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Subject: top 10 tanks in the world!!!
Hong-Xing    8/12/2003 9:07:05 AM
i think it would be this t-90 (rus) m1a2 (usa) t-98 (chi) m1a1 (usa) Challenger 2 (bri) t-95 black hawk (rus) al khalid (chi) merkeva (bra) arjun (ind) t-90||| (chi)
 
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mike_golf    RE:TO Fedaykin - AKS   1/19/2004 8:05:27 PM
AKS said: "Fedaykin, Russian soldiers do not have better training then US soldiers, their OFFICERS HAVE BETTER MILLITARY SCHOOLS, understand the difference." Could you back this up with facts? It is generally considered by most military observers that the Russian Army's officer are not tactically superior to the US, UK, or Germany. Russian military academies, from everything I know, teach Russian officers to follow rigid doctrine no matter what, which is a serious disadvantage in fluid, manuever warfare. AKS said: "...during the Iraqi war, in clear day A US A10 pilot nearly destroyed a british tank group, the pilot could not even defrentiate between a CHALLANGER and a T72/T55". AKS, please realize that an A-10 pilot moving at several hundred knots has about one second to make a positive vehicle identification. Having been a tank commander in combat I can tell you that on the ground, looking at the silhouette, moving at 40 Kmh or so, it is very difficult to make a proper vehicle ID in a second or two in combat. Pilots have to do it from above, which is significantly more difficult, at much higher speeds, from much greater distances. It is a testament to US/UK pilots skill level and training that they so rarely fired on friendly vehicles. Suppose we start checking statistics about Russian pilots firing on Russian soldiers and vehicles in Afghanistan and Chechnya? What do you suppose it will show? Probably that it happened there too. Friendly fire is a fact of life, you work to reduce it as much as possible. I don't knock on Russian equipment because I am a super patriot. I look at Russian equipment with the same eye that I look at any other equipment, as a Master Gunner who might be faced by that equipment some day. I have to understand its strengths and weaknesses and how to defeat it. In the case of Russian tanks I just need to stay out of your effective range (2500 meters, give or take) and use my ability to overwhelm your limited armor protection with my main gun. This is exactly how the US Army planned to engage Soviets at every opportunity possible if we had to fight them. If we had to fight within the lethal envelope of the T-72/80/90 125mm gun we would use a combination of superior protection, fire on the move ability and tactical superiority (individual sergeants can manuever their tanks on their own as they need to, for example) to defeat superior numbers.
 
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MikkoLn    RE:Summarizing a few things - MikkoLn   1/20/2004 2:54:12 AM
The critisism I've shown now and in generally time to time for year and a half now in here is not to point out any spectacular strengths of soviet equipment to western ones or to say try in any way to prove how marvellous they are. Maybe due to the nature of the writers on this board (majority from USA or western europe) I've encountered too much "everything soviets are building is crappy" or "I'm just waiting to get one in my sights" etc. Much of information generally easily available by publishations or media is not generally wery detailed nor accurate, and many very careless conclusions have been made during discussions we have had. In a way I've had a good oppurtunity to serve with a military that maintained and aquired both russian and NATO/western, as well as indigenous equipment (and in many times, models from each of these belonging to certain classes - i.e. APC's or rifles - were used simultaneously). That gave me a pretty good insight how things different coutries manufactured performed compared with each other, even though I've only trained troughly to use half a dozen firearms and a pair of tanks. With this background, I'm pretty amazed what kind of picture many have about russian arms manufacturing. And all this not at the slightest bit to show any support to russia (or soviet union better) as such as they've been the very dearest and only true enemies of Finnish population for couple of hundreds of years, long before US commie fear ever was raised. Ok but then, what was the real subject here...I managed to forgot what I really started this post originally for. But anyway in generally it's true that none of the purely conventional armour structures completed today are thick enough to guarantee protection against man portable at. Ceramic materials do that much better, and are of course a great improvement and achievement (I believe that is not worth discussing here). Although none of them can neither prove total protection, even frontal, against most modern products of at-branch. Towards this background, it makes completely no difference whether you have stripped T90 of early model T72 (350-400mm RHA frontal difference) in a way of your sabot round fired at relative distances. It will cut through anyway. Steel armour never compares favourably with laminates and composites as such. To my knowledge majority of the East German T72's belonged to mid-production M1 class (400-450mm RHA frontal armour). In terms of protection, later soviet versions increased it with some 50-100mm, but of course this is still not enough as such to provide protection against modern penetrators.
 
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MikkoLn    RE:Summarizing a few things - MikkoLn   1/20/2004 3:32:35 AM
...and to add of course everything is also pretty relative in these things. In 80's (after which much reduced major steps towards building completely new tanks have been made in russia compared to previous decades) 400-500mm of RHA found in their tanks was well on par with all existing tanks, excluding LeopardII. Chieftain and M1 could obtain similiar class results while other common 80's vehicles (LeoI, AMX30, M60) could at that point reach only 50% or at most 66% of the protective level of T72 for example. Much due to design criteria too, naturally, but before real efficient breaktrough of composite armours during the 90's (when soviet competence was in form of building new tank armadas gone) eastern block armour appeared pretty good. Considering the woeful lack of funds if compared with western nations I think soviets have shown good competence to upgrade seemingly obsolescent tank armies to maintain reasonably effective operability into the new century. With this in mind, considering that they even could have had effective composite armour developed by early 90's it would have been beyond capabilities of new russia to take full advantage out of it. In terms of needed quantity production era provides good chances to achieve nearly as good ad hoc protective levels as could be done with from the scratch ceramics with still using already available equipment. Reactive armour is by no means an ideal solution, but not really bad either (and especially for prevailing russian conditions far from it). Though it now seems to be fairly effective, also composite materials as we know them today have their faults. As mike_golf previously suggested, it seems also to me very likely that further active protection systems will eventually become a necessity in the future.
 
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AKS    RE:To northern guy   1/20/2004 10:41:19 AM
"America has a strategy that amongst other things tries to deliver a low casualty rate at the sharp end of its military force." Oh and the proud example of this is, Normandie Landing, right, wher you just fed soldiers to machine guns. Comon man, you usually speak with facts, but this onw was just funny. ONly country I know of that bases its doctrine on keeping their soldiers as alive as possible is Israel.
 
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AKS    RE:TO Fedaykin - AKS   1/20/2004 10:46:31 AM
Yes Mike I understand what are you saying, and I am not crazy to accuse a pilot who just did a swift attack, I mean it was on Cnn and BBC, surely you heard about it. The A10 did not attack once but several times, from low alttitude, I am not saying it the british tank commander is. He attacked them several times, which is unaccaptable.
 
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joe6pack    RE:To northern guy   1/20/2004 10:57:59 AM
"ONly country I know of that bases its doctrine on keeping their soldiers as alive as possible is Israel" Then obviously you haven't paid much attention to American doctrine over the last 30 years...
 
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mike_golf    RE:To northern guy   1/20/2004 11:02:13 AM
AKS wrote: "Oh and the proud example of this is, Normandie Landing, right, wher you just fed soldiers to machine guns." AKS did you read what I wrote on national strategy? The lesson the US learned from WWII was that mass was not the best strategy. Look at the post WWII strategy. And it's not like the Soviets/Russians have not historically just fed their troops to the meatgrinder and won by sheer mass. In fact, in 1814, 1914-1917, and 1941-1945 that was exactly the Russian strategy. It always has been, and probably will continue to be for some time to come. If you don't like the US, that's fine. But at least be realistic in your discussion of US equipment, training, strategy and capabilities.
 
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joe6pack    RE:To northern guy   1/20/2004 11:05:10 AM
"Oh and the proud example of this is, Normandie Landing, right, wher you just fed soldiers to machine guns. Comon man,..." This is what happens from history via hollywood... D-Day landings saw about 2,500 KIA total for allied troops, while being in the first wave was probably pretty bad... it was far from being one of the more bloody battles of the war..
 
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northernguy    RE:To northern guy..   1/20/2004 11:38:03 AM
The Russians took 40,000 casualties taking Berlin. The Americans took a couple of hundred casualties taking Iraq. Whatever the limitations of the Iraqi military their available resources, manpower, ammunition, communications, tactical options, or anything else, certainly exceeded that of the holdout forces in end of the war, isolated Berlin. Northernguy There may well have been reasons for the Russians pursuing their chosen Berlin strategy. None of these would have been acceptable to the American leaderhsip even then.
 
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TrueNorth    Re:Top Tanks - Tanks are Obsolete!   1/20/2004 12:50:17 PM
Tanks are Obsolete! The era of the main battle tank is over. People are stuck on them because they are ?prestige weapons,? and granted they are pretty impressive. They?re just not worth it in a modern conflict though, unless you?re a superpower with loads of resources in some slam-dunk contest like the Iraq war. Actually I heard that most of the casualties scratched up by the tanks last year were from their machine guns, since when the little groups of Iraqi?s popped up across the roads with their RPGs, they were too close for the main guns to be very effective. Basically tanks are just too expensive and unwieldily. A good western MBT these days costs about $10million, and you can roughly double that over its operational life when accounting for ammo, parts, fuel, crew, service, etc. That?s nearly a billion bucks for a battalion. And they?re terribly high-maintenance. You even have to get new treads after a couple of hundred kilometres! Getting them to the battlefield is also a major hassle, and presupposes you having a strategic transport capacity. More importantly, anti-tank weapons are just so much better and cheaper. LAAWs and RPGs are ubiquitous these days, and in a close-in fight can beat any tank. The new ATGMs really seal their fate, though. With a good crew, their chance of a kill is over 90% at 4,000 metres, which is beyond the effective range of a tank?s armament. Not only that, but at less than $50,000 per the cost-to-kill ratio is unbeatable. And if your opponent has air superiority, forget it. Don?t even bother fielding your tanks. Tanks today are like battleships of yesteryear. The dreadnought ruled the seas in WWI, but by WWII it was way too expensive and vulnerable to make a real difference. Many strategic planners had actually figured this out before WWII, yet others were still attached to that ?prestige weapon,? and too many officers, politicians and industrialists had a vested interests in keeping them (read ?Sacred Vessels? by Robert L. O?Connell). Same with the tank now. It ruled the land in WWII, but its day is passed now. There have been advances in armour protection recently, but I doubt it will be enough. It adds more to the tank?s cost in any case, and new artillery and ATGMs that strike downward on the tops of vehicles will get past it. The future of land warfare belongs to advanced artillery and better equipped infantry. PS: Did anyone hear of the Iraqis using any ATGMs last year? I thought they had Kornets.
 
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