Armor

[selenite0]

Tanks take a beating in Iraq

This is why I didn't get worked up about the armor-for-humvees controversy. No matter how much armor you put on somebody can get through it. So you've got to balance it against the other factors.

Comments

[daveamongus.livejournal.com]

You might be surprised that very few people realize that "more armor = more good" is not a valid equation. In Iraq, I actually argued against more sandbags for one of our fortified positions because it would have reduced the traversing range and depression angle of our big machine gun.

Trade-offs suck, but they're a fact of life.

[kouhaataru.livejournal.com]

Just a random guy passing through. I wanted to remark that this reminds me of an article I read over at exile.ru by their war commentator (who has quite a few interesting things to say in general) who is nowhere near the war. Basically he was saying that the whole problem with the situation in Iraq is that it's not being waged with tactics it's being waged with politics. For instance on the situation in fallujah (if memory serves, I usually hide in my hole and don't pay attention to such things), they first of all waited until after the elections, and then they gave 72 hours notice before the attack. As a result this enabled the training of normal people as guerillas and the preparations for guerilla warfare. Planting mines and explosives and so on everywhere, working out routes through the city streets and so on.

And in the midst of that, the actual guerillas had gotten out of the city way before hand. So, our troops are over there getting killed by old women who have lost their family in the initial shelling, by religious fanatic (as muslims appear to have a tendency to be) kids who have such belief they don't fear death that know the streets better than the back of their hands and all the while the ones acutally behind it are just out there laughing.

I had never thought much about it until then, but there is really no way things will ever end over in Iraq with these methods. However at this point nobody really wants to escalate things and the US can't pull out. Well... saying anything more is just opinion but I thought that the latter was an eye-opener for me at least. Perhaps not so for you but I just felt like saying that as I passed by.

R.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I think things are working better than that. There's a lot of military bloggers out there, including some who were in Fallujah and posted first hand accounts of who they were fighting and how it went. Check 'em out, it's fascinating reading--"milbloggers" is a good search term.

Thanks for passing by.

[abovenyquist.livejournal.com]

To quote one of the DARPA program managers: "Tanks are sooooo World War II."

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Oh, they have their uses. They were very effective against the strongpoints in Fallajah, for ex. But I think they are in transition from being an independent maneuver element to being part of an infantry battalion's heavy weapons company.