Defence review - Battle tanks - any need for them?

[Ayahuasca]

There is another defence review underway, and it is suspected that Dominic Cummings a) is in charge of it and b) wants to get rid of much of the army, including its tanks.

He may have a point - In the age of the attack helicopter and unmanned drones, is there any need for a single-purpose, expensive, large, heavy, expensive, manned, expensive, tracked vehicles with a turret and a gun?

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No point just ‘storing’ a tank - you can’t just store trained tank crew to man them if they were ever needed.

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LandRoverManiac said:

williamp said:

Were they right with the Buccanerrs, Canberras, Nimrods, Jaguars and Harriers? Have we needed them since but not had them??

Buccaneers were old 60s tech by the time they were removed from use - once the Tornados could self-designate then they lost their main utility. Low-level strike was always very risky and Gulf War 1 showed this quite clearly. Similar arguments could be made for the Jaguar.

Canberras were used up until quite recently (2009) for photo-reconnaissance - since replaced by other types.

Nimrod was VERY old by the time they tried to turn it into Mark 4 - however it would have plugged the gap until Poseidon MPAs were available.

I'd say Harrier is probably the most keenly missed - certainly everyone I knew who had anything to do with them rated them highly. There were totally unproved and unreliable rumours about it coming down to either the Tornado force or Joint Harrier Force to get the chop in 2010 - the decision was made by higher ups who were ex-Tonka pilots.....

That last bit should be taken with lots of salt.

Wasn’t there a particular and very useful bomb that Tornado could carry but Harrier couldn’t?

We need Ginetta back for this kind of stuff.

[Ayahuasca]

WreckedGecko said:

... good stuff about the Russian hordes pouring over the border...

Need to factor in tactical nukes.




That small orange thing is a B61-12 tactical nuclear bomb. Quite small as nuclear weapons go, but 50,000 tons of TNT would make a mess of a Russian tank regiment.

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yellowjack said:

I don't know about fighting the Russians nowadays, but back when it was the Soviets, and they were that much closer, occupying the Eastern part of Germany, I was lined up to be in the forefront ....

Back in the day I spent my spare time in the TA and our wartime role was apparently to be dropped into a West German village and ‘hold until relieved’.

At the time, as a guileless young man, I thought fair enough, no problem. Nowadays I would be ‘you expect me to do what?’

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borcy said:

DuncsGTi said:

Olas said:

many troops in combat deliberately shoot high to avoid the feelings associated with ending a life but this phenomena does not present itself with remotely operated vehicles

I'd love to know your source for this nugget

I think it was a study carried out in ww2 by the US Army. I think they found lots just fired to scare the enemy rather than actually aim at them.

A similar study was carried on weapons (muzzle loading) recovered from the Gettysburg battlefield. An astonishing proportion had been loaded more than once, some half a dozen times, without being fired! A theory was that soldiers went through all the motions of shooting, without actually shooting. Other theories are available.

[Ayahuasca]

Evanivitch said:

Ayahuasca said:

A similar study was carried on weapons (muzzle loading) recovered from the Gettysburg battlefield. An astonishing proportion had been loaded more than once, some half a dozen times, without being fired! A theory was that soldiers went through all the motions of shooting, without actually shooting. Other theories are available.

Likely that inexperienced soldiers were experiencing misfires, but due to the volley firing (noise, smoke) they weren't aware they were misfiring (obviously a lack of recoil being missed).

One other theory is that the soldiers trained the load drills without fitting a percussion cap. In the heat of the moment their trained muscle memory took over and they kept failing to fit the caps.