Originally published at: Know your Ukrainian weapons | Boing Boing
…
6 Likes
36 Likes
(How a Javelin-type weapon works.)
17 Likes
An NLAW costs about USD$37k and can roll off the production line in the West quickly. A T-72 tank that it can destroy or seriously disable costs at a minimum the equivalent of (pre-sanctions) USD$500k and takes a lot longer to produce. You don’t even need to do the math.
15 Likes
We’ve come a long way since my days in basic training when I fired the old M72 L.A.W. Straight line of sight with no guidance beyond that, a simple little tube. Weighed maybe six pounds total. No reload, just fire, bust the tube against something so it can’t be reused by the enemy, and walk away.
18 Likes
The second panel pretty much sums up “enterprise” development.
15 Likes
M72 LAW.
11 Likes
It always seemed to me like tanks serve more of a theatrical than a military role, being largely the same as the earliest models which were explicitly designed as a terror weapon against Edwardian peasants. My question is, if your opponent has seen horseless carriages before, and instead of being terrified puts expanding foam or a folding boat anchor in the tank’s gun barrel, do they have any defense against that?
2 Likes
The defense is supposed to be the troops advancing along with the tanks who can take out folks trying stuff like that. Leaving tanks exposed with no ground support is poor operational doctrine, at least as far as I’ve ever learned.
18 Likes
Ah, Hollywood. Always depicting weapons with such accuracy. Rambo here would have killed anyone behind him and set his chopper on fire.
9 Likes
Russians, with some justification based in WWII, bloody love their tanks. Start a Russian military or history buff on the topic and they’ll soon be waxing rhapsodic about the T-34 or KV-1. If they could fight a war only with tanks they would.
The Belorussians have the same attitude. This game could only have emerged from the former Soviet Union.
15 Likes
Probably because of world events, this WWII training video just popped up in my YouTube suggestions:
The presenter seemed to me to be a little over-the-top, almost a parody of how tough guys supposedly talked to each other in the 40’s. But this is how American soldiers were trained, apparently.
9 Likes
that was TMI – fancy schmancy bazookas, I get it.
5 Likes
9 Likes
Why waste time making Molotov cocktails when there’s bottles of Kvint around? 
(a little inside joke about crappy vodka)
13 Likes
Certainly getting some “Charlie Wilson’s War” parallels from this latest ghastly inhumanity. Russia attacks a low militarized country (Afghanistan/Ukraine), the west is horrified and initially dithers, then from various uncertain sources the latest high tech weaponry starts to flow into the hands of the desperate and resolved indigenous population. Probably a lot of weapons manufacturers are furiously taking notes -sigh-
4 Likes
11 Likes
Once upon a time my curiosity would have had me caring greatly about the various weapons. Now I’m just depressed by them all.
18 Likes
World of Tanks (WoT) is a massively multiplayer online game developed by Belarusian company Wargaming, featuring 20th century (1910s–1970s) era combat vehicles.
I had no idea World of Tanks came out of Belarus. Not to conflate a game developer with its government, but the fact that a Belarusian game is romanticizing 1970s-era combat vehicles while those same vehicles are currently rolling through Belarus only to be destroyed by much more modern, human-held weapons is… something. I’m not sure what.
5 Likes
The effectiveness of a tank makes a lot more sense when you realize that the vast majority of battlefield casualties. By a couple of orders of magnitude. Are the result of artillery.
Artillery doesn’t just mean big, indirect fire shelling. And while we mostly hear about the big, fast battle tanks the concept of “armor” in military tactics is as much about armored troop carriers and cars, mobile artillery pieces etc.
The actual first tanks were basically armored tractors intended to physically roll over and through field fortifications and trench lines.
So there’s your 2 things. Moving big, well protected guns around very fast. And preventing/breaking physical barriers to troop movement.
I don’t neccisarily totally understand it. But there seems to be a few things going on here.
One is that it turns out the Russian’s tanks and armored vehicles aren’t good.
The other is that tanks are apparently borderline useless for urban fighting.
So the Russian infantry is almost entirely organized around armor.
It’s the tanks and armored fighting vehicles that do the fighting, and infantry are there to defend the tanks.
Whereas with other modern armies it’s almost the opposite. It’s infantry, in fast moving lightly armored vehicles, that do the fighting. And the tanks support those troops.
6 Likes
