Running out of tanks?

Apparently the hardware situation in Russia is starting to feel the pinch of years of warfare:

When the then defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, boasted in December 2023 that 1,530 tanks had been delivered in the course of the year, he omitted to say that nearly 85% of them, according to an assessment by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think-tank, were not new tanks but old ones (mainly t-72s, also t-62s and even some t-55s dating from just after the second world war) that had been taken out of storage and given a wash and brush-up.

Since the invasion, about 175 reasonably modern t-90m tanks have been sent to the front line. The iiss estimates that annual production this year could be approaching 90. However, Michael Gjerstad, an analyst with the iiss, argues that most of the t-90ms are actually upgrades of older t-90as. As those numbers dwindle, production of newly built t-90ms this year might be no more than 28. Pavel Luzin, an expert on Russian military capacity at the Washington-based Centre for European Policy Analysis, reckons that Russia can build only 30 brand-new tanks a year. When the Ukrainians captured a supposedly new t-90m last year, they found that its gun was produced in 1992.

The tank & AFV production outlook is bad, and the production of artillery tubes is similarly grim for Moscow.

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Meme Dump

("Actually, unless it comes from the Tank region of France, it's just a sparkling armored fighting vehicle.")

"Four out of five dentists agree. The fifth is on Joe Rogan warning us about the conspiracy behind Big Floss." 

There's no word in Russian for "OSHA"...

A little-known tale from the wind-down of the Cold War is the fascinating story of what the Germans had to do to some of the Bundeswehr's newly-acquired fleet of Soviet-built BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles acquired from the ex-East German army in order to bring them into line with western standards of usability.

Some modifications were simple, like adding protective covers over the sharp-edged vision blocks for the dismounts' periscopes and a heater to keep the troop compartment warm in the winter. Some were practical, like locking out the top gear in the transmission to reduce wear and tear from high-speed operation.

Then there was the safety stuff, such as folding rearview mirrors, convoy lights, nonskid patches on the upper decking...oh, and, like replacing all the driveline components and gaskets containing asbestos with ones that wouldn't cause half your draftees to wind up in a cancer ward before they were old enough to collect a pension. They also removed the extra fuel tanks that were sandwiched in the thin armor of the rear troop compartment doors, which was the favorite BMP feature of Western infantry during the Cold War.

Best of all, because the 73mm main gun spewed toxic propellent gases back into the firing compartment, the West Germans just put an ixnay on firing the thing at all in peacetime.

As it was, even with the conversions, the BMP-1A1 "Ost" was just a stopgap, something for the newly absorbed units of the last round of Nationale Volksarmee conscripts to ride around in until they could be given Marders.

When the German army shriveled in size, the former East German IFVs wound up getting sold on to Greece and other countries.

Not a cell phone in sight, these NVA landsers are just living in the moment, huffing asbestos particles and freezing their asses off in the unheated crew compartment, hoping nobody shoots the rear doors with APIT.

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Knee Deep in the Dead

Using a pile of his Wagner Group stiffs as a prop in the background, Yevgeny Prigozhin went on a rant, saying he was going to pull his forces out of the fight around Bakhmut because the Russian army wasn't giving him enough ammo and support.



If I were Progozhin, I'd be making a habit of avoiding windows any higher than the second floor for the near future.

Meanwhile...

I feel like it's a good time to remind everyone that tankers literally only want one thing, and it's disgusting. pic.twitter.com/PpA8zTWl4G

— Sean M. Smith (@ReallySeanSmith) May 5, 2023

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Supertank

What's hilarious is that I know Putin stans who still insist that Russia hasn't used their good stuff in Ukraine yet.

"Show me that they've used T-90s!"

Er, okay?

“Someone left a Russian T-90A tank … captured by Ukraine last fall, on a trailer after the truck hauling it broke down and pulled into this truck stop off U.S. Interstate 10” https://t.co/krLsh3Idmi

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) April 13, 2023

Dude, Russia...er, "independent Donbas separatists"...have been using T-90s for nearly a decade now in eastern Ukraine.

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Museum Wars

You sickos are all waiting for it. #NAFO pic.twitter.com/eeqRT7txBl

— Sean M. Smith (@ReallySeanSmith) March 23, 2023

Interesting...

How it started...

How it's going...

It's real. According to CIT, Russia has removed T-54/55 from storage. Photographs of a train transporting military equipment from the far east (Arseniev, Primorsky Krai) was spotted. The tanks were identified as T-54/55.

How do you mean shortage 🙃 pic.twitter.com/LbLYwWvAFN

— NOËL 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 (@NOELreports) March 22, 2023

I wonder where they're going to source 100mm ammo? I guess there's some in storage, and the PRC probably manufactures it. It looks like the tanks on the rail cars still have active infrared searchlights, which would be borderline suicidal to use on a modern battlefield.

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Secret Weapon

As I was going through the stacks of books in the attic, winnowing things out to be dropped off at Goodwill or used to stock the Little Free Libraries in the neighborhood, I ran across this tome about one of the U.S. Army's most important weapons of the Cold War...

Not really a "weapon" per se, the Army's...in fact, the whole U.S. military's...training system was predicated on the idea that our guys would be outnumbered and have to rely on superior training and tactics to win. Units rotating through NTC could expect to get whupped by OPFOR.

This book was published in '89, and a bit over a year later, the destruction of the Iraqi army in a hundred hours showed that the training had paid off.

Turns out the Russians didn't train that way.

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We've been warning you!

If you want to give tanks to Ukraine, not only do you need to have the tanks to spare in the first place, but they need to actually be in running order and not mothballed off in some corner someplace, half-cannibalized for spares.

Some German officials expressed sympathy for Finland, which is not yet a NATO member and has Europe’s longest border with Russia, some 830 miles. It does not want to weaken its defenses now that Russia has shown a willingness to attack a sovereign neighbor.

But some European officials were hoping for a larger contribution from Finland, given promises from the United States and Britain to come to its defense if necessary, even before NATO accession.

Nordic countries such as Sweden, which had long pushed for Leopard deliveries but on Friday offered only “up to” 10, are facing another unexpected problem, several German officials said: While their politicians and members of the public appear keen to offer tanks to Ukraine, their militaries are not.

For decades, European countries enjoying a post-Cold War “peace dividend” had seen war as almost a thing of the past, regularly cutting military support. Now, the shrunken armies tend to be protective of what they still have. At NATO, European militaries are sometimes called “bonsai armies,” after the miniature trees.

A whole generation has grown up after the Cold War and let formerly muscular defenses atrophy. The Bundeswehr is an underfunded shadow of its former self. It used to be the brawniest army on the continent and now it has fewer MBTs than the Greeks. And if the Bundeswehr is in such a sad state, imagine what, say, the Dutch or the Belgies are looking like these days.

War just wasn't a thing that was gonna happen anymore in the new globalized world. What were you? Some kind of paranoid loon that thought Russia was just going to start invading neighboring countries?

Hey, they started back during the last years of the GWB administration and basically haven't stopped since.

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Crucial Industry

Like modern military jet aircraft or warships, there aren't a lot of nations with the infrastructure to build tanks. It's important that we retain that...

This should be a teachable moment: The time is right, right now, to cement the Abrams as the single go-to tank for America’s allies and partners. While the Israelis, French, Japanese British and Germans—and the Koreans aggressively marketing the K2—have tank-making capabilities, they cannot match the potential U.S. capacity; in its heyday, the Lima plant produced 800 Abrams per year. Only the United States can fill the demand of all the free countries that need tanks. To begin with, there are lots of M1s in the world—more than 10,000 including all variations. Secondly, even though the U.S. tank industrial base is a shadow of its former self, it’s in far better shape than its European counterparts. Thanks to congressional budget plus-ups, the tank plant in Lima, Ohio has been substantially modernized with new machine tools and its skilled workforce sustained. With a supply chain linking 41 states, tank production and servicing is a boon to domestic manufacturing even as it improves global security. Although the current U.S. Army version of the Abrams is the best tank in the world, there is still room for improvement in the design (the original Abrams entered service in 1980). In particular, new materials for the hull and turret and electric systems to replace hydraulics could save as much as 20 tons of weight while retaining full armor protection and simplifying logistics and sustainment.

[snip]

One of the challenges in ramping up tank production is a shortage of trained welders—a problem that also constrains shipbuilding. Many of these welding jobs are part of the unionized workforce, which makes it harder for manufacturers to grow their workforces quickly. Specifically, unionization inhibits the manufacturers from immediately doubling the salaries of the welders without affecting the wages of others in the factories. Within the defense sector we need to treat welders the same way the private sector treats star programmers: by paying them extremely well. We cannot afford to have trained welders take jobs at Walmart or as forklift supervisors because they can earn more money. If anything, we should be incentivizing more forklift supervisors to become welders. Welding is a key national security manufacturing task.

See this old M103 heavy tank?

It's kind of an extreme example, but it's basically made of three big-ass castings, two of which, welded together, form the hull. The hull is 22 feet long. That's a big casting and a lot of welding; you don't make those from a manufacturing base that's otherwise capable of making only cookware and kitchen appliances.

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Ghost Brigades

 ZCQOTD: “What are you talking about? Russia’s deployed 100% of their operational Su-57’s and Armatas to Ukraine and not a single one has been destroyed.”

It’s funny because it’s true.

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Clank Clank Goes the Tank

There's been a lot of hand-wringing about sending weapons to Ukraine, both from the US and our European allies. Early in the war, Germany in particular was mocked for sending naught but some ballistic helmets, apparently afraid that if they sent anything more belligerent, such as excess Bundeswehr pocket knives, a Russian soldier might get shivved with one and the Russkies would make Berlin glow in the dark in retaliation.

After enough T-80s and T-90s got blowed up by Javelins, Western governments eased up and began sending artillery systems and heavier antiaircraft hardware, as well as taking the opportunity to clean out old storage closets of leftover antique armored personnel carriers.

Lately we've been tap dancing up to even heavier gear. The US has announced we'll be sending some M2 Bradley IFVs, and France chipped in some AMX-10 RC heavy armored cars. While referred to as a char, or tank, in French service and apparently some obscure EU regulation classifies anything above a certain weight and with a big enough gun as a tank...and the AMX-10 clears those hurdles...war nerds will insist that unless it comes from the tank region of France it's just a sparkling armored fighting vehicle.

It looks like the inhibition on sending tanks is finally cracking, though. While Germany is still dithering over letting Poland send some of its Leopard 2's, Britain has announced it's sending 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks.

I found that particular number interesting. Late Cold War and post-Cold War Russian armored units use three-tank platoons and three platoons plus a commander's tank make a ten tank company.

The British Army, from whose stores the Challengers will be pulled, uses some archaic TO&E, possibly left over from the Wars of the Roses or Cromwell's New Model Army, wherein four tanks equal a Bonnet*, and four Bonnets plus two more tanks in a headquarters Bonnet equal an eighteen-tank Spanner†.

Fourteen tanks, however, is enough for three four-tank platoons plus two tanks for an HQ platoon, equalling a fourteen tank US-style armored company. Apparently the Ukies are using a US/(most of)NATO TO&E for their armored units. So the Ukrainians will have at least one company of Western MBTs.

While this is an almost symbolic amount, hopefully Britain's gesture will get Germany off its ass with those Leos. (Ironically, if the West does start sending those Leopard 2s and/or Abrams, the Challenger company is going to be a logistical problem, because the L30A1 main gun on the British tanks is rifled and uses separate bagged propellant charges & projectiles; it's not compatible with the 120mm smoothbores used by the Leo2 and Abrams.)

*Bonnet = Troop

†Spanner = Squadron

It was all a sham.

The Putin stans keep telling me that the Russians have huge reserves of modern materiel, but if so, why are they reactivating vintage T-62s, buying drones from Iran, and sourcing replacement T-72s from Belarus?

Where are those "10,000" T-72/T-80s?

These were the same Russian simps telling me that Russia was holding their best stuff at home and the reason the initial advance went so poorly was because it was being done by second-line troops and reservists...until the Ukies wrecked house on the 4th Guards Armored.

What do you want to bet that a large percentage of the billions Moscow allocated to modernize its armed forces following their underwhelming performances everywhere from Chechnya to South Ossetia wound up bobbing gently at anchor in Monaco and Barcelona?

BONUS! Footage of Russian reenactors LARPing 1940s-era logistics...

I guess these things wouldn't look sexy parading through Red Square, so there was no incentive to make them.https://t.co/jbvLYUtER9

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) October 15, 2022

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The AFV equivalent of "That '70s Show"

I haven't seen so many knocked-out or abandoned T-62s since VII Corps roflstomped the Iraqis.

Shot:

A T-62? Are they cleaning out tank museums or something? https://t.co/ys3pymAavT

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) October 4, 2022

Chaser:

What's funny is on paper Russia supposedly had ~10,000 T-80 and T-72 variants in reserve when the war started, which is vastly more than the highest estimates for their losses.

Trying to guess the ratio of "never existed lol" and "supply clerks parted them out for booze." pic.twitter.com/89r7bfVHKC

— Sean M. Smith (@ReallySeanSmith) October 4, 2022

Don't forget to read Sean's Balkans memoir, Rank Absurdity.

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Pop Top

War at one remove...

Still catching up here. 

Go read my 'net buddy Counter Jockey's thoughts on the current shoot-'em-up in the Wild East.

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QotD: Glowing in the Dark Edition...

Bobbi writing on current events:

This will be on History tests, eventually -- presuming there's anyone around and current events don't eventually poke a hole in history big enough to throw a Dark Ages through.

A reporter at the BBC*, sounding a little thick, wondered why... if this was such a humanitarian crisis and an affront to the international order ...Uncle Sam wasn't sending troops.

The reporter first brought up the fact that Ukraine wasn't a NATO member and therefore we were not treaty-bound to defend them militarily, but they then discarded that angle, noting

...that lack of national interest hasn't stopped former presidents from expending blood and treasure on behalf of others in the past. In 1995 Bill Clinton intervened militarily in the war that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. And in 2011 Barack Obama did the same in the Libyan civil war, both largely on humanitarian and human rights grounds.

In 1990 George H W Bush justified his international coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait as defending the rule of law against the rule of the jungle.

The real reason we happily intervened in those instances wasn't oil (Serbia didn't have any and we weren't getting any to speak of from Libya) but because neither Benghazi, Belgrade, nor Baghdad had the Strategic Rocket Forces in their hip pocket.

We might risk a nuclear knuckle-joust over an Article 5 attack on a NATO treaty partner, but sorry Volodomyr, you're mostly on your own for this one. We'll send thoughts and prayers and maybe a few crates of ATGMs, but we're pretty warred out at the moment.

*And why was the reporter at the Beeb cocking a snook about Biden not sending troops, anyway? Aren't there people closer to home to whom she could have put these questions? BoJo's not been shy about denouncing the depredations of Hitler 2: Electric Boogaloo, either, but I don't see her demanding that he ship the West Shropshire Fusiliers or whoever off to Kharkiv.

(Not actually current equipment for the West Shropshire Fusiliers... which is a unit I made up.)

Sealift on the Move

The Russian LST flotilla has left the Baltic, which has to have the Swedes breathing a little easier, and linked up with the LST Group from the Northern Fleet in the North Sea. If they're headed for the Black Sea, that's a bit of a haul.

”The LST group of the Baltic Fleet, which left the Baltic Sea yesterday, was joined today by the LST group of the Northern Fleet, consisting of the LST "Pyotr Morgunov", "Olenegorsky miner" and "George Pobedonosets" following the same course to the North Sea.” https://t.co/1VcPv9wiCU

— Jamming (@balticjam) January 18, 2022

Sweden had mobilized reserves and deployed troops and armor to Gotland, due to concern over Russian flights nearby, and the sortying of the amphibious warfare ships had only ratched up tension. There was some supposition that a coup de main against Gotland could be used to forward-deploy SAM bases and close that airspace to NATO sorties in support of the Baltic countries if Russia invaded them, but that'd be a little spicy for Vlad. Ukraine is one thing, but NATO member nations are another altogether.

(The Swedes actually retired the S-tank in the late '90s, but they're pretty funky.)

"Grave for Seven Brothers"

1:35 Tamiya kit, photographed with a Fuji X-T2 & 18-55mm f/2.8-4

The M3 Lee is one of the most unfairly maligned tanks in history. (For instance, the supposed Russian nickname for their Lend-Lease examples, "grave for seven brothers", is almost certainly a postwar invention.)

When early reports of armored warfare started arriving from Europe, it was clear that the Army's M2 medium tank, with its 37mm main armament, was woefully undergunned and work began on a medium tank with a 75mm main gun, what would become the M4 Sherman. But a stopgap was needed until the Sherman was ready, not only for the rapidly upsizing US Army, but also for the British, who had left much of their armor on the continent after Dunkirk. So along comes the Lee, essentially a hasty retrofitting of a sponson-mounted 75mm gun to an uparmored M2. 

Critics of the Lee seem to gloss over the fact that the Brits designated it a "cruiser" tank, as opposed to an "infantry" tank; in other words, its job was to drive around fast and blast stuff, especially enemy tanks. And for its first few months in the desert it completely BTFO'ed the best armor the Afrika Korps had on hand at the time. Panzer III's with the 50mm main gun were outranged by the M3's 75mm and the gyrostabilized* 37mm in the Lee's turret was adequate for pretty much anything the Germans had in the Western Desert. It wasn't until Panzer IV f2's with the longer-barreled 75mm started showing up that the M3 was seriously outgunned in the African campaign.

*From the M3A1 on, both the 37mm in the turret and the hull-mounted 75 were gyrostabilized in the vertical axis. Wehraboos always go quiet or change the subject whenever gyrostabilization of tank guns gets brought up.

Ordnung Muss Sein

You'd think that Germans would be very orderly about naming things. Orderliness is a German cultural trait carried almost to a fault. 

Some military historians have claimed that the very disorderliness and ad hoc nature of the American armies in Western Europe gave them an edge against their Wehrmacht opponents. Perhaps the GI's would scatter a bunch of random objects in the middle of a forest clearing and when the Germans scurried out to put them in alphabetical order they'd get blasted with BARs and Tommy guns.

The photo below is of a 1939-vintage Leica IIIb. 

That's some very orderly-sounding nomenclature. Just from the name you know that it's better than a Leica II, and an improvement over the Leica IIIa, in the same way you know that a similarly 1939-vintage Panzerkampwagen IIIf was better than a Panzerkampfwagen II and an improvement over the Pzkw. IIIe. (This was a historical period where ordnung got a bit out of hand between the Rhine and the Elbe.)

Too much ordnung.

After the war, the ordnung wind got knocked right out of Leica's camera naming sails, as is related in this hilarious article which is worth reading even if you're not a camera nerd because it's just that funny:

When Ernst Leitz GmbH invented the M system in 1954, they named their first M camera the Leica M3 for a very good reason. The name M3 signaled to the unwashed masses that the camera was a rangefinder (the German word for this is messucher) with three framelines (the number 3). The name makes sense and camera-likers knew what they were buying. For this reason, the Leica M3 went on to be the best anything that anyone had ever made anywhere. But every Leica camera since then has been a gigantic leap backward, and a complete and unmitigated disaster.

Incidentally, all this talk of rangefinders and frame lines explains why Leica dwindled from a maker of photographic tools used by pros to a lifestyle brand largely reduced to peddling Veblen goods to the brand conscious bourgeoisie and well-heeled hipsters.

See, that Leica IIIb has a viewfinder with frame lines in it for a 50mm lens. When you attach a 90mm lens to it, like the one in the picture, you need to either try and guess what fraction of the image in the viewfinder will actually make it into the narrower 90mm field of view, or else clip an auxiliary finder (unhelpfully named the SGVOO) in and hope that parallax doesn't jack you up too much.

Single lens reflex cameras added a bit of bulk compared to the little Leica rangefinders, and the slapping noise of the SLR's mirror mechanism was unavoidably noisier than the whisper of a cloth shutter, as anyone who's watched a press conference in the marble hallway of a government building knows, but the convenience of actually seeing the final image in the viewfinder outweighed all that. 

Japanese SLRs ate the professional camera market whole in the Seventies, leaving Leica, who avoided the technology for as long as possible before releasing an overly-complex super-Teutonic SLR, to flounder.

The "diesel Leica".

This is why Leica discussion on the web these days is largely lawyers and orthodontists discussing the stitching on half-kilobuck waxed canvas bags on rangefinderforums while NFL sidelines, presidential press conferences, and National Geographic covers are the province of Nikon, Canon, (and, increasingly Sony, but that's a tale for another post.)

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