Probably get another monstrosity like the T-35 that couldn't fight it's way out of a paper bag.
Posted on 05/25/2015 5:46:34 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Russia is expected to spend more money on its military in 2015 than in any previous year in its entire post-Soviet history.
According to an analysis conducted by Forbes Magazine, Russia will spend an estimated 5.34 percent of its economic output on defense in 2015. This estimate is based on the assumption that the Russian economy will contract by 3 percent and a 15 percent hike in the real value of the military budget.
However, another estimate quoted in the Wall Street Journal based on Russian government data notes that country’s GDP may even decrease by 4.6 percent largely due to lower oil prices and Western sanctions. Consequently, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev recently announced that this year’s 3.3 trillion rubles military budget will need to be adjusted and cut by five percent or 157 billion rubles.
Even worse, according to newly published budget data of the first three months of 2015, military expenditure exceeded 9 percent of quarterly GDP – almost twice the amount cited in Forbes Magazine.
The verdict is simple: Russia cannot afford military expenditures at such scale in the long-run. “The modern Russian economy just does not generate enough resources to finance the current 2011-2020 rearmament program. This seriously reduces the ability to efficiently renew the Russian armed forces’ equipment,” a recent analysis by the Moscow-based defense think tank CAST notes.
The only way for Russia to currently finance its growing military expenditure is to tap into the country’s reserve fund – money the Kremlin put aside over the last few years when oil prices were high and meant to cushion the economy against shocks. With the help of the reserve fund – worth approximately six percent of the country’s total GDP – Russia could maintain a 3.7% deficit for less than two years,
(Excerpt) Read more at thediplomat.com ...
Probably get another monstrosity like the T-35 that couldn't fight it's way out of a paper bag.
Saw this happen. The biggest piece of the truck left was the seat with the driver in it. I don’t think it moved the tank at all. Yes, the truck driver ran through the road guards at a crossing.
They’ll spend 5%+ of their GDP on military?
Let em.
They still don’t matter....
This one was destroyed outside Berlin in 1945. Photo by a memeber of the 208th Engineer Combat Battalion.
and for only $10 I know a guy who can lower the springs and will throw in dingle berrys to hang from the port holes....
“All, my, Friends,
Drive a Low Rider...”
Was the truck driver a Mongol?
Pretty much every major country built a few “land battleships” like the T-35. England, Germany and the US did, anyway. None of them were of any use at all. Too slow, too heavy, and broken down most of the time. Note the men standing by the T-35 are Germans.
It would seem obvious they aren’t building this
to destroy their economy but ours in the next
two years, that’s all the time Obama can give them.
I don’t think tanks have airbags and seat belts. But they have really good door locks.
Funny thing about tank columns, you can hear them coming for miles. Not too stealthy. Against formidable opponents they can be easy targets.
Russians also have a history of destroying their economy quite unintentionally. Oil price coming down to $60s from $110 has a huge effect on them as oil and gas is what drives their economy.
Tanks are significant enough force multipliers that any apparent diminishment of their effectiveness via emerging novel means will prompt evolution of more miniaturized point defense systems, upgraded electronic countermeasures, and enhanced armors to counter them.
Where’s the tank?
This leads me to believe the have an immediate use in mind.
the photo in post 21 didn’t open but the Soviet tank in post 24 is a T-34 with the 85mm gun and a larger turret for it that was introduced in late 1944 or early 1945. It was this version of the T-34 that US forces faced during the Korean War. I’m guessing that is the source of post 24’s photo.
Hey, they claimed the F-35 awesome tank killer, will be combat ready this year. We don’t need no steenkin A-10s. /s/
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