Per Martin Caidin's "The Tigers Are Burning", a historical account of the Battle of Kursk, the German tanks were inferior to the Soviet tanks in most ways. That surprised me!
Are Tanks and Armored Vehicles Obsolete
- Thread starter Al
- Start date
- Status
This is a small sample size, but I was surprised by an Iranian coworker's vehement support of Iraq in 2003. I asked him about that in light of Iran and Iraq having been involved in a long bloody war in the '80s.
He explained it something like this:
An Iranian man will fight his brother.
The brothers will stop fighting each other, though, to fight the men from another family.
However, all the men of the village will put aside their differences to fight the men of another village ... and so on up to two Middle-Eastern countries will fight each other, but will gladly put their war on hold to fight an outside invader.
As an aside, my two Iranian coworkers were excellent fellows - hard-working, intelligent, kind, charitable, generous, gracious, and funny. It was a pleasure to work with them. I had lots of political differences with the one, but we didn't let that affect our friendship.
My aunt was the same about Japanese products in general. This was in the mid-'70s, so 30 years after the end of the war. Insisted her husband buy Brit cars, which were problematic. I asked her why not a Toyota, and she said that the Japanese had done very bad things during the war. With the lack of tact of a teenager, I asked if the British firebombing of Dresden very late in the war had been OK.
My sister married a very good Japanese-Canadian man from a very loving family. Our aunt did attend, and I hope was OK with it.
Arthur Harris like any other war criminal should have tried for war crimes IMO.
A lot of that book seems fiction, if memory serves only 1-2 Tiger were destroyed in all of Kursk and the soviets claimed more tigers destroyed than existed on the entire front.
Yet Soviet commanders told Stalin "the tigers are burning!" and invented all sorts of german losses to cover up the tremendous losses of their own.
The battle of Kursk is a lot more nuanced than simply repackaging the soviet propaganda of its day.
At the key battle of Prokhorovka, the Soviets lost 550 of 850 tanks of all types while the Germans lost about 50 of 300.
Is there much tank vs. tank fighting in Ukraine? I was under the impression the Ukrainian army was not using a lot of tanks. Even when they capture a Russian tank in working order, they don't change the flag on it and go to the front, it's just going to get blown up. In other words a tank has some use as an offensive weapon, but the best defense against them is not a tank of your own.
Last edited:
No. The real question is has the ROI on warfare in general made it obsolete.
The U.S. dropped Atomic bombs before. link.
With the integration of economic systems they are conducting warfare against themselves.
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2021
- Messages
- 5,387
Yes, but don't forget about IG Farben (Agfa, BASF, Bayer.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben
My thought only. I think the original goal wasn't to corner in on Russia but create instability in the former Warsaw Pact for Russia to deal with. This would only work if Russia internally has instability as well in their political and military (like back in the 1989/1990 era).
It would be wise to wait till Putin pass away before the attempt, or at least till Putin's generals started some move on their own.
Giving false hope and promise to a former Warsaw Pact nation then didn't go all in for their "civil war" is going to end like Syria. We no longer need Syria if the pipeline would not be build but Ukraine is pretty important if you still want to use Russian oil and gas.
ROI on war was never good even back in the days. Roman empire, Mongol, and many former empires East and West all collapse due to war debt and it is only worth fighting if you can win or if losing the war means your extinction. It is usually wise to fight someone much smaller than you are and just make peace with someone of equal size, or your goal is not to win but to wear out your enemy so they will give in and leave you alone if you have nothing to lose.
There's a reason we just left the Warsaw Pact alone back then instead of trying to invade and win like WW2. Russia and Ukraine at the moment are economically poor, militarily still pretty strong, but their financial impact on world economy could be pretty big if the conflict spread to between Russia and NATO nations or other world economy (Taiwan declare independent forcing China to do something, hitting Japan along the way, etc).
Saying ROI on war made it obsolete is like saying prison sentence ROI made police obsolete.... As soon as you take it for real you have what we are seeing in San Francisco right now.
Last edited:
Be nice to China. They would be the only 3rd semi-super power in the world to absorb all the resources and trade need of Russia that Europe abandoned and end up with a lot more output that we cannot get enough elsewhere (ores, energy of all sorts). Basically with the conflicts you are going to see the trade wars of the last office reverted and extra icing added on top to make them happy so they will not steer toward Russia too much.
They would then ask to be treated like Japan and S Korea, but US and Europe would never allow it (imagine per capita GDP of Japan but with China's size and population, competing with you on the world stage). It is better not to go down that path.
The financial guys know and that's why RMB shot up to the moon, even more than the traditional safe haven like USD.
Last edited:
There is a reason we no longer do that. The political impact being the top one, not the radiation or physical damage.
Our wars with out profit have bankrupted the U.S.A.. Nixon taking the dollar off the Gold to pay off the Vietnam war wasn't the best thing.
I think UK had the same problem with the Suez Crisis
1956: Suez and the end of empire
In the decade after the second world war, as Britain struggled to square its diminishing empire with belt-tightening measures at home, it found time to get involved in a war in Egypt. Derek Brown writes about the end of the postwar political consensus.
www.theguardian.com
Finance and Development
www.imf.org
Hell yeah we did
I think "Bomber" Harris was following orders. The fire-bombing of the strategically insignificant Dresden, especially that late in the war (February 1945?) looks horrible in retrospect, but part of Bomber Command's mandate was to demoralize the German people.
Harris died some years later, feeling, with some justification, that he'd done his job to the best of his ability, and been abandoned by the politicians, including even Churchill, postwar.
But the victors write history.
Len Deighton's excellent novel "Bomber" is, IIRC, based on the destruction of Dresden.
- Status
