now see if every western piece of equipment was just 3x as good, NATO will totally win!
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The current Russian experience in Ukraine shows two things:
The combat effectiveness of Russian military forces is generally not up to its advertised value. We even saw this in Desert Storm, so it’s not a recent result of their collapse into kleptocracy.
Also, it reinforces the saying that great generals study logistics, not strategy. I could not even imagine being the guy who had a multiple mile long column of tanks idling on the road and running out of fuel. If the Ukrainian army had the advanced weapons back then, there would have been a thousand burning tanks that day.
We even saw this in Desert Storm, so it’s not a recent result of their collapse into kleptocracy.
The Iraq Army of the Gulf War was supremely dysfunctional, poorly led and trained, sitting on the worst defensive terrain you can imagine, and had been savaged by weeks of air strikes that they were defenseless against. All of that had a lot more to do with their defeat than the tanks they were driving - by the same token, Abrams and Leopards were destroyed in large numbers by Soviet weaponry after being deployed incompetently by Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
Further complicating things was that the T-72s the Iraqis were using had old steel penetrators that lacked the complex protection designed to defeat western tank rounds in turn, along with being export models missing the nightvision and thermal optics that were standard on Soviet-fielded tanks.
wtf what are you talking about, the Red Army was dismantled in the 90s, and Iraq was nothing like the Red Army??? you wouldn't hold up US-armed dictatorships in latin america as full reflections of US strength, would you? or Batista and Somoza make the US military look pretty bad, don't they!
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I am discussing the combat effectiveness of the hardware, not the strategies and tactics of the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army, by the way, was considered among the best fielded by a non-European power. I’m going to make a perhaps unsupported assumption here and guess you were not part of the US or other national military or intelligence service at the time, but no one expected the outcome that prevailed (and I will point out that if we had invaded and occupied, it would have been just as much of a shitshow as it was a decade later).
I’m talking about that I have my tank on this hill, and they have a tank on that hill. I can target them, they can’t target me. I can hit them, but I am out of their range. I can kill the tank with a single shot, and likely burn the crew to death in a horrible fashion at no risk to myself or my crew. And the exact same thing happened in the air - and in modern conventional warfare, once you lose the air, you lose the war.
We had a saying about the Russian military back then when we’d debate the quality of their systems - “Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.” There was also an often repeated anecdote about a German anti-tank unit that said they surrendered when they ran out of shells before the Americans ran out of tanks.
But what really stayed with me was when a Russian general said that now they know what would have happened in Europe.
you said you were talking about russian military forces. specifically about equipment is different, but you're still being obtuse to act like exports were clear reflections of a first-rate military's even on the same model of a given weapon, the good shit was reserved for domestic use.
great point about the air, because if the soviet union had designed their tank fleet around them being sitting ducks after losing an air war they might have made different design decisions, but removed from the context of being competitive in the air, what do you know, the equipment was sub-optimal.
i also readily accept that american tanks in foreign service are not performing as well in ukraine, iraq, or saudi arabia as they do in american service. weapons have contexts, the "my tank vs your tank" 1:1 doesn't dictate the shape of a war
[fart noise]
Desert Storm
Every time the US went adventuring in Iraq they made sure to pay off all the Iraqi generals and warlords to lay down arms ahead of time, Americans bought themselves a cakewalk because they didn't face any significant opposition lol