Posted on 11/21/2010 9:28:07 AM PST by Nachum
The U.S. military is sending a contingent of heavily armored battle tanks to Afghanistan for the first time in the nine-year war, defense officials said, a shift that signals a further escalation in the aggressive tactics that have been employed by American forces this fall to attack the Taliban.
The deployment of a company of M1 Abrams tanks, which will be fielded by the Marines in the country's southwest, will allow ground forces to target insurgents from a greater distance - and with more of a lethal punch - than is possible from any other U.S. military vehicle. The 68-ton tanks are propelled by a jet engine and equipped with a 120mm main gun that can destroy a house more than a mile away.
Despite an overall counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes the use of troops to protect Afghan civilians from insurgents, statistics released by the NATO military command in Kabul and interviews with several senior commanders indicate that U.S. troop operations over the past two months have been more intense and have had a harder edge than at any point since the initial 2001 drive to oust the Taliban government.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
So mountainous...I don’t know. Seems like the taliban could just avoid them.
I'll take that back....Petreuas must have requested them so there must be a new plan...both defense and offense.
“further escalation in the aggressive tactics”
Huh? Our guys have had their hands tied for months now, have to get permission from God to do just about any combat operations.
Excellent. Now we can crush all those hostile armored units that have been pinning down our men and holding up victory.
The author is an idiot. The M1 is not a “hevily armored” tank, it is a “main battle tank”. There ARE “light tanks” in the inventory, but there is no such thing as a “heavily armored tank”.
The phrase is a pejorative, I think.
Just drop a couple of clusters & be done with them.
Bait, perhaps?
Yes, and maybe sometime somebody will say exactly what victory is.
The perfumed princes of the Pentagon strike again.
This is going to be a supersized clusterf*ck.
You do not use armor against insurgents.
The French tried it in IndoChina and Algeria.
The United States tried it in Vietnam
The Soviets tried it in AFGHANISTAN.
At best, you control the immediate surrounding but you can’t hold and keep territory.
At worst, you get your ass shot all to hell in ambushes.
And how do you get the M-1’s in to Afghanistan?
You fly them in on C-5’s - One at a time!
Afghanistan was and should have always been a Special Forces show.
But since it’s the only game in town, and all the conventional force generals got to get their ribbons and get their tickets stamped.
Idiots.
The curious thing is how exactly they get there. They must be flying these in...maybe two at a time on a C-5...because they have no seaports to use in this land-locked country.
I was a tanker for fifteen years. We didn’t even train for any counterinsurgency ops, that was left to the infantry and special forces. MOUT gave us the willies; a tank downtown was a delicious target to anyone looking down at it.
I flew helicopters in Vietnam; one of our local landmarks was a knocked out M48 tank in a clearing. When all your enemy has for mobility is shank’s mare, he has the advantage over anything bigger; a cheap RPG can kill a million dollar vehicle and that sort of thing.
The M1 Abrams is the world’s best tankbuster (with a bow to the A-10 Warthog). But maybe they will use it as highly mobile artillery in a direct fire role. And if they can cage it up like the Stryker, it can survive RPGs. But the only sensible strategy is the classical one: tanks deployed in combined arms operations (they can’t survive without the infantry!).
Just don’t know about this. But hey, I retire in two months.
Great post. And thank you for your years of service!
Is a tank faster than a mechanized mortar platoon. Sure, but they aren't that much faster.
That worked so well for the Russians.
BTW, are they sending ammunition too?
Where did you get all of your military knowledge and experience? It sounds like you picked most of it up from playing electronic games.
A simple Google search should bring you to a picture of the Presidential Palace in Saigon in 1975. Exactly what sort of insurgent apparatus is that in the photo? Armor has been employed in most conflicts around the world since its invention across the continuum of warfare. You can find examples of successful and unsuccessful use at each point along the continuum
We use some at Stevens Pass, WA for the same purpose (shoot the mountains).
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