A nice summary of the resource war that’s behind the rhetoric…
Having said that, “all wars ultimately are about some kind of resource,” said Rafal Rohozinski, the founder of SecDev. He said it is hard to ignore the economic benefit that would accrue to Russia should it win the war and carve up Ukraine’s mineral and hydrocarbon wealth.
Lithuanians are crowdfunding 5 million euro to buy a Bayraktar drone for Ukraine. Already 3 million raised in two days. This is a private initiative, though it required coordination between Turkish and Lithuanian governments to make possible.
How many anvils or sledgehammers can you get from recycling a tank, I wonder? Certainly plenty of those available to melt down.
Ughhhhh, do I feel like getting potentially grifted today…kind of…
It’s ALWAYS about resource extraction, isn’t it…
That is pretty cool!
Yep.
“Property. All for property.”
– James Jones, “The Thin Red Line”
Maybe this is their answer to the asymmetric warfare tactics with the Ukrainian military taking out expensive tanks with relatively cheap anti-tank missiles: now the tables have turned because the missiles are worth more than these old obsolete tanks, so the Ukrainians are the net losers in future encounters! Brilliant military strategy!
I wonder how much are tank crews worth to Russian govenrment. It looks like due to design of those tanks destroying a tank frequently leads to crew loss.
Edit: I also wonder how many will be abandoned by crew due to low morale.
The design flaw of having crew inside tanks – or, indeed, anywhere near the front line – is a bug that will be rectified in the next war.
In the future, the only casualties will be civilians.
I don’t know the statistics but I would guess that’s the case for the crews in most destroyed tanks other than the ones featured in the old GI Joe cartoons, which seemed to have 100% survivability.
I went to the site to check it out. I guess they are giving them away for $1000 donations and making or buying drones for the Ukrainian forces.
This is one of my starkest memories from Bosnia. The treetops shattered by artillery around the Brčko bridge area.
Here’s stats on US M1 tanks from the Gulf War:
21 tanks destroyed. All crews survived.
And an AskHistorians for tank crew surivability in WW2:
This person writes 6.6% battle losses in “armor” for the US, which is a figure I’ve seen elsewhere.
Anecdotally, a friend was a tanker in Gulf II. He had four tanks shot out from under him, so badly destroyed that he said they were “basically unrecognizable.” Everyone survived.
