It’s a total mystery. Nobody can possibly know.
They are still reposting that one picture of a burning Abrams from the 90s I think?
I think there’s a new one now, isn’t there, from march? Of a “destroyed” Abrams, where the crew got out safely, turret still attached and probably recoverable.
There’s a couple of photos of abrams with fracked tracks that they’ve been claiming are “destroyed”, that’s been pretty great.
Well, if that happens on the retreat, that’s still a loss of a vehicle. But losing a crew is almost always worse.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-abrams-tanks-19d71475d427875653a2130063a8fb7a
Drones have changed everything.
Daddy Putz has a humiliation fetish.
He could easily take over the rest of the world but he’d never get hard again.
What a dilemma.
Ah yes. “Better.” Although the only time I ever hear about the Ruskies’ newest “better” tank is when gets blown up by a missile.
While I (American) am not a fan of the F35 - mostly because it costs so goddamn much money that could be better used for shit like infrastructure or healthcare - the Abrams remains a solid, proven platform. It’s starting to show its age a little, but it’s still MUCH cheaper and more practical to minority iterate than start from scratch. Whatever guy posted that was probably one of these ‘Tankies’ I keep hearing about.
The US is planning for a new tank roundabout 2030. While right now it notionally is going to be an Abrams derivative, it is almost certainly going to be a completely overhauled new design and not a retrofit of existing tanks like what has been happening to Abrams.
Just something to point out to people who complain about the U.S. gifting stocks of vehicles to Ukraine. The U.S. was planning to get rid of them anyway.
The F-35 is an expensive program, and has undeniably had cost overruns, but from some of the poking around it seems the issues have also been exaggerated or different issues have been conflated, so without doing a deep dive, it is hard to say if the program is worth the bang or not.
The f-35 has no peer, from a us perspective every dollar spent being ahead is a win.
I suppose the question is really if the dollars are being spent in the most efficient way to get the result. I don’t know, because that’s complicated and probably needs more digging than I can do for an NCD comment. I do know that much of the discussion is muddled by the three models of F35 all essentially being their own subprograms. Which makes it hard to follow certain news articles or critiques when they jump from model to model to make their points.
Just something to point out to people who complain about the U.S. gifting stocks of vehicles to Ukraine. The U.S. was planning to get rid of them anyway.
the vast majority of materiel we’ve sent to ukraine thus far has been old pre-modernization stock, or older, modernized stock in the case of some of the abrams i believe. It’s literally just shifting some budget to procurement to get us new stuff, while shipping some of our older kit to be used in battle, which is productive. There is almost no downside in us doing this, aside from the fact that we have to ship it to ukraine, which kinda sucks.
the F35 has been incredibly expensive thus far, but produced in significant numbers and fielded for a similar amount of time as something like the f16 it will completely absolve it’s development costs over time. It’s also important to remember that the f-35 is quite literally the most advanced air warfare platform that exists right now, which kind of follows the price tag.
90% of the complaints about the f35 on the internet have been “it bad at dog fighting” and “it expensive” and, that’s about it. As for dog fighting, it’s literally not designed to dogfight, so it should be no surprise that it’s not very good at it.
I watched a Perun slideshow ages ago which at least touched on production / export of the F-35 and how economies of scale bring down per unit price significantly over time.
Economy of scale almost always does. Part of something to dig into is if a projected lifetime program cost accurately bakes that in. It seems intuitive that people against the program will do everything they can to minimize the effect in order to pump up the projected cost, while supporters will do the opposite and give unrealistically optimistic costs.
I don’t know specifically if that has happened with F-35 discussion, but I always suspect such manipulation as a baseline.
The US is planning for a new tank roundabout 2030. While right now it notionally is going to be an Abrams derivative
Are you referring to the M10 Booker or the M1E3? The M10 is it’s own design, while the M1E3 (which should become the M1A3 on adoption) is a refresh of the Abrams, and it’s not an either/or.
If you look up The Chieftain on Youtube, he’s speculating the M1E3 will focus on integrating all of the add-on modules that have become standardized of the past couple of decades. This will likely reduce the weight of the tank from a whopping 72 tons to make it possible to address future threats while keeping the overall weight low enough to cross bridges.
Some people are speculating that the M1E3 will get an auto-loader, but the couple of tons those weigh is significantly more than a hyperactive 18yo, so we’ll see how that works out
I was referring to the M1E3. My point was that it has so many goals to hit that it seems likely not going to be able to be refurbishments of existing M1s, but completely new builds. Therefore existing M1s like those going to Ukraine were destined for retirement anyway. This is something to bring up for people who have been decrying the “waste” of equipment being sent there. Much of it is nearing the end of the life cycle anyway.
(And the Army assures me that the M10 is not a tank! )
Yeah, this def looks like satire.
However, there are THOSE people out their, in the wild.
The thing with the F-35 is you’ll never actually hear about it being “better” because there is no dogfight. It shows up, you die, that’s it. In the real-world it would be like one guy showing up to a boxing ring to fight, and the other guy dropping a nuclear bomb on the stadium. The whole point of 5th gen fighters is that they don’t engage, they have so much technology that they blow up the opponent before the opponent even knows they showed up.
Meanwhile, Russia’s “5th gen” fighters can’t get near the airspace because they both don’t have the proper smart munitions, and don’t have the physical capabilities to fly into an area blanketed in US AA weapons.
Back in 1989, when Saudi Arabia was looking to buy new tanks and did some tests, the Osorio performed better than the Abrams on most tests, was cheaper and was declared the winner of said tests. However, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait happened shortly afterwards and the Saudis opted for the M1 Abrams due to politicking. Unfortunately for Engesa, the company behind the Osorio, the Brazilian Army was never interested in such a large tank
sauce - https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/brazil/osorio.htm
Reminds me of the latest Adam Something video. Russians are raised from birth with ridiculous amounts of “Russia Fuck Yeah” that’s just pure triple distilled victory porn, and posts like that are the consequence.
My favourite line from any of the Grand Theft Auto games is from a radio ad for some movie that ends with “Rated PG for Patriotic Garbage”
As an American, American jingoism in films does make me laugh. Like we are the only ones who can save the world.
Does Russia have films like that?
Well, there’s books like that. The idea seems to be that the problem with Nazis wasn’t the whole genocide thing, but rather the fact that they invaded Russia. So let’s do this: go back in time with modern equipment, ally with Hitler, and march on London and bomb Washington.
Start from American movies, then add a bunch of historical rewriting and fighting Nazis everywhere and you’re getting close to Russian level movies from what I’ve heard.
As a non-American, how is that any different from America?
Many big countries are basically the same, with the belief that their armed forces are “the best”, with hours of pop propaganda around how their marines or special ops are the best in the world.
Well as s non american I feel it’s quite simple : the USA has an incredible potent war machine, so if their citizens think they have an incredible army, then they are more or less quite correct.
Russians on the other hand just smokes copium and have fever dreams.
It’s true for military stuff but false for many many things that they’d still insist is the best way to handle things. Mass shootings is an anomaly that’s completely normalized there, sometimes it’s not even worth a media footnote.
And there’s a strange thing about shooting presidents every once in a while
You’re not wrong. Americans have a lot of “America fuck yeah!” energy going on, the difference really would be that when we break from that mentality and start going “what the fuck America?” we don’t get arrested and put in jail or forcibly conscripted into a war we didn’t ask for.
Defenetly not germany. Last few times they were like that, the world stamped it out.
