Posted on 05/04/2022 2:22:48 PM PDT by BenLurkin
I’m seeing quotes for T-72 for $50,000 or so.
https://www.wired.com/2015/06/heres-can-buy-russian-tank/
And, ATGMs are often used against vintage BMPs and such or much less value.
You’re assuming 100 percent hits.
You’re assuming Russian crews are part of the equation, and don’t consider that allied operators are also part of the equation.
Look, it’s o.k. that the U.S. squanders $2.3 trillion LOSING the war in Afghanistan, and another $2 trillion LOSING the war in Iraq. These expenditures would have been fine if we had won those wars. But, as it is, we lost, and we, the U.S., are still a free country. Those were “wars of volition,” as far as we were concerned, and since the men of those countries wouldn’t fight, screw ‘em.
It’s another thing when we have a people that will stand and fight, and we run out of weapons because they’re so damn expensive.
Did you factor in the value of the demoralization that happens when you deplete your stocks and lose in spite of the bravery of the men of Ukraine and the foreign fighters who have joined them?
You may be comparing apples to oranges there.
A combat ready, modernized T72 with functioning advanced fire control, advanced ERA, communications, modern ammo, and all the add-on bits that make the feature list isnt going to be offered to the public.
Your last bit is not relevant. Defeat does have a hundred fathers too.
BMPs carry more men, and a hit on a BMP is likely to kill or wound more personnel than a tank. Which figures in the tradeoff also - recruitment and training of infantry is no small problem for the Russians these days. They are generally very short of infantry.
About you saying my last statement not being relevant ... you should have some humility since we haven’t won a war since WWII while we spend more money on defense than the entire rest of the world combined.
About a T-72 costing $2.2 million: Russia has a defense budget of $60 billion. With all of its priorities, it cannot afford to produce tanks, and hasn’t had a tank in production since the Soviet era. So, your numbers are Pentagon gobbledygook. What the Russians have is 10,000 tanks in reserve, mostly decades old tanks, in various stages of repair, that would have to be refurbished for deployment.
Independent of being modernized (which you assume), these tanks are awesome vehicles against infantry without ATGMs.
OK, so lets say we have Javelins. Implicitly, according to you, Javelins are 100 percent effective. (I already called you out on this assumption of 1 missile = 1 tank kill. But, if you want now to speak to the matter, please do.)
According to doctrine, you’re supposed to swarm tanks with the Javelin. That means shoot multiple missiles. So, it’s not one ATGM for one kill.
According to doctrine, another tactic is to attack tanks simultaneously with mortars and/or machine guns while attacking them with ATGMs. So, there goes the stand-off advantage that you talked about.
One of the advantages of proxy wars is that we can see what actually are the kill rates of things like the Javelin missile and the Excalibur round. In the world of unlimited budgets, you can make up any number you want. I’ve seen claims that the Javelin in 97 percent reliable, and 100 percent effective. I suspect these claims don’t actually mean what they seem to mean. But, proxy wars give us the real picture.
Russia has produced large numbers of tanks since the Soviet era - about 3000 T-90’s for instance, almost all for export, as well as several advanced versions of T-72’s. We need not count the 50-odd T-14 Armatas, as they are still in prototype effectively, but yes, they have been made too.
The manufacturing rate is very low, about 100-200 a year all in.
Yes they have those 10,000, of which many will never be worth refurbishing, and for most probably there will be a long lead time to do so, and few of them will be modern enough to justify a Javelin. This old Soviet stock would be very vulnerably to a host of older missiles the Ukrainians (or some Nato countries) hold in large numbers. Thats a use, for instance, for all those old Milan and TOW missiles.
We have no idea, other than very general ones, how many Javelin missiles Ukraine has already received (leaving aside those assigned and undelivered, in the pipeline, etc) and how many are being held in reserve, how many were destroyed in transit or were captured, how many were used, what they attacked with them, etc. Both of us are in the dark here in coming up with missles used/target.
I am not specifying doctrine of any kind. I dont know how you got anything like it from what I wrote. The Javelin is a long range battlefield ATGM specifically designed to defeat modern tanks. It can be used under different circumstances of course, but its strengths are as above. It can be substituted by other mussiles depending on the circumstances, and it is certainly not the only ATGM used by the Ukrainians.
Personally I see it best used as a long range ambush weapon, the longer the range the better, to increase the area within which the ATGM teams can hide from random suppressive fire. Theres a lot more area to cover at 3000 meters from the front of an enemy column than at 1000 meters. Coordination with other fire can happen with mixed ranges - MGs can fire from their effective range while ATGMs engage at theirs. All affected by terrain and visibility of course.
Thank you.
I didn’t know what the true measurement was.
To me a 55 gallon drum was filled with 55 gallons.
Surprisingly for me, it isn’t.
I didn’t get anything about doctrine from what you wrote. I squirreled around the internet to pick up the nuggets.
You have never addressed the issue of how many Javelins it takes, on average, to kill one tank. Not ever. Not under direct and repeated challenge. Yet you insist that the Javelin meets a cost benefit test (i.e., on average costs us less than the value of the targets it takes out) and even that it is efficient (relative to the benefit/cost ratios of the NLAW and the stugna).
If you cared about actual outcomes, you’d be curious. But, you’re not even curious.
What about you saying both of us are in the dark?
Do the math:
1. Number of Javelins sent to Ukraine: https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/biden-javelin-facility-weapons-sent-to-ukraine-watch-live-stream-today-2022-05-03/
2. Number of tanks killed with Javelins: About 1,000 Russian tanks have been destroyed or abandoned; we’ll say 600 due ATGMs, of which we’ll say half is to Javelins and half to NLAWs and stugnas. So, my guess is it takes something like 8 missiles on average to kill one tank. I would hope that Congress is interested in a much better researched estimate.
It is NOT clear that the Javelin meets a cost-benefit test, no less is efficient (i.e., has a high cost-benefit ratio compared to other ATGMs).
I mentioned some of the ridiculous claims made for the Javelin in a prior post. Actual performance is often an eye-opener.
Thank you for confirming what I wrote. In saying Russia has only produced tanks for export since the Soviet era, and has only produced scattered other tanks, e.g., prototypes of the Armata, you’re only quibbling. Russia is trying to present itself as a near-peer to the U.S. on a military budget less than one-tenth of ours, and with a population that is shrinking (especially in the demographic of military-age men), and is increasingly stupid and drunk.
God forbid that we can’t in Ukraine, with $800 billion in annual defense expenditure, defeat a country with $60 billion in annual defense expenditure. Because this time, the bloated cost of U.S. weapon systems would betray people who are fighting to defend their country, as opposed merely adding to the waste that was involved in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Destroying a $50,000 T-72 with a $80,000 Javelin. Good!
Destroying a T-72 with a $20,000 stugna. Better!
Destroying a T-72 with a 40 mm mortar shell dropped from a drone. Priceless!
Some comments -
We have no idea of usage/wastage of Javelins, much less how many “kills” can be attributed to them. These should, btw, include all “kills”, tanks or otherwise. Coming up with a “cost to kill” as in some form of total cost analysis is going to be futile.
Russia HAS produced tanks not for export since 1991. At least 500 of the T-90s were retained for Russian use, and 2-3 thousand T-72B-series. Add to that refurbishment of a large number of T-80s - the T-80 chassis were made in the Kharkov works, but upgraded and modified in Russia. Between these models are nearly all of those tanks used in the initial attack on Ukraine.
All means possible are best. ATGMs of any sort and from all sources, AT rockets, mines, drones, artillery, whatever. The point there is that these are all means dependent on all sorts of circumstances.
Maybe a situation makes it possible to lay an IED, perhaps a lack of enemy observation. Maybe a short range ambush is feasible, where the enemy has not deigned to plaster their approach route with suppressive fire. A long range ATGM is a very important addition to all these, as the use case is very typical of the terrain and tactical situation over there, that is open country plus extensive enemy suppressive fire.
Also, weapons and even enemy casualties are means to an end - generally to stop an attack, in the case of ATGMs, or to, in an attack, take out spotted enemy assets from a safe(er) distance.
The US Air Force was using Warthogs to great effect in Iraq
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In the After Action reports on the ‘highway of death’ by the AF, A-10s were barely mentioned because no one kept track of their sorties, most of the credit went to F-16s(15s?), other planes, and artillery.
The story might be on FR, but I forget where and when. Sorry. You’ll have to Goggle it - also try, now that I think of it, YouTube.
Actually it is the most humane way to kill baby seals - which has been an industry for generations and is the only high value work available - other than Canadian welfare - in the region.
Seals are nasty stinky animals - as you’d learn if you had any experience with them.
What is an orc?
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I just report. You decide.
You calls them what yous want. I calls them Orc because they behave like Orcs.
War criminals identified: identification data of scouts of the Russian 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade
https://informnapalm.org/en/war-criminals-identified-personal-data-of-scouts-of-the-russian-64th-motorized-rifle-brigade/
Be sure to report to Central to pick up your Orc disinformation check and cash it before it bounces
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/highway-death-in-pictures-1991/
US planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel”, said one US pilot.
This bombing was done with cluster bombs and incendiary rounds from A-10s. A cluster bomb is a weapon containing multiple explosive submunitions.
This spreads the destruction over a much wider area and doesn’t leave a single huge crater behind. Anybody within the strike area of the cluster munitions, be they military or civilian, is very likely to be killed or seriously injured.
Except that’s not in the USAF after action report.
I have never read the official debrief but I have always gotten the idea the USAF would like to get rid of the Warthog. I think I remember some action broadcast at the time. I thought at that time that they must have been glad they were forced to keep them because they came in handy. But it has been too long ago for me to be sure.
here is another one telling how 2 warthogs killed 23 Iraqi tanks in one day.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-how-a-10warthogs-killed-23-iraqi-tanks-in-one-day-during-operation-desert-storm/
I don’t know except what I read and saw on TV about either Gulf war, but I came away with the impression that the A-10 was the best we have for CAS if we had air superiority.
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