archive https://archive.ph/W8bFQ
A Ukrainian Armed Forces officer, whose brigade is fighting on Leopard-2, pointed out the fragility of the tracks, weakening their tension and leading to breakdowns and this is a disaster in combat conditions. Ukrainian soldiers have to constantly monitor this feature of German tanks.
A commission from Germany, which visited a repair centre in Lithuania for Leopards, was unpleasantly surprised by the number of equipment that failed due to defects.
Problems with logistics and lack of spare parts persist - even in Lithuania, far from the front, mechanics face problems when repairing Leopards.
A German officer admitted to Der Spiegel that German tanks wear out much faster in combat conditions. Based on the experience of the Bundeswehr in Mali, we can say that a mileage of 10,000 km in combat conditions is equal to 100,000 km in peacetime, the officer claims. Added to this is the problem of the need for complex maintenance of tanks, which must be carried out at the factory.
“Attempts at repair by the Ukrainian military lead to additional damage to the Leopards,” concludes a member of the German commission that visited Lithuania.
I see they really uphold the best traditions of German tankmaking.
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“Attempts at repair by the Ukrainian military lead to additional damage to the Leopards,”
lmao. 70 years later, and they’re still coping for their inability to understand logistics or build anything that lasts.
lol right!
It’s really a tradition at this point for German tanks to be like this.
RETVRN TO TIGER II
A German officer admitted to Der Spiegel that German tanks wear out much faster in combat conditions. Based on the experience of the Bundeswehr in Mali, we can say that a mileage of 10,000 km in combat conditions is equal to 100,000 km in peacetime, the officer claims.
No shit, Sherlock.
Added to this is the problem of the need for complex maintenance of tanks, which must be carried out at the factory.
So the tanks are not fit for sevice…
I love how NATO equipment is proving to be complete garbage now that’s seeing real action in a serious conflict.
When your opponents literally aren’t the poorest unequipped people on earth. And even then sometimes.
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I think it’s pretty likely we’ll see at least some F-16s delivered this year, and I imagine Russia will make them a priority target because there’s going to be a lot of propaganda value in shooting them down.
They are inventing and manufacturing tanks only so that War Thunder has new content. They are not meant to be actually used in wars.
They need to expedite peace negotiations as continuing this war only further embarasses NATO.
I don’t see any peace negotiations happening as long as the Nazi junta in Kiev remains in power. Even if the US tells them: “negotiate or else the aid will be cut”, Zelensky will refuse because he has backed himself into a corner with the Nazis around him. Also, the Ukrainians know that the current US administration and especially the European governments have really no other choice either. They cannot afford to be seen to allow Russia to win after how much they have invested in Ukraine. They’ve all tied their political future to this war. Kiev understands this and will just call their bluff if they try to apply that kind of pressure.
This conflict is going to end the hard way, with one side collapsing, completely exhausted, and capitulating, and that is not going to be Russia.
Zelensky ought to get a place next door to Bolsonaro in that Florida gated community.
Why would Russia even believe anything the Kiev regime promises in a peace deal? They have disregarded all previous agreements the day after they were signed.
Obviously that’s the plan that the US has. They think they can freeze the conflict, build Ukraine’s military back up and try again in a few years. I don’t know whether Russia would fall for this same trick again, but let’s assume that they did agree (never underestimate the gullibility of liberals and their ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory…because even with all that has happened Putin still fundamentally thinks like a liberal). The problem for them is that this option is not politically viable anymore.
In the current atmosphere in Ukraine the hardline Nazis would see any deal as treason. Meanwhile the general population in Ukraine but also in Europe would become extremely angry and wonder why, if they could have had the same deal back in March 2022, they had to sacrifice so much (because Europe also has morgaged its future on the promise of a victory and the expectation of another influx of cheap resources from Russia after its renewed subjugation).
So every move that the US can make is now a bad one. Russia has the collective West in Zugzwang, and the only thing they can do is prolong the inevitable.
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That would be an outcome that the US would greatly benefit from since it would allow them to disentangle themselves from the Ukraine quagmire, try to also stop the conflict in the Middle East from spinning out of their control, and then devote all their attention to China.
The problem is that the US does not have complete control over Kiev, and in some ways the tail is wagging the dog in that relationship. As i have pointed out, Kiev can and probably will continue to play stubborn since they realize that once they make a deal the US will drop them in favor of more important engagements.
Out of self-preservation Zelensky cannot allow the conflict to end, and given that the US and EU have built him up to be too much of a heroic figure in the eyes of their people they cannot openly betray him now. What they need to do first is to destroy his image, to find a way to put the blame on him for losing the war.
There have been rumors going around for a while that the US is telling Kiev they need to freeze the conflict by spring 2024 at the latest, threatening to expose massive corruption in the Zelensky administration if they do not obey. I don’t know how accurate the rumors are, and even if they are accurate it may be just a bluff.
Another additional obstacle is that in the West there are still a lot of neocon hardliners who are utterly obsessed with Ukraine who will continue to call for more and more escalation and that Biden would need to fight against to push any kind of pragmatic solution through. And i don’t know if he has the political capital for that. His position is very weak already.
I see no way out of this conundrum for the US. They cannot lose this proxy war without catastrophic consequences (dissolution of NATO is a real possibility) and the only thing they can do to delay their defeat is continue to escalate to more and more dangerous levels. Give Ukraine even more weapons and money and sink even deeper into the quagmire. And Europe’s situation is even worse…
At this point I don’t see how NATO escapes utter humiliation.
The usual way, propaganda power. Sure, everyone outside the same map will see the emperor naked butt clearly, but most people inside will be completely oblivious to reality or forgot it in few weeks as every single time before.
I would bet that it applies to just about every standing conventional army right now. If you haven’t been in war recently against a peer opponent, then you really have no way of knowing how many issues your equipment has.
Reject modernity, return to T-34 lol
Looks like T-72 is the most combat-tested tank at the moment.
Didn’t the T-72s in Iraq get wrecked by Bradleys? If an MBT can’t stand up to cheaper, faster APCs, why would anyone buy MBTs?
Bradley carries anti-tank missiles, but has very weak main cannon. In Ukraine tanks are mostly used against infantry and field fortification, so 125-mm main cannon of T-72 is extremely useful. And T-72 is much better protected against infantry anti-tank weapons.
If an MBT can’t stand up to cheaper, faster APCs, why would anyone buy MBTs?
Are Bradleys actually cheaper than T72s?
$4,122,000 dollars for a bradley after adjusting for inflation from 2000 to 2022.
$1,200,000 dollars for a t-72 in 2023.
So lol no
my god, it’s all “our unkillable technological marvel that can each kill 10 enemy tanks single handedly” vs. “we’ll make 11 of them then” again
Always has been
T72s used by Iraq were shitty export variants. Worse gun, thinner and worse armor, weaker engine, shitty ammo, bad optics and sensors, etc. Soviet weaponry had basically 3 kinds of the same thing:domestic models with all the latest tech, export for Warsaw pact nations that had some downgrades like worse airplane radars for example, and “monkey model” for non allied countries still. buying weapons. There’s a lot of difference that model number doesn’t encompass.
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“Attempts at repair by the Ukrainian military lead to additional damage to the Leopards,” concludes a member of the German commission that visited Lithuania.
Our tanks aren’t shit, you’re just all morons is, if nothing else, a very bold stance to take
This is especially funny coming from the Germans since tanks absolutely have to be capable of field repairs, especially the fucking tracks.
Of all tank parts, the tracks must be designed in a way to be easily field serviceable. The Germans simply didn’t design a good tank, but they ofc won’t admit that, so blame the Ukrainians lol
To be fair to the german military industrial complex all the design requirements ever were like “hold off the russians long enough for the actual military to arrive” so I can see why “tracks that work” weren’t exactly high on the priority list
I don’t even know if I’d give them that much credit. They were likely designed to be as marketable as possible to justify high costs to the government (and taxpayer), and shiny gizmos sell well in a system designed to jerk off to supposed ““technological marvels””. High costs = more profit for the defense manufacturers.
Nah, Leo 2s are old. Like late 70s old. Different world, germany was still a social democracy back then, very much frightened about the russians, and oddly against arms deals.
I’d argue the lack of “working tracks” is because nobody ever expected them to actually do anything except be driven to the front and then shot down until the Americans roll in.
Leopard 1 is about 60 years old and doesn’t have armour because it was assumed HEAT rounds would be able to penetrate any armour.
Leopard 2 is about 45 and is generally considered equivalent to other western tanks, considered to be a defensive design for parking in the Falder Gap.
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Fucking awesome… it was what… over a year ago that articles were talking about how shitty the Russian equipment was because used tires would be left on the side of the road instead of be dragged along towards the front lines…
The downside of filling your military with Nazis back in the 50s is that you never learned the lesson that stupidly overengineered wunderwaffen don’t make good weapons. Whoops.
How does a thing that breaks down before it even gets to the battle field twisted into “Well it’s over-engineered” anyway?
Overengineered would imply you put too much energy and resources into the design, not that you built something that goes 10 feet and shits itself, and then you have to take off the turret to change the oil.
German tanks of WW2 were over-engineered in that many of them used unproven designs that were very complex . The tiger is the best example of this. It had a lot of things going for it; it out gunned everything else on the battlefield and was armored against any allied tank at the time that they were introduced, despite it’s size, tiger was only a few MPH slower than the sherman and it’s weight was better distributed, resulting in less pressure per square ft and less wear on the roads, due to the interlocking road wheels. These same interlocking road wheels constantly got gunked up with frozen mud on the eastern front and during the bulge, often having to be melted with torces. Tiger was MASSIVE and took a huge amount of resources and labor to manufacture. So due to a combination of technical flaws and reliability issues resulting from the need for constant maintenance in the field. This and the fact that 3 smaller tanks could be built with the resources it took to make 2 tigers that really make it an over engineered failure.
I’ve found what over-engineering means in practice is similar to feature creep in programming, wherein an engineer keeps getting requests to solve problems in a project, but never enough time to iterate down the design to use off-the-shelf components, tuned, functions consolidated, etc. Also no one is removing features that could be done with additional training even if the feature is expensive and unreliable.
Thus each feature/bit on the tank technically works some of the time, but breaks down too much and has no common parts with other bits of the tank.
The word conjures an image of an engineer going ham on a project, but it’s often because of poor time management and inflexible orders coming from above.
EDIT: I realise this is only tangentially related to feature creep. Sorry. Hopefully if you squint you can see it
the fall of the DDR and its consequences
