Wait, we had a proper tank semi-derail there. Let's go back to that.
* Strife26 dons cvc sme helmet
the tank has never been destroyed in combat because since the proxy wars with the soviet union they never had anything better than tanks from the 70s to compete with ror
Iraqi army tanks were either downgraded export versions of T-72 they got from the Soviet Union or domestically produced copies of downgraded export versions of T-72.
Since World War II, America has never been in combat with countries that has similarly powerful armies. It's easy to gang up on a country when you have total numerical and technological superiority (like Serbia, Iraq, Libya and almost Syria). Fighting a country like Russia or China, on the other hand, is not. M1A12 SEP Abrams tanks will face much more serious resistance there than those Iraqi insurgents with IEDs...
Judging by recent trends in international politics and the fact that my country is in a military alliance with Russia, I will be able to personally see and even test (with a help of RPGs) the combat worthiness of Abrams tanks on the frontline at home in the relatively near future. I'll tell you the results once it happens, provided that Bay 12 Forums, the Internet or the USA would exist at that point. 
I'd also argue that China definitely had a combat power equal to that of the UN forces deployed during the Korean War, hence the whole pushing our asses back the the 38th parallel thing. Abrams have been destroyed in the past, but it's a very difficult thing to do. In most cases, it's a matter of recovery being deemed more troublesome than it's worth, generally resulting in a continuous stream of bigger attempts to combat loss the downed vehicle.
Also, that's a really bad idea.the tank has never been destroyed in combat because since the proxy wars with the soviet union they never had anything better than tanks from the 70s to compete with ror
True, but being able to take a detonation of TNT without any crippling damage does say a thing or two about its design. Al-Qaeda used to suicide bomb those tanks, nowadays they don't.
I'd suggest Kim Jong-Un to liberate Korean city Vladivostok. Then it will be not so one sided as against USA but mad enough to have a right to be called a crazy dictator
It's also speculated that the South Korean military is sufficiently powerful enough that they'd wipe the floor with the North before the US gets any major assets deployed as support. South Korea spends more on their military than the North has in GDP after all.
Depends on what you want to call a major asset. There's 28000ish troops in South Korea at any one period of time, but that's not the number to look at. The big one is the fact that there's just about a full line brigade deployed, and the US is in the process of beefing that up with an additional combined arms battalion (
http://rt.com/news/us-south-korea-military-296/ for an easy to find source, but you can find it in official press releases if you dig.) At the end of the day, a hard core, professional volunteer badass tanking dog of war like myself is not to be considered a minor asset (it'd hurt my ego, you know?), especially when the bulk of both forces are conscript armies.
It’s kind of off-topic for Korea but this thread does talk a lot about tanks. I haven’t followed along for some time but,
1) didn’t the Iraqi’s show the Achilles’ heel of an Abrams was the necessarily large supply convoys? Those turbine suck up a lot of fuel. Korea maybe not so much, it’s small, but target the tanker trucks and it still becomes more or less Rommel’s problem.
2) didn’t the Mid-East wars of the 70s demonstrate that unit superiority would be trumped by tactics and terrain? (Golan Heights)
3) does anyone think there ever will be another major tank battle involving the US? That was NATO’s plan for countering the Warsaw Pact but, it was a long time ago. The US has now had a lot of practice using drones and Hellfires. They’re pretty precise. And if somebody comes up with something so top-protected that a Hellfire wouldn’t do the job, wouldn’t it be almost no time at all until there were simply larger drones launching something bigger?
Regarding 1, thats why the Challenger 2 (and modern Panthers IIRC) run on good old diesel rather than kerosene turbines. Regarding 2, if you can conrtol that aspect of combat. Regarding 3, there probably will be, as drones are fine and dandy, but cant really hold terrain as such.
MonkeyHead is somewhat on the ball here.
The Iraqis never had an effective counter to American tanks. It's just that, at the end of the day, you *can't* patrol a damn country that's any decent size with tracked vehicles, that's not what they're designed for. But claims of the Abrams regularly running out of fuel and being a sitting duck is almost always overblown. Believe you me, the United States military apparatus is more than aware of the importance of delicious jp8 and we're more than good to provide. Bar none, there is no country in the world that does logistics to the level of the United States (this is also why you see armchair analysts bash the Abrams for reliability, our rear echelon types, as much as I bag on them, mean that it's generally much much easier to replace rather than fix in the field).
Diesel engines are all fine and good in their place, but they just can't provide the sheer power that a turbine engine can, as well as being considerably louder. It's an aftereffect of the design considerations that went into the xm-1 project and into the Abrams. We've got more than enough range, but between long distance tooling and sprinting to the next iv line, I'm always always always going to want to do that sprinting.
2) There's a war demonstrating that every few decades or so. Hannibal, Franco-Prussian, Winter, 7-Days are all good examples. The North Korean army probably has advantages in straight discipline and probably home court or initiative, but that's not a huge advantage compared to experience, technology, and training (because, you know, the US and the ROK can actually afford to have our soldiers fire real rounds during training)
3)Drones are great, effective things, but, at the end of the day, they're just another aspect of air power. You don't get to take and hold ground with things in the air, that takes steel shod treads, closely followed by guys in boots. A drone, while having considerably greater staying power than planes of yesteryear, are still far behind that of a tank. Additionally, they don't have nearly the firepower in round count of my 120mm, the ground level view and observation capabilities, nor definite presence that can only be provided by ground forces.
I could certainly see some border skirmish spiraling out of control, probably with some inane fuckup on one side or the other starting it. But once rounds start hitting Seoul, the cat isn't going back into the bag until truly ridiculous number of civilians flee South and an armored spearhead crashes through the dmz (possibly with an armored anvil first, assuming that North Korea actually mounts an invasion)
Of course, that'll be a real, doctrinal war, the kind that you need to describe with apocalyptic terms. Not something to look forward to as a dispassionate observer.
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Topic: Additional CIA japes [DPRK Thread] (Read 553239 times)