The Armored Vehicle Thread

It is very humiliating building up a hype over a new generation of vehicles and then have them break down right in the middle of a parade instead of field trials and testing.

Another BTR?

Maybe they're just holding some sort of big IFV competition and us being on the outside we're reading their procurement situation wrong.

Or it is working just like the old times with several parallel procurements running side by side.

I'm doing my best to give them the benefit of the doubt and hoping they're not gonna buy four separate new BTR replacements.

It looks as if the BTR-87 is oriented towards the export market, which would be a curious choice if Boomerang were really intended to enter service soon (unless the Russian military wants to keep Boomerang off the export market—highly doubtful, given their need for hard currency).

I'm strongly suspecting this is the manufacturers scenting delays and cost overruns for the Boomerang project, and putting out an alternative early.

^ Yeah it sounds like export stuff. Sell it to places with a lot of war on like Syria or Libya or South Sudan.

Here's a paper that may be of interest: the US cavalry and mechanization, 1928-1940. DTIC link.

In the interwar years, a lot of cavalry officers were still in denial about their obsolescence in the face of mechanization and pushed through several hybrid horse/vehicle formations. "Mechanized cavalry" was the more sensible of them; mounted riflemen supported by armored cars, a good idea in theory, in practice the armored cars by themselves were a lot more effective.

As for the less sensible ideas (or: the worst possible ideas for mechanizing cavalry units), I present: horse portee.◊

edited 30th Apr '16 2:10:47 PM by SabresEdge

The next logical step.

Sabre: Good find. Isn't DTIC great sometimes?

-Reads through the Post WWI Boards decisions-... I shouldn't be surprised they ignored the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and WW I in terms of how common trenches and earth works had become. Never mind the fact they were common in the Napoleonic era as well.

edited 30th Apr '16 4:27:01 PM by TuefelHundenIV

^^ Isn't that Big Dog 2.0?

Trench warfare gets a mention in one of the Horatio Hornblower books when the French army is laying siege to Riga.

Their mechanization/motorization was only completed towards the end of the campaign. Of course, that's not really the noteworthy thing that they did...

Strictly speaking trench warfare's been around for millenia. Trenches were one of the defensive features of all properly built Roman camps from at least Marius' time, and probably earlier. And those camps often came under sustained attack from whatever enemy they'd pissed off at the time - lots of whom tried various ways of crossing trenches and circumventing the other stuff that the Romans had in their toolkit of how to be a nasty defensive minded bastard. The fighting that ensued was as often as brutal as anything you'd see in the Somme or Passchendaele.

And sometimes it could be an unexpected counter. In the Battle of the Trench, Muhammad and his followers dug a large trench against their Meccan enemies (who were mostly mounted). The Meccan attackers, not expecting a drawn-out siege scenario, ended up milling about in confusion, launching a few raids (repulsed), and in the end withdrew.

It's a pretty major event in the early history of Islam, which makes it all the more hilarious for the Charge of Abu Hajaar to end up being ineffective because their Kurdish enemies...dug a trench.

See there we have it. An extensive history of trench warfare and earth fortifications. The Romans liked filling their ditches with sharpened stakes and sometimes setting them on fire for fun.

Hell they even dug trenches to stop tanks and tanks had to start carrying facine with them to cross them.

obstacles other then mine fields All sorts of nifty blockages for vehicles.

I recall seeing photographs of both German and Soviet tanks having wooden planks or detachable metal sheets strapped on the armor as makeshift bridges.

There's probably all manner of ways you might try to bridge gaps. Sometimes you just stop and let the engineers build a bridge. Sometimes you have some fancy vehicle that can drop a portable bridge for you to use. Sometimes you dump a bundle of rods or sticks into the ditch and drive over them.

I'm sure once in a while, the crews have to grab shovels and fashion their own solution. Or they just turn around and try to find another place to cross.

You mean like this◊ or this?◊

edited 1st May '16 11:50:04 PM by Greenmantle

We heard you like tanks so we put a tank on your tank on your tank so you could tank while you tank while you tank.

That would blow Xzibit's mind, I think. Nice picture that one - the first time I ever saw that one. I do wonder how they'd get the tanks out of there though.

In fact, I've actually seen that photo of the Churchill ARKs (Italian Pattern) before. Although, I'm sure they were dug out in the end.

edited 2nd May '16 8:41:21 AM by Greenmantle

How does the hierarchy of tank units and formations work in the various major militaries of the world? We can start off with the US Army and the Russian Ground Forces for the first comparison, if you like.

Look up FM 100-60 for some insight into how Russian-style formations are organized, from the squad to the corps level.

Since Sabre is being a lazy bastard (), here's a direct .pdf link.

edited 10th May '16 1:11:22 PM by Achaemenid

Yeah, that's the first link in my search results. Didn't quite answer my question, though, so I tried smallest unit in a "tank company", and I hit the jackpot: The hierarchy of tank formations in the US Army starts with the section (2 tanks), followed by the platoon (4 tanks in 2 sections), and then followed by the company (3 to 5 platoons, for a grand total of up to 20 vehicles).