Western-made armor is failing in Ukraine because it wasn’t designed to sustain a conflict of this intensity, a military analyst told The Wall Street Journal.
Taras Chmut, a military analyst who’s the head of the Come Back Alive Foundation, which has raised money to purchase and provide arms and equipment to Ukraine, said that “a lot of Western armor doesn’t work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity.”
“If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn’t perform,” he said.
Chmut went on to say Ukraine’s Western allies should instead turn their attention to delivering simpler and cheaper systems, but in larger quantities, something Ukraine has repeatedly requested, the newspaper reported.
Western armor isn’t meant to be driven across the country into battle on the front lines. It’s meant to operate in areas of air dominance where most defensive fortifications have been bombed well in advance. It’s also designed to be able to attack and move with speed and accuracy, not charging forward.
So… Basically, it’s not designed for use in a peer engagement?
no, it’s because the core doctrine and design (at least of the leopard 1/2) is to use them in defensive battles against larger numbers of tanks - that was the entire NATO strategy in western Europe during the cold war, when all of that hardware was designed
not for rolling into unknown territory and getting hit by entrenched infantry AT, as Turkey discovered a few years ago
They are designed for peer engagement under a different strategy than ww2 era doctrines where tanks provided cover for infantry.
An Abrams is designed to use it’s superior range, accuracy and speed to take out medium hard targets. Similar to the Mongols horse archer strategy.
What peers?
parts of that design difference is the size: western tanks are all larger silhouette, which they had to pay to have better accuracy at extreme ranges
afaik, they’re made for defense in depth and retreating at their effective range while thinning out attacking tanks
The large silhouette is more of an armour/survivability thing rather than a FCS/accuracy thing
The west probably should have anticipated having armour that works in these conditions. *Especially *considering they’ve been trying to get this war going for over a decade at least.
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