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Russia Update: Gas Shortages, Plane Shortages, Crimea’s Collapse

Thursday, July 2nd, 2026

The longer Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine continues, the more things in Russia (and occupied Ukraine) seem to be breaking.

First up: gasoline shortages across Russia.

The lines are growing at Russian gas stations — and so is the frustration and uncertainty as several months of Ukrainian attacks have set oil refineries ablaze and choked supplies for motorists across the vast country.

Ukrainian forces struck Russia’s major Ufa oil refinery for the second time in a week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday.

Almost daily long-range attacks on Russian oil facilities have created a fuel crisis and heaped political pressure on the Kremlin as its all-out invasion of Ukraine stretches into its fifth year.

The Ufa refinery is one of Russia’s largest producers of lubricants and is located more than 600 miles from Ukraine, Zelensky said on social media.

Ukraine also struck a plant producing missile components in Russia’s Penza region southeast of Moscow, some 300 miles from Ukraine, Zelensky said.

Russian officials did not confirm the strikes, which could not be independently verified. The Russian Defense Ministry reported intercepting 179 Ukrainian drones over 16 Russian regions, the annexed Crimea and waters of the Azov and the Black Sea.

Evidence suggests that Ukrainian drones are most often intercepted by their targets.

Fuel rationing has been introduced in many Russian regions, with hourslong queues of cars snaking beside roads. Social media videos show drivers aghast at the lines or swearing at empty gas pumps and rising prices. The mayor of the Siberian city of Irkutsk even ordered portable toilets brought in to accommodate those in line.

Siberia is full of oil, yet there’s still a shortage of gasoline there.

The fuel crisis — unprecedented for a nation that is one of the world’s biggest energy producers — has brought Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine home to ordinary Russians like few other events in the war, now in its fifth year.

It drew a rare admission from President Vladimir Putin, who acknowledged “problems persist for both motorists and businesses,” and “there are still queues at petrol stations, and finding the right grade of petrol isn’t always easy.”

He insisted the shortages are “not critical” and “temporary.”

I’m sure the situation will ease once the three day special military operation concludes…

But that appeared to do little to reassure at least one motorist in Moscow, the wealthy capital typically better-insulated from economic shocks than the rest of the country.

“I think the situation is not very good,” the motorist waiting in line told the Associated Press on Monday, the day after Putin’s televised remarks.

“They say one thing on television, and in reality it’s another. … People are queueing everywhere,” he added, declining to give his full name out of safety concerns.

Zelensky on Monday echoed that sentiment, writing on Telegram that “Putin can go on and on, claiming on TV that he supposedly has everything under control,” but Russians can see that the war “has reached the point where even an oil state — a gas station, as Russia used to be called — is now facing gas shortages.”

An AP count shows over 50 reported attacks by Ukraine on oil refineries, depots, terminals and other energy infrastructure in Russia and the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula since March. Often, the same facility was hit more than once -– such as the refinery in the Black Sea town of Tuapse that was struck four times.

See pretty much every LinkSwarm over the last year for details.

The amount of crude oil Russia processed into fuel in June was down 25% from a year ago, to 3.95 million barrels per day — the lowest level in over two decades, said Gary Peach, oil markets analyst at Energy Intelligence.

“The outages are extraordinary,” he said.

Gasoline production has fallen 17% to 850,000 barrels a day, from 1.03 million a day a year ago — far short of what the domestic market needs. Russia exports relatively little gasoline.

About a third of Russia’s oil refining capacity is offline, said Chris Weafer, CEO of Macro-Advisory Ltd. Consultancy, noting that because refineries don’t publicly confirm the extent of the damage, his estimate comes from anecdotal evidence and oil industry sources.

“It comes at a very critical time for the Russian economy, in that the agriculture season, particularly the harvest season, is now starting to ratchet up,” increasing demand, Weafer said.

Ukrainian officials describe the strikes as a campaign to pressure Moscow to end the war by undermining military logistics and supply lines and weakening its ability to mount front-line assaults.

In particular, Kyiv has sought to isolate Crimea, which was seized from Ukraine in 2014 in a move most nations don’t recognize. Attacks this year forced the Moscow-installed authorities to enact fuel rationing on the peninsula in May and halt sales to civilians there altogether. Limited sales later resumed in the city of Sevastopol.

Speaking of occupied Crimea, so many people are seeking to escape the resource-starved peninsula that the traffic jam at the Kerch Strait Bridge is visible from space.

  • “Thousands of cars rushed the last route out of Crimea, now jamming the Kerch Bridge with thousands of cars at a complete standstill.”
  • “The delays result not only from the number of people wanting to leave, but also from repeated closures during Ukrainian drone alerts, intensified security inspections, and worsening logistical disruption across Crimea.”
  • A “few motorists still driving into Crimea strapping industrial fuel tanks onto the roofs of their cars and connecting them directly to their fuel tanks with hoses. The improvised setup is extremely dangerous, creating obvious fire and explosion risks, yet many drivers appear willing to accept those dangers simply to carry enough gasoline to be able to escape the peninsula once they finished what they came to Crimea to do.”
  • “Russian military decisions are simultaneously making the situation even worse, as Russian commanders have redirected both civilian and military traffic onto the Kerch Bridge. Instead of being one of several transport arteries, the bridge has become the peninsula’s primary logistics lifeline, working beyond its practical capacity, due to the Ukrainian strikes that have repeatedly disrupted the Melitopol-Mariupol corridor and heavily damaged northern Crimean crossings.”
  • “Military convoys, fuel trucks, civilian traffic, and freight vehicles all compete for the same limited crossing. Rather than solving Russia’s logistics problems, rerouting traffic has concentrated nearly everything onto a single vulnerable bottleneck.”
  • “The resulting congestion has forced Russian authorities to adopt extraordinary measures, declaring a state of emergency within Crimea. This grants them broad powers to restrict civilian movement and establish procedures to prioritize military transportation over civilian traffic.”
  • “Residents increasingly complain that gasoline has become unavailable and that public transportation is being disrupted because minibuses cannot obtain sufficient fuel. These shortages coincide with repeated Ukrainian strikes targeting Crimea’s broader energy network, including the Kerch and Simferopol thermal power plants, electrical substations, gas compressor stations, and various major and minor fuel and gas depots. Together, these attacks have affected electricity generation, gas distribution, fuel storage, and logistics simultaneously, causing rolling blackouts, water supply disruptions, and persistent fuel shortages affecting civilian life.”
  • “Instead of easing the burden by facilitating departures, Russian authorities are using emergency powers to preserve transport capacity primarily for military logistics. Civilians therefore bear much of the cost of sustaining Russian operations, finding themselves trapped by restrictions while essential supplies are increasingly directed toward the military.”

    • And after four years of war, the Russian military is running out of, well, pretty much everything.

  • “Russia is running out of bombers, and it can’t replace those that are being destroyed. There’s a deep crisis in Russia’s aviation sector, and it spells disaster for Putin’s plans for 2027.”
  • “There is nothing that demonstrates Russia’s problems better than what is happening with its Tu-22 bombers. On June 16, Euromaidan Press revealed that Russia started its war with Ukraine with a stockpile of 41 Tu-22M3 bombers. Now, it may only have nine left.” Euromaidan is, of course, firmly pro-Ukrainian.
  • ‘Every Tu-22 that goes down is an airframe that can’t be used to pelt Ukraine with missiles and bombs.”
  • “Russia hasn’t made any new Tu-22s since 1993. Russia has been losing Tu-22s by the bucketload, and absolutely none of them are being replaced.”
  • “Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, at least 24 Tu-22s have been destroyed or damaged, and all that Russia has in place is a modernization program designed for the declining stockpiles of Tu-22s that it still has in its arsenal. There are no spare parts. Even minor damage to one of these bombers can result in it being completely written off, as Russia doesn’t have what it needs to make repairs. That means that every Tu-22 that goes down is a bomber that Russia will never be able to replace.”
  • “It’s a systemic production failure problem that extends to the entire Russian aerospace industry, both military and commercial.”
  • Management turnover at Tupolev snipped.
  • “Russia’s Defense Ministry received almost $53.5 million in combined settlements from Tupolev. That number is interesting, because it is roughly the same as the cost to modernize a Tu-95MS bomber, and it’s about a quarter of the amount that Russia spends to build a Tu-160M. In other words…not a whole lot. And if that’s all that Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed, it reveals plenty about the state of Russian bomber manufacturing. The company that is supposed to be refurbishing Russia’s aging fleet could even push one Tu-95MS out of its doors. Looking beyond that, the company was also supposed to produce four Tu-160Ms for the ministry, all of which were to be built between 2022 and 2023, and delivered in 2025. But only two ever reached the Russian military, and both arrived in 2026, which is a year after the initial deadline.”
  • “One of the biggest problems Russia faces [is] being forced to burn through multiple old tanks just to get one up and running again. Euromaidan Press reported on this issue in April, noting that Russia was running out of T-72Bs that it could refurbish, which had led to it cannibalizing older T-72As just to get some metal on the battlefield. At the time, Russia had between 800 and 900 T-72As, though only around 500 could be possible candidates for refurbishment. The rest would have to be stripped for parts to be used in that refurbishment, and Russia would likely have been far short of what it needed to get all 500 possible refurbs functioning.”
  • “Now, take that problem and transplant it into a bomber fleet for which there are only a few dozen airframes available, rather than hundreds. Cannibalization still has to happen. But Russia runs out of the parts it needs much faster, and, as with its tanks, it doesn’t have the facilities needed to build more. These are, by and large, Soviet-era bombers, and Russia has long shut down many of the plants that made the parts used to build these airframes decades ago.”
  • “Since production resumed on the Tu-160 in 2019, only six have been delivered to the Russian armed forces. Russia lost twice that many bombers to Operation Spiderweb alone, and it’s lost many more besides.”
  • “This is a problem that we see across all of Russia’s military. The Soviet-era systems on which Putin has relied so heavily in the war against Ukraine are one-and-done. Geopolitical Monitor says that in the air, Su-25 close support aircraft are no longer produced, meaning that the airframe has the same problems as Russia’s bomber fleet. The T-80 tank family also can’t be replaced, which means every ‘new’ T-80 we see on the battlefield is really just another refurb that Russia managed to create by stripping away parts from other T-80s.”
  • “TL;DR: If it was made during the Soviet era, Russia no longer has the tools or know-how to replace it.”
  • “Russia is launching 180 to 250 glide bombs at Ukraine every single day, which requires the flying of 200 sorties per day, which, in turn, places enormous amounts of stress on pilots and their airframes. Now, consider this rate of aerial attack when stacked up against Russia’s bomber problem. Russia’s bombers are used to launch cruise missiles and glide bombs. Every single time one of those bombers goes down, be it to a Ukrainian attack, a crash at a base, or simple maintenance issues caused by flying far too many sorties, that’s an attacking threat that is permanently grounded.”
  • “Slowly, but surely, Russia is running out of its irreplaceable Tu-22s and Tu-95s, and it isn’t building Tu-160s at anywhere near the rate needed to keep up the pressure. When the bombers run out, the attacks stop.”
  • Then there’s the nuclear issue, as all those dwindling numbers of bombers are nuclear weapon capable. “Given how much Russia loves to throw around its nuclear weight as an intimidation tactic, the real-time crumbling of a large part of its nuclear triad is a situation that actively weakens Russia on the global stage, not just in Ukraine. Russia’s nuclear threat is losing muscle by the month.”
  • Russia has similar problems keeping it’s seized Boeing and Airbus airliners flying. “In January, The Moscow Times reported that one of Russia’s solutions for the inevitable shortages this situation creates is going to be to send Russian airlines mothballed Soviet-era aircraft in 2026 and 2027. That isn’t a solution. It’s a continuation of the problem that we’re seeing in Russia’s bomber fleet.”
  • “Not even Russia’s modern airframes can escape the sanctions problems. In both the Su-34 and Su-35S, around 80% of the critical electronic components needed to make those jets usable are made in the West.”
  • “There is no road to recovery that can be followed while the Ukraine war continues.”

    • Every day Putin continues his illegal war of territorial aggression against Ukraine, more and more things in Russia break.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 8 Comments »

    Russian Tank Factory Layoff?

    Monday, November 24th, 2025

    Reporting from Ukraine says that Russian tank producer Uralvagonzavod has instituted “mass layoffs.”

  • “Russia’s main tank manufacturer, Uralvagonzavod, has announced layoffs of roughly ten percent of its workforce and a freeze on new hires until February, with some internal divisions reportedly losing up to half their staff.” 10% seems oversold for “mass layoffs,” but any layoffs from such a vital defense contractor suggests things are indeed breaking inside Russia’s overheated and over-stressed war economy.
  • “The cuts go far beyond administrative reshuffling, as insiders cite a combination of crippling factors: sanctions that block imports of Western optics and fire-control systems, exhaustion of stored spare parts, and delayed state payments for ongoing contracts. The company is already behind on deliveries of T-90M and T-72B3 tanks, with workshop activity down by nearly 33% compared to last winter. It’s a chain reaction: without foreign components, upgrades stall; without upgrades, contracts shrink; and without new contracts, entire divisions begin to shut down.”
  • “The consequences reach far beyond one factory, as Uralvagonzavod, builds and repairs most of Russia’s main battle tanks, including the T-90M and T-72 series that form nearly 80 percent of its active armored fleet. Even a modest ten percent reduction in staff could mean 25 to 30 fewer tanks repaired or produced each month, enough to reduce frontline availability by hundreds over a single year. The reported 50 percent layoffs in some divisions would push output back to pre-war levels, erasing two years of industrial mobilization. Russia has already been losing armored vehicles faster than it can replace them. What is changing now is that they lose the ability to rebuild reserves for massed assaults altogether.”
  • “The layoffs also highlight a problem at the core of Russia’s war economy, as Moscow is short nearly 5 million workers across key sectors, according to official estimates, and defense plants are among the hardest hit. Skilled welders, machinists, and engineers have been drafted or have fled abroad, while those who remain are aging and overworked, with Russia not having enough to fill the heightened demand. Entire industrial regions from Nizhny Tagil to Ufa now offer 40 to 60 percent wage bonuses and still fail to fill vacancies. The fact that Uralvagonzavod is cutting jobs instead of hoarding them shows the problem is not labor, but resources: a major red flag, as it signals that Russia’s production system is running out of both money and metal.”
  • “The same pattern is emerging elsewhere, as in Tula and Bryansk, small-arms and component plants have halted production several days each week due to missing parts and unpaid contracts. Workers in Izhevsk report wage delays of up to two months. Ammunition factories in the Urals, which had been running 24-hour shifts, are now cutting back to two. Even the aerospace sector, long prioritized for funding, is postponing engine deliveries for drones and cruise missiles because of alloy shortages. The once-overheated war economy is visibly cooling, showing what happens when political ambition outruns industrial capacity.”
  • “Overall, the layoffs at Uralvagonzavod are not just an economic footnote; they are a warning sign that Russia’s industrial war machine is reaching its limits. What began as a mobilization boom is turning into a contraction driven by exhaustion, shortages, and overextension. For Ukraine and its partners, this is a strategic opening; a weakened Russian industry cannot sustain a prolonged war of attrition.”

    • Along the same lines, Covert Cabal, looking at satellite imagery, reports that Russia is drawing down the stocks of their most ancient T-72 tanks.

    ‘

  • “Before the war began, the T72 family was by far the largest stock of any other type of tank in storage. Today, it’s down from the pre-war 2,700 to just over 600, less than 500 of which even have a viable chance of being restored. But what is a lot more interesting is the massive decline in recent months of the oldest T72 variants.” Namely T-72 Urals and T-72As.
  • “They’ve brought almost twice as many of these old T72s out than any other type of tank this year.”
  • “Russia in less than a year has removed over 450 of them, about half. And realistically, today it’s probably much higher as we couldn’t find newer imagery of some bases than 4 months old.”
  • Both bases the Russian use to store old T-72s show significant numbers of them removed.
  • “Our last count leaves just 188 newer T72Bs and just 141 of all types of T80s remaining in storage. That’s down from the roughly 1,500 of each in storage before the war began. And those that do remain are generally in worse condition. Only a small fraction of those might ever be made viable again.”
  • “There are several smaller plants, but the one major one we focus on is UVZ.” AKA Uralvagonzavod.
  • “The number of tanks seen outside over the years has never been more than 100 until this summer. In an image we got from the 4th of November 2025. There now sits 482 tanks out front. Something never seen before. And there’s likely even more inside. Not all these are the old T72s. There are some slightly newer T72Bs along with some T90s. So all evidence points to Russia beginning a major revamp and long-term project of restoring and upgrading these old tanks that will take many years. The problem is after this they really have very little left.”

    • So we’re left with a mystery: At the same time Uralvagonzavod has a multi-year backlog of tanks to repairs and refurbish, they’re laying employees off. It’s hard to understand why.

    Unless, of course, they’ve ceased new tank production entirely…

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    Posted in Military, video | 9 Comments »

    Tank News Roundup For October 18, 2023

    Wednesday, October 18th, 2023

    A fair amount of tank news has built up in the hopper over the last month or so (some, but not all, related to the Russo-Ukraine War), so let’s do a roundup.

    The U.S. Army has announced that it’s not doing an M1A2SEPv4, and instead will produced the M1E3.

    The U.S. Army is scrapping its current upgrade plans for the Abrams main battle tank and pursuing a more significant modernization effort to increase its mobility and survivability on the battlefield, the service announced in a statement Wednesday.

    The Army will end its M1A2 System Enhancement Package version 4 program, and instead develop the M1E3 Abrams focused on challenges the tank is likely to face on the battlefield of 2040 and beyond, the service said. The service was supposed to receive the M1A2 SEPv4 version this past spring.

    The SEPv4 will not go into production as planned, Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo told Defense News in a Sept. 6 interview at the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia. “We’re essentially going to invest those resources into the [research and] development on this new upgraded Abrams,” he said. “[I]t’s really threat-based, it’s everything that we’re seeing right now, even recently in Ukraine in terms of a native active protection system, lighter weight, more survivability, and of course reduced logistical burdens as well for the Army.”

    The Abrams tank “can no longer grow its capabilities without adding weight, and we need to reduce its logistical footprint,” Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat systems, said in the statement. “The war in Ukraine has highlighted a critical need for integrated protections for soldiers, built from within instead of adding on.”

    Ukraine’s military will have the chance to put the M1 Abrams to the test when it receives the tanks later this month. The country is fighting off a Russian invasion that began nearly two years ago.

    The M1E3 Abrams will “include the best features” of the M1A2 SEPv4 and will be compliant with modular open-systems architecture standards, according to the statement, which will allow for faster and more efficient technology upgrades. “This will enable the Army and its commercial partners to design a more survivable, lighter tank that will be more effective on the battlefield at initial fielding and more easy to upgrade in the future.”

    “We appreciate that future battlefields pose new challenges to the tank as we study recent and ongoing conflicts,” said Brig. Gen. Geoffrey Norman, director of the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team. “We must optimize the Abrams’ mobility and survivability to allow the tank to continue to close with and destroy the enemy as the apex predator on future battlefields.”

    Norman, who took over the team last fall, spent seven months prior to his current job in Poland with the 1st Infantry Division. He told Defense News last year that the division worked with Poles, Lithuanians and other European partners on the eastern flank to observe happenings in Ukraine.

    Weight is a major inhibitor of mobility, Norman said last fall. “We are consistently looking at ways to drive down the main battle tank’s weight to increase our operational mobility and ensure we can present multiple dilemmas to the adversary by being unpredictable in where we can go and how we can get there.”

    General Dynamic Land Systems, which manufactures the Abrams tank, brought what it called AbramsX to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in October 2022. AbramsX is a technology demonstrator with reduced weight and the same range as the current tank with 50% less fuel consumption, the American firm told Defense News ahead of the show.

    The AbramsX has a hybrid power pack that enables a silent watch capability and “some silent mobility,” which means it can run certain systems on the vehicle without running loud engines.

    The tank also has an embedded artificial intelligence capability that enables “lethality, survivability, mobility and manned/unmanned teaming,” GDLS said.

    The Army did not detail what the new version might include, but GDLS is using AbramsX to define what is possible in terms of weight reduction, improved survivability and a more efficient logistics tail.

    The Army awarded GDLS a contract in August 2017 to develop the SEPv4 version of the tank with a plan then to make a production decision in fiscal 2023, followed by fielding to the first brigade in fiscal 2025.

    The keystone technology of the SEPv4 version consisted of a third-generation forward-looking infrared camera and a full-sight upgrade including improved target discrimination.

    “I think the investment in subsystem technologies in the v4 will actually carry over into the upgraded ECP [Engineering Change Proposal] program for Abrams,” Camarillo said. “However, the plan is to have robust competition at the subsystem level for a lot of what the new ECP will call for, so we’re going to look for best-of-breed tech in a lot of different areas,” such as active protection systems and lighter weight materials.

    For instance, the Army has kitted out the tank with Trophy active protection systems as an interim solution to increase survivability. The Israeli company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems develops the Trophy. But since the system is not integrated into the design of the vehicle, it adds significant weight, sacrificing mobility.

    The Army plans to produce the M1A2 SEPv3 at a reduced rate until it can transition the M1E3 into production.

    Which looks to be 2030.

    Nicholas Moran looks at what this might or might not mean in practical terms, with an emphasis on what it doesn’t say:

  • “We have about 10 years that the SEPv3 is the latest and greatest.”
  • “They are actually going to backfill some of the v4 modernizations to the v3.”
  • “‘The Abrams tank can no longer grow its capabilities without adding weight and we need to reduce its logistical footprint.’…There’s two parts to that one sentence that have a lot of digging into.”
  • “The Abrams started at 55 tons…now the v3 is 72 1/2 tons. If you add the Trophy APS, that’s an additional two and a half tons on its own. Then you put the reactive armor tiles on the side. Oh! Let’s put a mine plow on the front. Now your M1 is breaking 83 tons.”
  • One way to shed weight is with a smaller turret, like the Abrams X.
  • “What it doesn’t say in here, and what they’re not saying, is just how much weight are they trying to shed. Because if you’re trying to shed five to ten tons, that’s one thing. If you’re trying to shed 20 to 30 tons, then that’s something else entirely.”
  • The Abrams is essentially an analog tank which has had digital systems bolted onto it. “the upgrades that we have paid for our tanks have not been integrated upgrades from basically the ground up.” We’ve bolted on integrations modules, each of which adds weight.
  • “You can probably shave a few tons without touching the form factor of the M1A2 one bit.”
  • “Rip out the guts. Rip out all the electrics, all the electronics, and replace it from something that is designed and programmed from the ground up to be completely integrated.”
  • Replace the M256 cannon with the XM360, “which, as far as I know, does work. You install that you’ve shaved a ton off already.”
  • Replace the turret hydraulics with electrics.
  • Swap out copper wiring for fiber optics.
  • “So getting it from this current 73 tons down to, oh, let’s say 65 tons, probably isn’t all that hard.”
  • “If you want to take off more weight, you’re gonna have to look at a more radical redesign.” Like an unmanned turret.
  • Reduced logistics could go a lot of ways, some outside the tank. 80 ton tanks require beefy bridges, like the Joint Assault Bridge. (I include this because of my readers’ passionate opinions on proper battlefield bridging techniques.)
  • If you mean fuel efficiency, you can pull out the current gas turbine engine and replace it, either a more efficient turbine or something else.
  • “The Army has spent a lot of money paying Cummins to develop the Advanced Combat Engine. This is an opposed module, opposed piston modular engine, and it can be configured for 750 horsepower. I believe it’s just a six cylinder version to the 12 cylinder or piston version, which is a 1500 horsepower, the same as a turbine the same as modern MTU. It would make some sense that the Army is going to look very hard at this.” The AEC is a bit funky, with two pistons per cylinder working together to compress the gas. They claim it offers about 25% fuel economy and a similar reduction in waste heat.
  • They might also look at a hybrid power train.
  • You can also save logistical weight in spare parts. “If you were to rip the guts out of the tank and start from scratch, you can probably come up with a maintenance and logistics system for maintenance which is much more refined and efficient.”
  • “‘The war in Ukraine has highlighted a critical need for integrated protection from soldiers built from within instead of adding on.'”
  • “This has apparently been in the works for the better part of three years now. In 2020, the director of operational test and evaluation put out his annual report, and when it gets to the M1A2v3 section, it basically says ‘Guys, this is getting a little bit out of hand. The tank is a tad heavy.'”
  • “The Army understands that they’re pretty much at the limit.”
  • All this is being done now because Ukraine finally made them pay attention to things that had already been identified as problems but not addressed. “Something like the Ukraine conflict is a little bit of a kick in the pants, and it’s probably going to attract somebody’s attention and say ‘OK, yeah, this is what we need to do it.”
  • Trophy adds so much weight because you need to balance the turret. Redesigning the turret from the ground up solves that issue.
  • Modular open systems architecture standards: “The backbone, the central nervous system of these things, is a new version that’s compatible across vehicles.”

    • Chris Copson of The Tank Museum offers up an assessment of the use of tanks in Ukraine’s summer offensive (posted September 29).

  • “One commentator has been dubbing it ‘Schrodinger’s summer offensive.’ Is it or isn’t it, and it appears to be currently tentative at best.”
  • “We’re also seeing the tank struggling to assert influence in what has increasingly become a slog dominated by artillery.”
  • “Putin’s special military operation saw the Russian army fought to a standstill, and they’d suffered huge losses in men and material. But they’re still in possession a swathe of Ukrainian territory running through the Eastern Donbas right the way down to the coast of the Black Sea.”
  • “Russian forces have fallen back into a defensive posture behind layered defenses minefields, anti-tank obstacles and barbed wire.”
  • “Ukrainian response has been probing attacks in greater or lesser strength, and they’re starting to use some of their Western supplied military equipment to attempt to break through before the Autumn rains, and the rasputitsa, the roadless time, puts an end to the campaigning season.”
  • “Zelensky fought for supplies of modern Western military material, and, after quite a bit of hesitancy, it’s begun to arrive.”
  • “So far there’s been enough, we think, to equip up to 15 Ukrainian brigades, and each of those is going to be around about 3,000 personnel and about 200 vehicles of all types.”
  • He covers the trickle of Challenger 2s, Leopard 2s, Abrams, etc., and the capabilities of each, which we’ve already covered here.
  • “In the early stages of the invasion, February and March 2022, Russian tank losses have been estimated at anything from between 460 and 680 from a total inventory around about 2,700 in BTs. Both of those figures are estimates from Western or Ukrainian sources and they’re now putting the figure well over a thousand.”
  • “An awful lot of these losses seem to be in tanks and AFVs either stuck bellied out through poor driving, or run out of fuel. That’s just poor logistics.”
  • Russian tank units lack enough infantry support to protect their armored columns from Ukrainian anti-tank units.
  • “We’re starting to see images of Ukrainian Leopard 2s and Bradleys knocked out by mines or artillery in attempts to breach Russian layered defenses.”
  • Ukraine’s western tanks have much higher repairability than T-72s. “Western MBTs [are] designed so that an ammunition or propellant explosion actually vents to the outside, and this tends to maintain damaged vehicle’s integrity and make it repairable, as well as increasing the likelihood of crew survival.”
  • Damaged Leopard 2s are already being repaired.
  • “Because Russian industry is under the cosh, a shortage of chips and high-tech components, and that is because of the western embargo. The solution their general staff has come up with is to pull tanks out of storage, and this includes some very elderly models indeed. Some of the estimated 2,800 T-55s which comes into service.” Cold War designs.
  • “Commissioning tanks after decades in store is a huge undertaking. It’s not just a question of charge in the batteries, it’s more like a total rebuild.”
  • “They’re not likely to be in peak condition,” but might be OK in static defensive roles.
  • “There is evidence that at least one has been used as a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.”
  • “Against tanks like Challenger, Leopard or Abrams in an open country tank engagement, it’s fairly obvious they wouldn’t make the grade.”
  • Keeping all the different western tanks supplied and running is going to be a huge challenge to Ukraine. “A range of different and very unfamiliar, in some cases artillery pieces, trucks, logistic vehicles. Now the range is huge. Finding trained mechanics and procuring a huge range of spares. It’s going to be a colossal headache.”
  • “Artillery is really of central importance to the Russian, and before that the Soviet, way of war. And it’s the primary lethality in deep and close battles. Now perhaps 70% percent of Ukrainian casualties so far are being caused by Russian artillery.”
  • “At present a [Russian] brigade grouping is assigned a brigade artillery group, BRAG, and that’s two battalions of self-propelled howitzers and a battalion of multi-barreled rocket launchers. Use is made of forward observers, unmanned aerial vehicles and artillery location radars to identify targets.”
  • “At its most effective this uses the Strelets reconnaissance fire system to pair tactical intelligence and reconnaissance assets with precision strike artillery, and that gives you real-time targeting [Reckify?] uses the 2K25 Krasnapol 152mm laser guided round, which is able to inflict accurate strikes.” But it doesn’t work so well with cloud cover.
  • “We’ve also heard quite a lot about the Lancet range of loitering munitions for precision targeting. The Lancet-3 drone has a 40 minute flight time and it counts a 3kg warhead.” Oryx credits over 100 kills to Lancets. “These mostly have been self-propelled artillery, but also tanks.”
  • “With the constant presence of surveillance drones and satellite intel, it is getting just about impossible to hide anything on the modern battlefield.”
  • “The main take-home from the current conflict, and this might be stating the blindingly obvious, is that the battlefield is a very open place these days, and tank tactics have to evolve to take this into account.”
  • One thing we haven’t seen much of recently: Russian air power.
  • “There seems to be some progress around Robotyne, and the Challenger 2, Maurder and Stryker IFVs of the 82nd Air Landing brigade have been deployed to bolster 47th Brigade. And there seems to be some penetration of the Russian air defenses. Ukrainian offensive has broken through the first of three defensive lines, but the progress is really slow, because you’ve got minefields, dragon’s teeth and anti-tank ditches, and the Russian forces are very well dug in.”

    • Finally, we have a report that Russia is resuming the long-halted production of T-80s.

    The Uralvagonzavod factory in Omsk, in Siberia, hasn’t manufactured a new T-80 hull since 1991. And work on the T-80’s GTD-1250 turbine, at the Kaluga plant, likewise has idled in the decades since the Soviet Union’s collapse.

    No, for nearly 30 years the Russian army has replenished its T-80 fleet with old, refurbished hulls and engines. Those hulls and engines obviously are beginning to run out as Russian tank losses in Ukraine exceed 2,000. For context, there were only around 3,000 active tanks in the entire Russian armed forces when Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022.

    Uralvagonzavod produces just a few dozen new T-72B3s and T-90Ms every month: far too few to make good monthly tank losses averaging a hundred or more. That’s why, in the summer of 2022, the Kremlin began pulling out of storage hundreds of 1960s-vintage T-62s and ‘50s-vintage T-54s and T-55s.

    But the T-62s and T-54/55s, as well as only slightly less ancient war-reserve T-72 Urals and T-80Bs, are a stopgap. Some get fresh optics and add-on armor; many don’t. To sustain the war effort into year three, year four or year five, the Russian armed forces need new tanks. Lots of them.

    Thus it was unsurprising when, two weeks ago, Alexander Potapov, CEO of Uralvagonzavod, announced his firm would resume producing 46-ton, three-person T-80s “from scratch.”

    It’s a huge undertaking. While the Omsk factory still has the main T-80 tooling lying around somewhere, it must also reactive hundreds of suppliers in order to produce the tens of thousands of components it takes to assemble a T-80. That includes the gas-turbine engine.

    During the T-80’s initial production run between 1975 and 2001, Kaluga built thousands of 1,000-horsepower GTD-1000 and 1,250-horsepower GTD-1250s for the type. A thousand or more horses is a lot of power for a 46-ton tank: a Ukrainian-made T-64BV weighs 42 tons but has a comparatively anemic 850-horsepower diesel engine.

    The T-80’s excess power explains its high speed—44 miles per hour—and commensurately high fuel consumption, which limits its range to no more than 300 miles. Why then would Kaluga bother with a new 1,500-horsepower turbine?

    As long as certain Russian forces—airborne and marine regiments, for example—value speed over fuel-efficiency, it makes sense they’d want even more power for their new-build T-80s. A 1,500-horsepower engine also would give a next-generation T-80 lots of growth potential. Uralvagonzavod could pile on tons of additional armor without weighing down the tank.

    A few quick thoughts:

  • This hardly expresses confidence in the future of the T-14 Armata, does it now? (Speaking of which, they withdraw it from service in Ukraine, evidently without engaging any enemy tanks in anything but an indirect fire role (assuming they weren’t lying about that as well.))
  • If they’re struggling to produce just a few new T-72B3s and T-90Ms, why would producing T80s be any easier?
  • Russia announces a whole lot of things that never come to pass. In many ways its their default mode when announcing MilTech Wunderaffen.
  • Restarting a production line that’s been idle 30 years isn’t just difficult, it’s damn near impossible. At lot of the people who had the knowledge of how to actually build the things have probably died, and Soviet-era schematics are not an adequate substitute.
  • I’m pretty sure they have the capabilities to build the heavy equipment parts. The modern electronics? Not so much.
  • Like a lot of Russian announcements since the beginning of Vlad’s Big Adventure, this is probably a bluff to overall the gullible. I’m sure the Russians intend to restart production of T-80s, but I wouldn’t count on doing it very soon, or producing terribly many.

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    Posted in Military, video | 11 Comments »

    Remembering the Battle of Medina Ridge

    Tuesday, February 28th, 2023

    We’ve already talked about the Battle of 73 Easting, so let’s talk about the battle that followed close on it’s heels, the Battle of Medina Ridge, the 32nd anniversary of which just passed, and which some regard as the largest tank battle of Desert Storm.

  • Following 73 Easting and the Battle of Norfolk, The Adnan Republican Guard division of motorized infantry launched an artillery spoiling attack against the U.S. First Armored to slow their advance, only to be slaughtered by MLRS cluster bombs, Apaches and A-10s.
  • This is simultaneous with the destruction of loot-laden Iraqi vehicles on the Highway of Death and the burning of Kuwaiti oil fields.

  • Despite the Iraqis believing that the rugged terrain south of the Euphrates valley is too difficult for an armored division to negotiate, the 24th Infantry Division reached their objective, securing Highway 8 east of where the 101st had done so a couple of days earlier. They blockade the highway, destroying over 100 vehicles retreating westwards with tank and TOE fire. Bedouin nomads watching from atop a nearby ridgeline politely applaud as tank rounds hit their targets.

  • The Medina Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard is the last organized combat force standing against the U.S. and its allies.
  • While the Iraqis have entrenched behind a small hill the Americans must crest, they’ve made the mistake of being just out of range of their T-72s.
  • “For the next 40 minutes, the engaged elements of the First Armored Division simply sit there picking off Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles with impunity. The Iraqis desperately call in artillery support, but the rounds fall behind the front line of Abrams tanks.”
  • “The 1st and 25th Field Artillery Regiments respond. Using artillery acquisition radars, the U.S. artillery is able to detect the firing of an Iraqi artillery piece, pinpoint its exact position, and return counter artillery fire on it before the Iraqi round has even landed. Within just a few minutes, two entire artillery battalions of the Medina division have been wiped out.”
  • “40 minutes after the battle began, the Medina’s right flank has been completely destroyed, and the right flank of the American force is just beginning to smash into the Medina’s left. In this sector, many Iraqi tanks are pointing southwest. The nearest tanks are destroyed before they can even rotate their turrets towards the Americans. Those that do fire back find that they are again outranged.”
  • Apaches and A-10s join in here as well.
  • “The battle would become known as The Battle of Medina Ridge. It lasts just two hours during which 186 Iraqi tanks and 172 armored vehicles are destroyed. Four American Abrams tanks are lost.”

    • I’m skipping over some secondary action and friendly fire incidents, but the Iraqis were complete routed and Americans took minimal casualties.

    If more modern American and NATO tanks using combined arms operations took on even more antiquated Soviet tanks in Ukraine, the result is likely to be similar.

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    Posted in Military, video | 5 Comments »

    The Tank Isn’t Obsolete, Russia Is Just Using Them Stupidly

    Sunday, February 26th, 2023

    Here’s a video from Samir Puri and the Imperial War Museum that echoes something Nicholas Moran said ten months ago, namely that the tank is not obsolete on the modern battlefield, it’s just that the Russians are using them wrong.

    Takeaways:

  • Russia, despite a century of data, isn’t using tanks properly in combined arms operations in concert with infantry, artillery and close air support.
  • Ukraine is, though much of their close air support has taken the form of drones. “These unmanned aerial vehicles have proved very effective especially against slow-moving Russian armored convoys.”
  • “We don’t really see this kind of tight combined arms operations being mounted by the Russians. They really struggled to do this. Instead, what we saw were quite disconnected Russian elements, and that meant that often the Russians were moving into positions it was still very well defended that hadn’t been softened. Which is why as the war has moved on sixth, seventh, eighth month [this video came out two months ago], the Russians have changed tack very much to I guess quite brutal indiscriminate bombardment of the cities they want to take.”
  • “There are no massed tank battles for which the Cold War T-72 was designed. In fact, engagements in Ukraine are on a much smaller scale with platoons and companies clashing together rather than divisions and corps.”
  • “There has also been an absence of close air support, a crucial tool for supporting tanks as part of combined arms operations. There was a lot of aerial activity, there was a lot of dog fighting as well, early on in the in the invasion. But the aerial defense systems that both sides have gotten and can deploy to cover their their more fixed positions are effective enough that the attrition rate amongst combat aircraft has risen. And the Russians interestingly appear to be husbanding the resources of their air force.”
  • “In the early months of the war, Russia had little infantry with which to protect its tanks, particularly in urban settings. That that allowed small groups of Ukrainians to mount what almost seemed like guerrilla operations. Getting in close to Russian armor and taking them out with anti-tank guided missiles before they knew what was happening.”
  • “Russia has now launched a much larger mobilization of manpower to try and fix this problem, but with many of its best troops and equipment already expended, there are questions about the quality, supply, and morale of these new soldiers.”
  • “The fact that the Ukrainians are actually able to capture intact or largely intact T-72s is a testament to the Russian logistics. Meaning that you find in captured Russian equipment low supplies, some Russian PWOs complaining of a lack of lack of proper support from their headquarters and have simply given up or run away.”
  • Drone warfare has also made it much harder for Russia to use tanks in a traditional defensive role in static positions on systems of defensive trenches.

    • Though Russia’s forces have shown some small signs of increasing technical competence in various areas, the fact that they lost so much armor attacking Vuhledar shows that they still have a long way to go when it comes to staging competent combined arms operations.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 30 Comments »

    The Tank Museum on The Tanks Going To Ukraine

    Saturday, February 25th, 2023

    The Tank Museum has a video up covering five tanks being sent to Ukraine (Challenger 2, T-72, Leopard 2, Leopard 1, and the M1A2 Abrams).

    Some of this will be familiar to regular readers, but I did learn a few new nuggets:

  • Despite previous reports that we were sending M1A1 Abrams to Ukraine, we’re actually sending more modern M1A2s. No word on which SEP level, but I would bet against the most modern SEP3 package, as not all America’s own active armor has been retrofitted with that yet.
  • I didn’t realize Germany had also given the greenlight to ship older Leopard 1s to Ukraine. The 105mm rifled gun is probably undergunned vs. T-72 and newer Russian tanks, but should be able to punch through older tanks and pretty much all Russian BMPs. They’ll be useful for second echelon and infantry support roles. (And we might consider demothballing older 105mm gunned M1s to ship to Ukraine as well.)
  • I didn’t realize that only some 440 Challengers had been built.

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    Posted in Military, video | 2 Comments »

    Russo-Ukrainian War Video Tank Update for May 26, 2022

    Thursday, May 26th, 2022

    It’s been three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, and there’s more tank news coming out as the main theater has shifted to eastern Ukraine. Here’s a (mostly) video roundup of the news:

  • We hear a lot about Russia has 20,000 tanks (or some other crazy high number) in reserve. This guy went through satellite photos of all Russian tank storage yards and came up with an estimate of 6,000, only 3,000 of which appear as if they could be made battle ready. (A lot of the photos show hulks with their turrets off).

  • Did Russia’s First Tank Army lose 130 tanks in the Battle of Kharkiv alone?

  • Ukraine appears to have knocked out a Russian T-90M tank, the most modern Russian tank that’s actually been fielded:

    (There’s still no sign of Russia’s T-14 Armata in-theater.)

  • Update: As of this writing, Russia has lost 729 tanks in Ukraine, and a total of 4,134 “vehicles” (including helicopters, UAVs, and even towed artillery pieces) in theater.
  • Is Russia demothballing T-62s to send to Ukraine?

    Remember, the Soviets stopped manufacturing the T-62 in 1975, the same year that the Captain & Tennille and “Rhinestone Cowboy” topped the charts and The Rocky Horror Picture Show debuted in theaters…

  • Ukraine has also taken delivery of the Brimstone anti-tank missile from the UK:

  • Not a tank, but built on a T-72 chassis, is the Russian T-2 “Terminator,” which sports duel 30mm auto-cannons for close support of tanks in urban warfare.

    That does look like it would but a world of hurt on urban defensive positions, but won’t be any more immune to NATO-sourced Ukrainian antitank weapons, and they reportedly only have a handful in-theater.

  • Also not a tank: Ukrainian forces take out a thermobaric (AKA “vacuum bomb”) missile launcher:

  • Turns out that the Russian military’s catastrophic performance in Ukraine is not a great advertisement for its weapon systems, and India is canceling some big deals.

  • And in tank news related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. is accelerating it’s delivery of M1A2 Abrams tanks to Poland, to back-fill for the Soviet-era tanks Poland gave to Ukraine.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 3 Comments »

    Is Russia’s Military Running Out Of Equipment And Spare Parts?

    Sunday, April 3rd, 2022

    Is Russia’s military running out of the equipment, spare parts and supplies necessary to maintain their war in Ukraine? Some reports say so, suggesting it’s because the parts are made in Ukrainian factories.

    Vladimir Putin is said to be running out of missiles, tanks and aircraft, because the parts they rely on are made in Ukraine.

    The engines of Russian military helicopters and key components for warships, cruise missiles and the majority of the nation’s fighter jets are all made in Ukrainian factories, the Telegraph reports.

    The factories, which also produce parts for tanks and ground to air missiles, no longer supply Mr Putin’s army.

    I’ve got to take this report with several grains of salt, because I assume those same factories must have stopped supplying Russia with spare parts after the seizure of Crimea and invasion of Donbas back in March of 2014. Are we to believe that Russia has failed to find alternate manufacturing sources for key military equipment for eight years? Russia’s invasion has displayed multiple levels of manifest incompetence, but it’s hard to believe they would be that incompetent for that long. (Now, could spare parts not exist due to massive corruption? That seems plausible, but it’s not the kind of thing you can count on your opponent suffering from.)

    The army is also understood to be running low on arms following five weeks of sustained bombardment of Ukrainian cities.

    This, on the other hand, seems quite plausible, given the well-documented logistical difficulties, and the furious rate at which Russian forces expended munitions during the initial assault.

    The T-72 battle tank is one of the Russian army’s main armoured vehicles but, parts for it are understood to be manufactured in Izyum, an eastern Ukrainian city that Mr Putin’s forces have failed to capture.

    The T-72 has been around since 1969. I can believe some of the high tech components for the most modern variants are in short supply, but surely they’ve have multiple source for the vast majority of mechanical parts for a long time now. And even if not, they built some 25,000 of the things, so I can’t imagine they don’t have enough mothballed tanks to provide spares, though it’s going to take time to get cannibalized parts out to field repair centers. (I’m assuming Russia has some sort of field repair capabilities, and I know Russian tank recovery vehicles were spotted on trains en-route to the theater before the war began.)

    Open-source intelligence estimates suggest that Russia has lost at least 2,000 tanks and armoured vehicles, although true figures are suspected to be higher.

    This I just flat out don’t believe. And indeed, when you go to what appears to be their primary source, they’re including a whole lot of trucks in that list, which aren’t counted as “armored vehicles.” The lesson here is “don’t believe anything that sounds too good to be true” and “always check the primary sources.”

    Speaking of primary sources, that Oryx blog list does look pretty useful, though the nature of the methodology (adding up all pictures of destroyed equipment) is certainly suspect to manipulation.

    Their summary line for Russian equipment losses as of this post “Russia – 2360, of which: destroyed: 1190, damaged: 41, abandoned: 232, captured: 897.”

    Here are the individual type breakdown lines:

    Tanks (405, of which destroyed: 190, damaged: 6, abandoned: 42, captured: 167)
    Armoured Fighting Vehicles (274, of which destroyed: 129, abandoned: 32, captured: 113)
    Infantry Fighting Vehicles (392, of which destroyed: 216, damaged: 2, abandoned: 31, captured: 142)
    Armoured Personnel Carriers (81, of which destroyed: 21, damaged: 1, abandoned: 17, captured: 42)
    Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Vehicles (17, of which destroyed: 9, abandoned: 3, captured: 5)
    Infantry Mobility Vehicles (76, of which destroyed: 43, damaged: 2, abandoned: 5, captured: 24)
    Communications Stations (15, of which destroyed: 4, abandoned: 5, captured: 6)
    Engineering Vehicles And Equipment (78, of which destroyed: 23, abandoned: 13, captured: 37)
    Heavy Mortars (11, of which destroyed: 3, captured: 8)
    Towed Artillery (47, of which destroyed: 9, damaged: 4, abandoned: 5, captured: 29)
    Self-Propelled Artillery (72, of which destroyed: 25, damaged: 3, abandoned: 14, captured: 29)
    Multiple Rocket Launchers (45, of which destroyed: 18, abandoned: 5, captured: 23)
    Anti-Aircraft Guns (3, of which captured: 3)
    Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns (11, of which destroyed: 5, abandoned: 3, captured: 3)
    Surface-To-Air Missile Systems (42, of which destroyed: 22, damaged: 1, abandoned: 7, captured: 12)
    Radars (4, of which destroyed: 1, captured: 3)
    Jammers And Deception Systems (6, of which destroyed: 2, damaged: 2, captured: 2)
    Aircraft (19, of which destroyed: 18, damaged: 1)
    Helicopters (38, of which destroyed: 33, damaged: 3, abandoned: 1, captured: 1)
    Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (21, of which destroyed: 14, captured: 7)
    Naval Ships (3, of which destroyed: 1, damaged: 2)
    Logistics Trains (2, of which destroyed: 2)
    Trucks, Vehicles and Jeeps (698, of which destroyed: 401, damaged: 16, abandoned: 59, captured: 210)

    (An aside: You’ve got to hand it to those Russian miltech geeks who look at this:

    And confidently declare “Oh, those are two destroyed 120mm 2B11/2S12 heavy mortars!” That’s some #DavesCarIDService level obsession there…)

    Keep in mind that Russia only had some 2,500 tanks assigned to active units at the start of the war (though other estimates are considerably higher). But given well-documented Russian maintenance problems, I can well believe several units have sustained losses in excess of that necessary to impair combat effectiveness.

    Keep in mind that the Soviet Union lost 83,500 tanks between 1941 and 1945 in World War II. Of course, that was a much broader theater, using much more widely-produced, low-tech tanks. Hell, two-way radios didn’t become standard Soviet equipment until 1944.

    For high tech munitions like smart bombs and guided missiles, I can well believe that Russia is running low on stock that can’t easily be replenished under the current sanctions regime. And we see ample evidence that field resupply has been negatively impacted by severe logistical difficulties. But “T-72s lack spare parts because the original factory was in Ukraine” doesn’t pass the smell test.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 7 Comments »

    The 30th Anniversary of 73 Easting

    Thursday, February 25th, 2021

    (Note: This is partially recycled from a previous post in honor of the 30th anniversary of the battle, but the video is new.)

    Thirty years ago, on February 26, 1991, units of the American Second Armored Cavalry Regiment engaged the armor of the Iraqi Republican Guard Tawakalna Division in the Battle of 73 Easting.

    The furious action lasted twenty-three minutes. The troop stopped when there was nothing left to shoot. Sporadic contact ranged from nuisance machine gun fire to one company-sized counterattack of T-72s and BMP armored personnel carriers. Tanks and Bradleys destroyed enemy vehicles at long range from the dominating position on the ridge. Three Bradleys from first platoon, led by Lieutenant Michael Petschek, encountered and destroyed four T-72s as they moved north to reestablish physical contact with G Troop. Medics treated and evacuated enemy wounded. Crews cross-leveled ammunition. Mortars suppressed enemy infantry further to the east as our fire support officer, Lieutenant Dan Davis, called in devastating artillery strikes on enemy logistical bases. Scouts and a team under the control of First Sergeant Bill Virrill cleared bunkers using grenades and satchel charges, and then led a much-needed resupply convoy through minefields to our rear. A psychological operations team broadcasted surrender appeals forward of the troop and the troop took the first of hundreds of prisoners including the brigade commander. Soldiers segregated, searched, and secured prisoners through the night. Many prisoners cried because they had not expected such humane treatment; their officers had told them that we would execute them. The prisoners were incredulous when our soldiers returned their wallets without taking any of the money that they had looted from Kuwait City. Just after 2200, 1ID conducted a forward passage of lines in Third Squadron’s area of operation to our south.

    The morning after the battle, soldiers were exhausted. Many of the approximately fifty T-72s, twenty-five armored personnel carriers, forty trucks and numerous other vehicles that the troop destroyed were still smoldering. Our troop had taken no casualties.

    Other sources say Americans suffered a small number of casualties, but it’s unclear whether these occurred during the Battle of 73 Easting itself, or immediately following it but before the larger engagement of the Battle of Norfolk.

    Here’s a video on the battle:

    In addition to being an overwhelming victory, and part of the larger overwhelming victory of Desert Storm, the Battle of 73 Easting was important for several other reasons.

    For one thing, it was the largest tank battle between American- and Soviet-constructed armor since Israeli M-60 Patton tanks faced off against Egyptian T-62s in Sinai campaign of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. All throughout the 70s and early 1980s, various media outlets talked about how much better Soviet military equipment was than American equipment. (I remember a 60 Minutes episode that talked about Soviet equipment being better “all across the board.”) And Soviet equipment was better—on paper, with thicker armor, higher top speeds, etc. And then 73 Easting happened, and M1A1s wiped the floor with T-72s. A lot of that was American troops being much better trained and led than Iraqi troops. But the Republican Guard was the best the Iraq army had, and on paper the T-72 was a match for the M1A1s. In actual combat, the T-72s started blowing up before they realized the Americans were engaging (and destroying) Iraqi armor at the extreme range of the American computerized fire control systems. Soviet armor still used reticules reticles, where the gunner had to manually calculate distance and windage to put shots on target.

    In Vietnam, early computerized combat technology was clunky and unreliable. By the time of Desert Storm, the furious onrush of Moore’s Law had rendered technology smaller, more compact, more reliable, and more user-friendly. By pursuing what Jerry Pournelle called the strategy of technology, the United States was producing weapons that were qualitatively superior to those of its communist foes. That technological gap (especially in the form of SDI) was one of the drivers for the end of the Cold War, and it was on full display in Desert Storm. The Soviet Union itself would dissolve later the same year.

    The Battle of 73 Easting was also important because it become the most accurately simulated battle ever:

    The Battle of 73 Easting has become the single most accurately recorded combat engagement in human history. Army historians and simulation modelers thoroughly interviewed the American participants, and paced the battlefield meter by meter. They came up with a fully interactive, network-capable digital replica of the events at 73 Easting, right down to the last TOW missile and .50-caliber pockmark. Military historians and armchair strategists can now fly over the virtual battlefield in the “stealth vehicle,” the so-called “SIMNET flying carpet,” viewing the 3-D virtual landscape from any angle during any moment of the battle. They can even change the parameters – give the Iraqis infrared targeting scopes, for instance, which they lacked at the time, and which made them sitting ducks for high-tech American M1s charging out of blowing sand. The whole triumphal blitzkrieg can be pondered over repeatedly (gloated over even), in perfect scratch-free digital fidelity. It’s the spirit of Southwest Asia in a digital nutshell. In terms of American military morale, it’s like a ’90s CD remix of some ’60s oldie, rescued from warping vinyl and remade closer to the heart’s desire.

    Like Agincourt or Amiens, the Battle of 73 Easting heralded the arrival of a new type of technology to the battlefield, one that every army in the world would henceforth need to take into account.

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    Posted in Military | 16 Comments »

    The Chieftain Talks Autoloaders

    Saturday, July 25th, 2020

    The Chieftain Nicholas Moran talks about the pros and cons of autoloaders, a subject we’ve touched on before, especially in relation to the Russian T-14 Armata.

    The point about autoloaders providing better crew safety through thicker ammunition storage bulkheads is a good one, as is the immediate capacity advantage of immediately accessible ammunition.

    He comes down on the side of yes, autoloaders are the wave of the future, but no, we should try to retrofit the M1 Abrhams for them.

    A couple of mild caveats on his assertion that an autoloader won’t be any more prone to malfunction than other tank mechanical components:

    1. Other tank components have undergone a century of evolutionary pressure in actual combat environments. Autoloaders are bootstrapping on decades of civilian factory automation innovations, but those happened outside the chaotic, dust-and-debris filled atmosphere of a moving combat platform. Experience as to how autoloaders break down in actual high-intensity conflict is scarce, with the possible exception of Russian tanks. (Lots of things went wrong with Russia’s invasion of Chechnya, and I get the impression that autoloader issues did not loom significant among them. And T-64s and T-72s were so badly outmatched in Desert Storm that I doubt much useful information got back to Russia about their field performance. Hard to get after-action reports on autoloader failure modes when your tanks start blowing up before getting off a shot…)
    2. Current turret confines probably provide sufficient space for autoloader maintenance and troubleshooting. But if turrets shrink to reduce weight/increase armor in absence of a loader crew, that’s probably going to reduce maintainability. In which case a significant number cannon issues will probably go from crew-fixable to depot maintenance.

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    Posted in Military, video | No Comments »

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