Posted on 04/28/2013 2:13:44 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Built to dominate the enemy in combat, the Army's hulking Abrams tank is proving equally hard to beat in a budget battle...
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
You are correct, sir. No one truly knows what the future holds, or what form the next wars will take. If you over prepare you will be deemed wasteful; if you under prepare you will be counted dead. All we know for sure is that there will always be wars, and we must be prepared to win.
If anybody thinks I'm some crazy loon conspiracy nut, take a look around the news
and do your own due diligence.
In all fairness, tanks have entered the realm of ‘permanent component’ for a modern military. Importantly, this doesn’t mean in their current form, it means in their principle.
To explain, the world changed with Napoleon Bonaparte, because he used his units much like chess pieces. Engineers, artillery, infantry, light cavalry, heavy cavalry, with their movements much as how their pieces move on the chess board.
The Russians, and later the Soviet Union noted that every type of unit that Napoleon used had a modern, technologically more advanced equivalent. In the case of heavy cavalry, they used both tanks and heavy armored helicopters in that role. Even chemical and nuclear weapons did not change this theory.
The US, however, is more fixated on the technology involved instead of its use. And in truth, there is so much technology today devoted to killing tanks that much of their tactical abilities are reduced. But that is only true technologically.
That is, the role of the tank on the battlefield, as heavy cavalry, still exists.
The US has tried to blend light and heavy cavalry together in the form of the Stryker armored vehicle. But this is a risky gambit.
Yet, the die is pretty much cast. So now it is up to the weapons designers to develop a better mousetrap. And I would not be surprised if it was a tank, reborn, to once again fill that particular role on the battlefield.
Cool, so large scale warfare and invasions and conquests are over, China is just wasting it’s money as it builds for a future that can’t happen according to you.
We started WWII with some inferior equipment but not all of it was that bad.
Our planes were a little bit behind but not as bad as many think. I would guess our ships were about as good as any and our service rifle was the best of any tho it was a year or so until they became plentiful. No big deal as the 03 Springfield was still as good as the Axis guns.
Probably our tanks were rated the worst but I remember seeing a Arika Corps veteran saying when the British got large numbers of American Grant and Lee tanks, they were better than what the Germans had.
I think the one thing the Germans had over everyone was the 88mm artillery.
Enough emphasis on pork. Tanks aren’t invincible, and they do cost a lot in several ways (e.g., transportation). The Army knows what it’s talking about in this case and doesn’t have any extraneous motives.
Don’t forget the M-2 ,0.5 Browning Heavy Caliber Machine Gun. The 50 caliber was mounted on tanks, half-tracks, jeeps and six to eight in P-47s and P-51s, Grumman Wildcats and F-6 Hellcats and just about anything else that flew, ran on the ground or sailed the seas. Ma Deuce demanded respect and she gets it!
There is ZERO chance of China confronting us directly over any perceived East Asian hegemony. The Chinese oligarchs don’t need to.
They own us, and are using the power of the money we give them with every “made in China” purchase to buy political influence in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan...and here.
Keep in mind: we’re a nation in decay, just a source of raw materials for them. Did you know that our top two exports to China are raw corn and scrap paper?
Scrap paper. Crushed cardboard boxes. That’s it.
And what are we dependent on them for? Almost everything but oil. And that includes most of the microelectronics used in our military hardware.
My wife recently took a series of business trips to the East, which included a week spent each in Singapore, Osaka, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. She returned home embarrassed for us. The cities she visited were bustling and blindingly modern—polluted, yes, but she said one could feel the general attitude of people on their way up.
One can smell the rot in the air here.
Asia is on the move. Meanwhile, most Americans leech off their countrymen and live for the next sporting event on television.
It’s a complex world, ruled by money, not tanks. Not any more. Ten thousand M1’s are worth nothing to a stagnant, ignorant bankrupt nation.
Yes the .50 caliber is still state of the art.
The German MG-42 was also a world beater. My Father used to tell stories of WWII to my brothers and me after he and Mother had gone to bed. We would sit by the bed and listen. He could imitate the sound of a MG-42. It was always fired in short bursts.
It is approaching 100 years old.
Zero chance of war with China, or a need to stand up to China militarism anywhere, and major warfare is ended for humanity, sounds great.
I don’t want any of what you smoke though.
The last uncle of my childhood passed away back in October. My Uncle Fred served with the 84th. Infantry Division in Belgium during The Battle of The Bulge. He told me about the MG-42. He said it fired so fast that ‘’If you heard it, it usually was the last thing you ever heard.’’ Unc’ was wounded by 88mm shrapnel in early January ‘45 and that got him the hell out of there but there are no doubt plenty of Germans and Japanese who almost fell afoul of ‘’Ma Deuce’’ and certainly must feel re-born that she didn’t give too hard a ‘’look see’’.
Are you still in high school?
Money rules the world. You’ll learn this as you mature.
No child, but you do seem to have a bizarre theory that history is over and the possibility of major wars has ended because someone recently invented money and economics.
Actually, our M4 Sherman was the match for the Mark IV German tank and better than their Mark III, which was their most plentiful tank. these were the tanks we faced in Africa when we started fighting over there. The M3 was not a good tank, the main gun was fixed and could only be aimed by turning the tank. In other words the Grant and the Lee were both inferior to the German tanks of the day. The Sherman was not.
However, when we got to Europe we were now facing the Mark V and Mark VI, the Panther and Tiger.They were both superior to the Sherman. They Panther had the same size gun as the Sherman(75MM) but it was a high velocity gun, better than the low velocity gun the Sherman had. Plus the armor on the Panther was better. The Tiger was so far above the Sherman that it speaks for itself.
Our big advantage lay in the fact we could produce hundreds of Shermans to every Panther and Tiger produced.
Typically, it took 4 Shermans to knock out one Tiger or Panther. The Panther was arguably the best medium tank of WWII, better than the Russian T34, which inspired it's design. The Tiger and the King Tiger(an upgrade of the Tiger)were both too heavy for the Power pack and were prone to break down frequently.
Try reading more extensively and you’ll see that technology has made mass warfare obsolete.
I have studied warfare for...oh, going on forty years, now...since my career Marine father brought the very young me to visit his first battlefield on Okinawa. Oh, I even have a PhD in modern European history, with a specialty in WWII logistics. And make my living teaching history.
And you? Oh, yeah. You post anonymously to an internet forum.
Stick to sports on television. That’s your speed.
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