The Armata rolls an unmanned turret, yeah. Russian doctrine is much more ready to use autoloaders than American, as a third order effect of traditional soviet cannibalization/maintenance techniques.
That sounds interesting, could you expand?
The USSR (even going back to pre-Soviet Russia, really) has had serious problems with supply chains and logistics, for various reasons. As a result, it was generally easier to resupply by cannibalization. Instead of sending resupply to Unit A and Unit B, it was easier to combine A & B into a fullish strength polyglot division. As a result, a lot of maintenance that a Western military would do at depot level is done at the front, so Soviet vehicles prioritize being able to brute force maintenance with manpower and little else.
Concurrently with this, Soviet WWII doctrine had much closer tank-infantry cohesion. T 34's always try to have a bunch of infantry (preferably sub-machine gunners) hanging on. By the time we get out of WWII, USSR doctrine has a squad of infantry firmly established as part of tank platoons, both for the maintenance capability and for combined arms.
If the American Abrams rolled with an autoloader, that'd be dropping the platoon size from 16 to 12 personnel, a very big difference in the platoon's ability to do things other than fight the tank (if you assume that the autoloader adds any extra maintenance, then those 12 are doing more than the 16 we before). With a soviet platoon, there's a whole squad of infantry rattling around who are already there to help with maintenance and dismount work.
Hence, the Soviets were much more ready to embrace autoloaders than the West. There's some other factors too, the Sovs were very big on making their turrets as small as possible, hence the tiny rounded things instead of big, boxy western styles.
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Topic: Non-EU europe thread (with Russia, Israel and Australia included) (Read 273723 times)