That's the neat part: you don't. You blast any known and possible enemy positions your scouts have identified with artillery, with the tanks observing from afar with their powerful zoom optics and chiming in to blast their own targets of opportunity. This is a very slow and tedious process that eats up mountains of ammunition: but the Russians both have time on their side and ammo on tap.
Anything you send in to provoke the enemy to open fire and reveal their positions would be more vulnerable to their fire than your tanks which would have the best chance of survival over your BTRs, BMPs, or recon vehicles.
If you are just going to level the place then why even bother with tanks or infantry... just aircraft and artillery till you have sand...
Not very practical for the task of liberating the Ukrainians from their new Nazi overlords from the west...
I mentioned this before, but they are probably working on robotic T-72 armored scouts teleoperated from the T-14.
But the obvious problem... wouldn't the T-72s be easier to destroy than the T-14s, so by sending in the weaker vehicles you just lose those more vehicles.
Improved protection like jammers and APS systems would just make the drones more expensive...
I would think flying drones would be faster but coordinating a lot of them and using them to build a picture of the enemy positions and firing points would require collating all the video feeds in real time to construct a real time map showing enemy forces and locations from which enemy fire is detected... which would create a resource the forces sitting back could use to direct their direct and indirect suppressive fire to engage the enemy...
A serious managment problem to be sure.
Maybe in the first few weeks, but nowadays all that's doing is getting valuable trained hohol and NATO mercs clapped by Russian SSO in ambushes.
Agreed... would be interesting to know what the VDV snipers and Naval Infantry snipers are getting up to as well of course as the Spetsnaz sniper units too... they don't spend all their time shooting enemy... a lot of the most important things they do is monitor enemy activity and forces positions... as well as provide information for artillery or air strikes or places to deploy drones to... or super deep behind enemy lines looking for shipping containers with 155mm ammo etc etc.
Normally, yes. But artillery seems to more than make up for this otherwise mortal tactical sin.
In a very real sense good artillery support can offset the use of the tanks themselves in a remote way... during WWII vehicles like the ISU-152 are assumed by most to have just acted like a big heavy slow tank with a very powerful gun, but actually they didn't operate with tanks and sat further back and fired from distances of 5km or more at enemy vehicles and positions that were causing the normal tanks and infantry problems moving forward.
This reduced the need for very heavy armour, but would require lots of ammo to be used, which of course was not ideal because 152mm rounds are huge and most armoured vehicles carrying such guns only carried a dozen to 20 rounds on board.
Obviously only useful with a clear line of sight to the target too.
This only works if the Russians oblige and charge on ahead - but they aren't. They are sending highly trained and experienced assault troops like Wagner to identify, and isolate the hohols into their strongpoints where Russian armor, artillery and airpower can bomb them to bits.
True, but even with experts fighting in built up areas you can just liquify is dangerous and slow work.
If there's anything that's a disappointment in this conflict its the PGM with the warhead power of a fire cracker.
Ironic because western weapons seem to take advantage of the fact that they are guided and accurate and use that as an excuse to make them lighter and smaller with a smaller warhead... the Javelin as an example has a 750mm armour penetration performance which is plenty for a top attack weapon, but when manually guiding it because the target does not have a good enough IR signature or there are windows of buildings reflecting sunlight offering dozens or hundreds of alternative IR signals to distract your missile, then you will find 750mm armour penetration is less than Metis and even Konkurs from the 1980s.
Experience so far seems to suggest that their cruise missiles and converted anti ship missiles carry too much HE and that smaller lighter missiles that are cheaper and can be carried in larger numbers are what the Russians are looking at next.
Of course some targets like basement ammo dumps, need kinetic energy and HE power so Kinzhal is the ideal choice, but fuel depots would be just as easy to take out with cluster munitions with incendiary munitions.
By the time their MGCS arrives the T-14 would be in service in numbers - and are already undergoing modernization. Way faster to upgrade an operational tank force with modernized vehicles than to build it up from scratch.
The interesting factor is the vehicle families too, so the T-14 is a MBT, but there will also be a Kurganets vehicle with the T-14 turret and tank related systems and equipment for the tank role in Kurganets formations called B-something, while the Boomerang formations will have a vehicle with the T-14 turret as a tank like vehicle and a K-something designation for use as a gun platform... a Typhoon and DT model might have the tank models too though they might use T-14 turrets with long recoil 125mm guns from the Sprut vehicle, or maybe the 57mm high velocity gun of the 2S38 air defence vehicle as a heavy gun platform for light armoured forces...
Maybe once all the vehicle families have their tank vehicles the T-14 might get its 152mm smoothbore tank gun, while the rest retain their 125mm guns.
The point of designing the T-14 and its turret and sensors and equipment mounted on the turret and chassis means to get a Kurganets tank you simply add the T-14 turret.
The same with the Epocha turrets... the early ones had 30mm cannon and Kornet EM and Bulat missiles in retractable mounts, while the new BMP models will have 57mm grenade launcher main guns with an APFSDS round bigger and more powerful than the 30mm APFSDS rounds, and command detonated HE rounds too, as well as Kornet and Bulat missiles for moving targets.
Those new German tanks should be most worried about their new high speed helicopters with LMUR and Hermes missiles...
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