Thanks.
I guess pieces of armor don’t matter a whole lot (as we saw with saddam’s 4 billion tanks getting WRECKED in the gulf war while we lost a few)
But China has quite a bit more.
They have backed off so far in the few skirmishes there have been.
I notice India refers to their dead soldiers as martyrs.
Never easy to beat a country with that kind of attitude.
I know they do not mean it in the same way insane muslims do and I think it’s a positive thing.
But what do I know? :)
China, on the other hand, is a monolithic state with the supremacy of the Han Chinese, Mandarin, and the Communist Party enforced from the barrels of guns and the walls of concentration camps. Their urban infrastructure is world class, but go into the countryside and back into the third world. And, of course, they have all those dollars we've kindly contributed to their development as a global threat.
I think all this makes China much stronger on paper but brittle, and India more able to absorb any setbacks in a military conflict. I've traveled in both countries many times, but not for several years. So this is just my own set of opinions.
Armor does matter, especially in the modern era with tanks having Active Protection Systems.
However, the area where the Indians and Chinese have been skirmishing does not necessarily lend itself well to armor - lots of long, high altitude valleys, mountain passes, steep climbs, etc. China sent some of their new light tanks there, India rolled some of their T-72 derivatives.
Should be pointed out that Saddam’s T-72 tanks were easy meat for a number of reasons. There were some defects in the design, sure, but that was less of an issue than the other issues:
1. All of his tanks were export models or copies of export models. These are by definition deliberately degraded, reduced capability (and in some cases, deliberately simplified - hence the historic nickname for export models being the ‘monkey model’) sold to other countries - this is so they are going to be at a disadvantage to the exporting country’s version. In this specific case, the Iraqi T-72s were equipped with a lesser armor package and never had the advanced countermeasures suite of the time which would include the Active Protection System.
2. Poor training and doctrine on the part of the Iraqi army - pretty much self explanatory. They didn’t train often enough, they aped *some* Soviet doctrine without really understanding why or agreeing with it, etc., etc.
3. Poor maintenance - after the war, it was found that a lot of the Iraqi armor was already dysfunctional to some degree or other before being thrown into battle.
If you ignore the above, you then have to say that the M1 Abrams is a terrible crappy tank because more than a few of them in the hands of other forces have been killed in Iraq and Yemen, among other places.