Ok, back up a second here… maybe this is because I’m not American, but-- San Diego’s School District has a police force???
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Looking at how much those MRAPs cost, in procurement, maintenance, fuel and moving them between where they’re manufactured, where they’re maintained and where they’re deployed, you’d think it’d be cheaper and safer to scrap that program and just use helicopters and planes to move troops through dangerous areas.
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They say it’s a glorified ambulance - that red cross on the side in the picture looks looks like a weak photoshop job to justify the emergency vehicle claim.
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Speaking as a combat veteran tanker, no. But if you base your chops on something that your dad did while you watch, then maybe you shouldn’t use that example for your professional credentials. Besides, Strykers (Striker!) have “main guns” one variant at least, as do plenty of modded-up M113s - which doesn’t make any of THEM “tanks” either.
HOWEVER - San Diego needs this (“for the children”) about as much as they need Ospreys. Why not give them a surplus battlecruiser while we’re at it? Police forces are for policing ONLY - not out pretending they’re on the front lines “defending FREEDOM”. If they want to do that, there are plenty of offices in your local strip malls, staffed with military personnel READY to enlist them & send them overseas.
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I’m not real fussed about the use of “tank” this time, both because there’s a picture right there making things clear, and because Xeni’s use of “basically” makes it reasonably clear that she’s being hyperbolic. It doesn’t read the same to me as Doctorow’s “OMG THE POLICE HAVE TANKS” thing, which had me actually going “what the fuck, how is it legal for police to have MBTs?” until I read the link.
So, yeah, I just wanted to make it clear in advance that I’m jumping into this argument as a cheerfully pedantic nerd, not because I’m upset with Xeni or with BoingBoing’s editorial standards. 
Except for a main gun. And armor designed to resist anti-tank projectiles. But sure, except for those two things, there’s only one thing.
True but irrelevant. Tracks alone don’t make a tank. Bulldozers are not military vehicles.
(Except for military bulldozers. But anyway.)
[quote]They are big and heavy and intended to move and protect soldiers in a firefight.
[/quote]
Yes, that’s another point against. Tanks don’t “move and protect soldiers in a firefight.” They’re not transport vehicles, they’re dedicated combatants.
There’s a lot of things that aren’t technically tanks but look a lot like them. Self-propelled artillery, many infantry fighting vehicles, tank destroyers (a very fine distinction there), even weird wheeled critters like the Centauro–they’ve all got big guns and all-terrain drives and armor plates, and I wouldn’t criticize anyone who mistook them for tanks outside of a technical discussion. But this thing, this jumped-up APC? It’s an armored truck with a lift kit. It’s got no mounted weapons. It’s got a windshield, for fuck’s sake. You can’t have a tank with a windshield! What would the neighbors think?
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There’s a multidecade (though now retired) British doctrine of infantry tanks that’d like a word with you.
The idea was that heavily armored tanks went along with infantry to provide fire support, and then lighter/faster tanks rushed in after they’d broken through the front lines. They abandoned the infantry/cruiser tank separation sometime in the early cold war, about when they managed to build something that was both armored and fast enough to do both. So, well - there’s very ample history of tanks being infantry support, even if it isn’t typical any more.
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Also tracks. Something like an M1128 mounts a tank gun but isn’t a tank because it has wheels.
That’s where I’m coming from. Tank is clearly a meta-category, like “automatic”, another pedantic mire for fetishists. And while treads are the weakness of my contrarian position, main guns are not, in that several decades went by before main guns were even a required feature of some tanks. Though given how useful wheeled tanks are, a number of wheeled tanks are being produced with 105 main guns. At the beginning of the life of the tank, main guns were not a feature. Currently, treads are optional too.
And as far as their role in combat goes, MBTs are a specific type of tank you should consider as a subspecies, not the definition. And consider the Merkava when you disallow APCs and the like. Not a single technical point (armor, armor-piercing, etc.) you bring up has anything to do with the definition of a tank. You’re talking only about MBTs. For example, here’s a corker which illustrates how wrong one can be, even while being convinced about the rightness of one’s “understanding” of the “proper” (baseless) categorizing.
Please read up on early tanks before you continue to talk about them.
This fetishistic yammering about what belongs in a headline is just that: yammering. And complaining about this headline isn’t even correct, as you’ve pointed out.
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No.
I took what he said as, ‘Guys who actually know WTF they’re talking about, and know exactly what a tank[1] in the military is and isn’t, are more than happy to call this thing, in the hands of a fucking school district, a tank.’
It is so far down the right hand end on the spectrum of Toyota Prius <-------> M1A2SEP that hyperbolicly calling it a tank in this context is completely appropriate.
[1] ‘Tank’ is and always has been a colloquial term, even in the military. It can include or exclude anything you want it to. That’s why there are loads of more technical terms like AFV, IFV, SPA, Armoured Car, Scout Car, etc. In the right circumstances, I’m quite comfortable calling any of those ‘tanks’. Christ, the A-10 has un-ironically been called a tank in professional literature, with nary a quibble. Try wrapping your pedantic brains around that conundrum tied in a box wrapped in bacon.
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If you are happy calling this a tank, what will your headline be when a school district gets a M1 Abrams? Shrug, more of the same? Or a ginormous escalation?
This is a truck with a lot of unnecessary armour plates on it that will tank (pun unintended) its fuel economy. Also it looks a bit scary? If they got an actual tank they would be siting a freaking artillery piece, together with treads that tear up the road, and is too wide to use normal roads, in a school area. Not to mention they would require a specially trained driver, and this new vehicle will have no internal capacity to carry anything useful.
The word ‘tank’ has meaning. There is no point diluting it. If you ask a member of the public to draw you a tank, they will not draw one of those things. Therefore using the term is an exercise in miscommunication.
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This MRAP looks remarkably like the Casspirs the cops used to drive around in when I was growing up in Apartheid-era South Africa. And yes, you don’t want to sleepwalk into that sort of policing, Americans.
I suspect the mine-resistant V-hull was pinched from our designs.
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There’s worse. Look at Los Angeles.
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Grenade launchers. I can see emergency workers justifying an MRAP based on someone’s fantasy about driving it into a burning school or hauling kids away from a gunman - even though it’s the wrong tool for either job. But how can a school district put a grenade launcher to even a plausibly legitimate purpose? Are we assuming that the school district will have to defend itself unsupported, that all the other police forces (that we’ve also militarized) and the military itself (in the form of the National Guard) will be unavailable at need?
If it weren’t for the fact that the LA Unified School District comprises some huge tracts of desert, I’d even wonder where the force would even be able to train in the use of these things.
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so clearly, the answer is no on all counts. Typical keyboard commando.
The only reason I can imagine campus police would want those weapons is that they regard students as enemies and expect to have to put down riots with deadly force.
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‘How can we get in and pull out a classroom at a time of kids if
there’s an active shooter?’ said Florentino. “‘If there’s a fire [or] if
there’s an earthquake, can we rip down a wall?’ Stuff like that.
And let’s build a fallout bunker! And we need more axes and chainsaws in case of zombies! And hand grenades and rocket launchers because, well, better safe than sorry!
Still more semi-survivalist fantasy at taxpayer expense.
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Gas. Don’t worry, it’s just gas.
Classroom discipline just got serious.
In order for the kids to reach an armored vehicle, they would first have to escape the fire, the collapsed building, or the active shooter. The armored vehicle would be no help whatsoever.
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