Tankity!

Interesting video on the Sheridan, the Army's last light tank.

That '70s Show: Armor Edition

The recent fighting between Thailand and Cambodia saw US-supplied Thai M48A5 tanks take on Russian-built Cambodian T-55s.

A lot of obsolescent hardware is still putting in work in various corners of the globe.

The M48A5 took out T-55s. This clash between the two is a very classic matchup, but the Cambodian side was at a serious disadvantage due to being in lower ground.@joeblillib4090 @Rattapoom_K @AnnQuann @ArmyMilitaryHD @T_55AM1_ pic.twitter.com/88MiAlq9VJ

— Нем🥖 (@wuthi11_) December 29, 2025

Book Report...

Having just finished reading Marko's second Frontlines: Evolution novel, Corvus, which involves a long, harrowing trek through enemy territory punctuated with some intense combat scenes, it made me want to go back and reread one of my favorites in that subgenre, David Drake's Rolling Hot.

It's still a gritty read and it still holds up well. While you can certainly get it as a standalone novel, it's also right in the middle of the second omnibus volume of Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories, available in paperback or Kindle format. (I have it in both Kindle and dead tree. Be aware that the Kindle formatting is not the greatest, but not bad enough to make it a chore to read.)

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Land War in Asia

Thailand and Cambodia have recalled their ambassadors, closed their border crossings, and started shooting at each other over a stretch of disputed territory.

The Royal Thai Air Force has apparently performed at least one airstrike with F-16s on Cambodian military facilities, and Cambodia claims civilian casualties occurred. Thailand says Cambodian artillery hit a hospital.

A quick glance at the comparative military strengths of the two countries makes it look like things would be pretty lopsided if Thailand got serious. Let's just say that in any future wargame simulations of current events, the Thai player won't have to roll for air supremacy on turn one. Not only do the Cambodians not have any fighter jets or attack aircraft, they don't even have any combat helos, except in the sense that any helo can be a combat helo if it believes in itself hard enough. The Royal Thai Army has some reasonably modern armor, while the Cambodian tank park is a bunch of mid-Cold War museum pieces and who knows what kind of shape they may be in?

I was going to say that any Northrop F-5 Tiger II stans should get excited because this might be its last hurrah, but then I remembered that Iran and the ROK still operate them and who knows what’s gonna happen next on this cursed timeline?

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"L'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!"

Here's a gift link to a video-heavy article on Ukraine's decapitation strike against Russian strategic aviation assets.

The level of planning and preparation this took is just off the chain, to the point that the guys driving the trucks with the little prefab conex "houses" that concealed the racks of drones under their roofs were just patsies who had no idea what they were hauling.

You could walk into the "house" and look around and not notice anything because the drone racks were concealed in an 8" deep space between the interior ceiling and the external roof. So some guy hires you to tow his tiny house for him with instructions to just drop it off in a specific parking lot at a specific time and his buddy will come get it from there... what's so hinky about that?

To put this all in perspective, remember that Russia set out in February of 2022 to duplicate the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. If OIF had gone like that, we would have been recommissioning M48 Pattons to use as mobile artillery pieces in the bogged-down fighting around Basra in 2006, when a surprise attack blows up half our B52s on the ground at Barksdale, AFB.

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Tab Clearing...

• Portugal likely to axe F-35 purchase. Buy stock in Airbus, Dassault, and Saab. Kraus-Maffei, too.


• Happy Pi Day!


• Super Nintendo hardware is running faster as it ages.

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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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