ukrainian military is always undermechanized. Trucks will mitigate casualties more then foot infantry just from being more mobile and responsive. Then Humvees and MRAP's even moreso. Then APC's even more than that. But more IFV's would be the best option for keeping Ukrainian troops mobile as well as alive on a modern battlefield.
Ukraine already has to ship Soviet design vehicles out of the country for repair and from most all reports I've read, they have to ship all US/NATO stuff like worn out M777's out of the country as well since they don't have sufficient tools and experience to do it in country.
M270's are not front line units (if they are then something went very wrong for the Ukrainians) they wouldn't need repair as often, there also aren't many of them.
Shipping a bunch of Bradleys to the front lines and then having to tow or leave them every time one is immobilized beyond the UAF's limited ability to field repair and then ship the recovered ones all the way back to some facility in Europe and back again just doesn't seem to be the better idea for mobility and responsiveness over sending them vehicles they have a much more substantial ability to field repair and thus get back into the fight.
The fundamental issue with US/NATO stuff is that everything about it is expensive and Cold War era equipment in particular like the Bradley was designed partly on the assumption that its operators would have a massive amount of infrastructure to repair and maintain it. More modern designed equipment like Humvees and MRAPs seem much better in this regard since they were designed for Iraq / Afghanistan where the conflict was known to be all asymmetric warfare from the beginning.
But they drive. A lot. In terrible conditions. Which is what breaks most often in armored vehicles that aren't being hit with anti armor weapons. At this tech level if they start taking major frontline damage that's a factory level repair anyway.
And what do you think they do with immobilized Soviet vehicles? Yeah, those have to be towed too with any more serious issues, it's not WW2, and we're not talking about halftracks and T-34's, you don't fix those with a hammer, wrench and duct tape.
Even Russians have to bring their own bloody tanks back to the factory, and they don't even have enough, so they set up new ones, one close to Moscow for extra keks, because shortening logistics lines is for noobs.
Russia Optimistic to Build Factory to Repair Tanks Which Destroyed in the War in Ukraine
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Marders and Bradleys aren't Puma or Ajax, they aren't that much worse than BMPs.
They were built to fight WW3, so infrastructure continuing to exist, yeah, bold assumption.
The vehicles of the time are rather modular, so as long as they have spare parts, they aren't hard to maintain to wartime standards.
Humvees were designed for *exactly* the same war Bradleys were. And MRAPs (which were designed for sandboxes) are such notorious maintenance hogs that them ending up everyewhere except US military is specifically connected to that - it's cheaper to give them away to police departments and random countries than to keep them as soon as they aren't needed for the COIN operations.
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Buba
A total creep
u so meen n 2 krtical!!!111
The linked to article puts the 2nd repair factory in ... Rostov, behind the southern frontline. Maybe even too close? But there is no other large city-industrial centre in the area, unless you go for Russian parts of the Donbas ...
As to the other being near Moscow ... IMO not too bad. It can service the northern front quite nicely, it is near the rail and road hub, can draw upon skilled labour from that area, and is several times closer than the tank factories beyond the Ural.
Russia is a big country
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How old are you, Buba?
Anyway, your son is right. God is punishing Russia for being an arrogant, imperialist asshole and for sodomizing Ukraine.
Tiamat
I've seen the future...
"Russian forces are indeed superior in one respect....THEY ARE BETTER AT DYING."
Read this in the voice of a Dalek for added effect.
In normal countries, death comes for you. In Russia, you come for death!
Okay calm down there Thanos.
One of the interesting things that stood out to me was that of the estimated 240,000+ shells the United States will be producing next year, a quarter of them might be the extended range M1128 Shells with the 30-40 kilometer range. Also the Czechslovak Group doubling their production rate in less than a year when it comes to artillery shell production.
Oh and the 90,000 tons of cluster munitions the United States may or may not have in artillery shell and rocket form lying around somewhere not yet demilled or converted...
Yep people often underestimate just how much artillery shells have been produced over the decades. Back during the Gulf War were were still using some WW2 surplus that was leftover.
Yup! So long as the shells themselves haven't been compromised and there are ways to launch them still around, they're still viable and will be used eventually in some form or another.
A bullet made in 1950 will still fire like the same bullet made in 2023, if it's intact.
Buba
A total creep
I understand that the metal parts of shells were of WWII vintage, but the explosives and/or propelant had been re-elaborated? Or are those compounds stable enough as to last 45 years?
It's not the bullet itself that matters, but the whole cartridge ... ?
It was hyperbolism.