Since February 2022, Ukraine has relied heavily on Western aid to resist the Russian invasion, including the use of U.S.-supplied M1 Abrams tanks. Despite its reputation as a reliable main battle tank, the Abrams has suffered heavy losses on Ukrainian soil, with up to 20 out of 31 tanks reportedly d...
Can't wait for the first F-16 to be shot down by the Russians. Ukraine already lost one, but it supposedly crashed instead of being shot down by the Russians. There is also a high chance that it was shot down by their own air defence lol, either way the air chief was canned instantly.
These US/NATO wunderwaffe are not so wonderful when faced with an equal foe. Their biggest selling points were that they were tested in real world combat, but it's easy to look amazing against much weaker armies. Same thing with all these American mercs who thought it was gonna be another walk in the park like Iraq lol
It took 30 years for T-72 to finally get its revenge.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the Soviet made T-72 tanks suffered a severe reputation loss, when thousands of Iraqi T-72M (the export, stripped down version of T-72A) laid burning in the desert. Even though only a fraction of them were actually knocked out by M1A1 Abrams, and most of the losses were due to US air superiority, a well organized propaganda campaign was run to depict Soviet military equipments as so overhyped that they turned out to be complete trash.
It was a total propaganda victory for the American military industrial complex. In fact, the reputation of the T-72 was so bad that Russia had to rename its successor “T-72BU” (Project 188) to “T-90” to avoid the association. (T-90 is still one of the best performing tanks that have since taken on the British Challenger and German Leopards in the Ukraine War).
It would be more than 30 years before the T-72s would face the M1 Abrams on the battlefield once more, and this time - we finally have a good picture (literal photographs) of how the M1 Abrams fared against the T-72s without air support. History has finally vindicated the Soviet design - still one of the best designed tanks to exist today despite its age.
The 2nd video looks like the footage was taken through a very long telephoto lens, using a tree as cover, doing the usual lens-compression effect you get with long telephotos. I'm wondering if it's a mirror lens like one of those generic 500mm f/8 ones. That ugly ringed effect can happen under the right exposure circumstances.
They should just do what I did in every game of Command & Conquer
Send every single tank they have out on a Death or Glory strike
Then when the Brotherhood of Nod (Russia[the bad guys]) is busy fighting the tanks, you send an APC holding a single engineer to capture their Mobile Construction Unit and win the game
Last week I had one of my libs grinning while talking about how Ukraine has Russia on the ropes after their own "special military operation" into Russian territory.
we need to retvrn to napoleonic warfare where both sides march in unison to the front lines, and only shoot when commanders on both sides give the signal at the same time
I seriously wonder if the future of warfare is going to be about who can field the most drones and there are few (if any) actual troops anywhere near the battlefield. Even a little 8" drone armed with a 9mm firearm could be more effective than having a rifleman that needs to eat, sleep, and is at risk of dying. If your drone "dies," it's not an issue because the operator with experience is 100 miles away and just switches to a different drone.
Nations with more manufacturing capabilities and stronger economies no longer have to worry about troops. Their experienced pilots can't be harmed, so they're only limited by how much material they can send out into the field. Casualties become a thing of the past. Even better is you can salvage your damaged drones or even enemy drones. That's something you can't do with people.
Seriously though I don't know why they thought a few dozen Abrams would do anything. The US deployed over 2,000 tanks during Desert Storm and that was basically a skirmish compared to what's going on in Ukraine.
My theory is that the NATO MIC is treating the war like a lab experiment. They give Ukraine a handful of export versions of all sorts of different hardware, then see how the Russian military takes them out for their own R&D purposes.
They should have sat on them all and used them in the Kursk offensive primarily on roads instead of having them sink in soft soil across Ukrainian fields where they get wrecked by artillery and drones.