Western-made armor isn’t working in Ukraine because it wasn’t designed for a conflict of this intensity, Ukrainian analyst says
by Silly-avocatoe
Western-made armor isn’t working in Ukraine because it wasn’t designed for a conflict of this intensity, Ukrainian analyst says
by Silly-avocatoe
34 comments
? It is working. Obviously not as well as it would do in the enviroment it was designed for but it still is able to blow up russians.
Text:
-Western armor isn’t cutting it in Ukraine, a military analyst told The Wall Street Journal.
-Taras Chmut said Western-made tanks weren’t designed for an “all-out” war of this intensity.
-Western allies should instead ramp up deliveries of simpler and cheaper systems, he said.
Western-made armor is failing in Ukraine because it wasn’t designed to sustain a conflict of this intensity, a military analyst told The Wall Street Journal.
Taras Chmut, a military analyst who’s the head of the Come Back Alive Foundation, which has raised money to purchase and provide arms and equipment to Ukraine, said that “a lot of Western armor doesn’t work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity.”
“If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn’t perform,” he said.
Chmut went on to say Ukraine’s Western allies should instead turn their attention to delivering simpler and cheaper systems, but in larger quantities, something Ukraine has repeatedly requested, the newspaper reported.
Despite Chmut’s comments, some advanced Western systems Ukraine has received were conceived with the highest-intensity combat in mind — NATO going head-to-head with Soviet forces. The US-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and Abrams main battle tanks were built specifically to counter Soviet ground forces.
But like other armored systems, they are susceptible to artillery and mines, both of which have proven fearsome challenges as Ukraine presses against Russian defensive networks.
Less than 5% of tanks destroyed since the start of the war had been taken out by other tanks, Ukrainian officials said in the Journal report, with the rest falling to mines, artillery, antitank missiles, and drones. This means the relative sophistication of a tank is no longer as important, the paper says.
Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding, Germany’s director of planning and command staff, said Western military strategists had not yet accepted that quantity trumps quality.
“You need numbers; you need force numbers. In the West, we have reduced our military; we have reduced our stocks. But quantity matters; mass matters,” he told the Journal.
Even so, Ukraine continues to ask for more sophisticated tanks and military equipment from its allies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly criticized Western allies for delays in the deliveries of weapons, saying earlier this month that slower arms shipments were hurting Ukraine’s chances of success in its ongoing counteroffensive.
A July report compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy said Ukraine’s allies had only delivered about half of the heavy weapons that had been promised.
“The gap between promised and delivered military aid is wide,” Christoph Trebesch, the head of the team creating the tracker, said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, told The Economist last week his country was prioritizing domestic ammunition production. “Anything that can be produced locally must be produced locally,” he said.
Sergej Sumlenny, founder of the German think tank European Resilience Initiative Center, previously told Insider that Ukraine was stepping up its domestic production in part because of concern that Western deliveries would not keep up with its military needs.
Basically an argument for Soviet doctrine which won’t ever sell in the West. Large formations won’t be created. The missing component is air which would solve many of these problems.
The US built 10.000+ Abrams… they were designed exactly for this intensity… to save the crew to fight another day
I rather survive in my Western tank than turn into sludge in my Soviet one.
But, yeah, if anybody would have been able to foreseen this conflict every country would have kept producing and kept massive stores.
But who the fuck thought Russia would toss out everything they achieved since the 90s to conquer Ukraine?
Worst strategic move ever.
WSJ loves sensational headlines. Western tanks still fight russian tanks just fine.
Ukraine need vehicles that don’t get damaged by mines. Problem is, besides planes, these mine proof vehicles do not exist. Western armor seems to be great since evidence suggest that after being hit. The soft, smelly, noisy flesh covered calcium sticks survive after the vehicle is destroyed or damaged. So the stuff the west gives them is useful.
What a stupid fucking opinion.
>Western allies should instead ramp up deliveries of simpler and cheaper systems, he said.
Complex systems are less fault tolerant. When they work, they work beautifully. When they fail, they tend to fail completely. Simpler systems can “partially” work. With complex systems, it’s all or nothing.
Western weapons depend on an infrastructure ecosystem to support and maintain them. Ukraine received the weapons; and probably *some* infrastructure, but not all of it.
They work fine in high intensity conflicts, but Ukraine needs more than 100 of them.
That they’ve only permanently lost about 10 Leos and 1 Challie in an offensive without significant air support against the world’s 5th largest military is testament to how well they work.
This seems to ignore the experience of Russian built armor.
Flying tanks? Apache training when?
They work fine in high intensity conflicts, but Ukraine needs more than 100 of them and better air cover.
That they’ve only permanently lost about 10 Leos and 1 Challie in an offensive without significant air support against the world’s 5th largest military is testament to how well they work.
The minimal training (both for crews and mechanics) and relatively low amount of vehicles probably mean that the wear and tear is quite brutal.
In WW2 lots of tanks were destroyed. News flash! In a big war lots of tanks get blown up. No one in the German army ever said, “you know what there’s too many Tiger tanks”. And yes, a lot of Tiger tanks did get destroyed. No tank is invulnerable.
Maybe the mix of heavy tanks to medium and light might not be ideal. Who knows! But it’s just bizarre too complain there are too many heavy tanks! Make up the numbers with other types of tanks to back them up. It seems to me there are still lots of t-72s and t-90s and, in addition, Leopard 1’s are on the way to make up the numbers.
To an extent the Bradleys can be used as substitute light tanks and so help to make up the numbers.
They were designed for a conflict of much greater intensity – the invasion of Western Europe by the 80s Russian Army, not the watered down version we have now. But they were designed for defense and counter punching as part of a fully integrated mixed arms force. That includes apachies, armored infantry, A-10s, air superiority fighters and way more precision artillery.
Yes.
Yes, they were.
This is a doctrine and full spectrum capability issue.
Western armour works best in a multi-layered environment. One aspect of it is still currently missing in Ukraine and that is air superiority. Add that in and it would be a turkey shoot.
“Let me cherrypick this comment out of context and use it as a headline to pour some oil on the fire”
~Some shitty journalist
Reading the article, it seems the author doesn’t realize that the West is giving Ukraine last season’s equipment. There are some caveats, of course, but this is a NATO war with Russia, through proxy, and on the cheap.
Nice headline with zero context
Which vehicles is the analyst referring to? MRAPs? Wheeled APC’s? M113s? Bradley’s? HUMVEE?, Leopards 1 or 2?M-109?, Stryker?, M-1 that arrived this week?, Bradley’s?……
I suspect the article is snippet taken out of context, because I would just about guarantee a Ukrainian crew would prefer the built in safeguards of Western armor vs the instant incineration and rapid disassembly of a Soviet era tank or APC with them in it.
As has been pointed out, pure Western doctrine doesn’t work without air cover and pure Soviet steamroll and let your soldiers die doesn’t either, it’s a hybrid war they type of which we haven’t seen on a scale like this ever. Infantry, drones, arty, tanks. Oddball mix of everything.
I’m guessing the context of the conversation was this:
Afghan era MRAPs and APCs are too complex and fragile for the task when something cheap and mobile works just fine (either way a hit destroys it).
Western armor can’t just line up and shoot and bulldoze… of course… this isn’t the desert and there isn’t 1,000 planes overhead… but 73 Easting overcame those limitations pretty well with the absence of that air support (but it was open desert). So care must be taken not to waste the armor and require time consuming repairs (because so far most of the crews live and the armor needs to be repaired)
In other words… this article is a nothing burger to get clicks
Who wrote this drek?
With all due respect, I’m not sure what this analyst is talking about. This has never been a “tank war.” Ukraine has done decisively well in heavy armor clashes throughout the conflict, when they have happened — but they have rarely happened. Most armored losses from the very beginning have been via asymmetrical attack (artillery and anti-tank infantry weapons).
Ukraine itself is an expert in how such losses can be inflicted, since they have taken out literally most of Russia’s entire armored corps in that fashion. So… I guess I am a little confused. What is the proposal here? That Ukraine’s allies should send fewer Challengers and Abrams and more T-72s? T-72s would be eaten alive by the kind of fighting that’s going on in Zaporizhzhia.
Most observers have concluded that tank vs tank combat has become a relative rarity. The Russian invasion confirms this heavily. There has never been a point when massed heavy armored formations were decisive in this conflict. And it’s not hard to see why: there is no way that Ukraine could ever field enough tanks to outnumber the anti-tank weapons, mines, and artillery shells in Russia’s inventory. You’d need hundreds of thousands. That number of tanks doesn’t exist in the world.
*sniff* smells of orc to me.
D tier take, Ukrainian analyst or not.
More nonsense articles from western ‘newspapers’
Months of counteroffensive failures and yet here we are. Piss off
This is what happens when you use armor like you were told not too or just like the russians are. I hate to knock some of their commanders, but they sent ill equipped armour into a situation that requires support. This run one tank up and shoot some trees is fuckin nuts. Without air cover even artillery barage and a cohesive attack, will they then perform at their peak.
Yet better than no armor
More Russian trolling. Fuck off already.
Ok we’ll take it back then
This ridiculous comment, of course it was designed for this, many in the west thought them to be to much. The T34 was an excelent tank of its time, Heinz Guderian called it the best in the world at the time, the Soviet Union lost tens of thousands of those tanks. Ukraine is moving forward despite the massive fortifications, troops numbers and overwelming artilery superiority, I dont what to be pessimistic here but Russia should be winning, and instead are on the defensive everywhere, believe me when I say, it is working.
The real different bit about this that is different is the introduction of new tecnologias that are not in itself new doctrine but they had capabilities not yet readily available like the fact the Ukrainian Battlefield is a highly survailance heavy Battlefield, US general say you have to take away the means of survailance, but that is increasingly a loosing fight. The US should rest on its laurels the reality os that operations in Iraq where sometimes Lucky, in 1991 the US was assiste by a million strong coalition(it wasnt just the US VII corp) and in 2003 the Iraqi army had been cripled by years of sanctions(not just western but from the UN security council, which means all Major powers).
Stupid article. Ukraine needs tanks. It doesn’t matter if they are Soviet or western, old or new, heavy or light. This has become an atritional war. Numbers are everything.
PUTA PROPAGANDA WARNING
“Western Made” armor was designed EXACTLY for this kind of conflict. It was only 30 years ago that the Cold War ended. Basic armor designs haven’t changed, but have improved, on those designs.
And yet those who operate the western Armour love it. The Russian Armour isn’t even remotely capable of the level of intensity.