Chieftain's Q&A #20: Zombies, Precious bodily fluids, and Magruder

greetings all time for another q a where i sit here trying to answer the questions that you put to me as always priority to the patrons but i will take good questions from other sources first up yes i know i don't pronounce porsche correctly decades of bad habits forgive me when i mess it up second i did slightly over egg the pudding when i said the sentinel wasn't really an australian tank particularly with regard to the gearbox since they lacked the ability to create the desired gearbox they ended up using a locally designed crash gearbox not pretty but it was domestic and it did work finally i may be traveling again keep an eye out on my facebook page and see if i am not in some outdoors pub around fort benning the evening of the 26th of may anyway on with the questions and starting with john what are my thoughts on israeli armor it's a very large subject for such a short question the fundamental thing is that israel designs his equipment for very specific sets of requirements and it also understands matters of sustainment its desire to make sure all its tanks use the same engine and gun for example not just for capability but also to simplify maintenance and supply it also need not worry too much about expeditionary capabilities pretty much any battlefield israel has been involved with has been within the fuel tank capacity of a vehicle than this went unimposed as a result they have made very logical decisions given the natures of the terrain and the expected opposition most other nations would not make the same decisions as israel did which is one of the nice things about modeling israeli armor you get to do something which looks completely different the other item to note and this is probably derived from the israeli habit of modifying anything it gets is the amount of upgrade components which israel has placed on the open market michael prothrow how do i feel about gun launched atgms why aren't they used much on western tanks borrowing the hat i've seen israeli trend coming on in this q a lack of purpose it seems there aren't many situations where a western mbt needs to fire a missile round it can be done you just need to replace the laser rangefinder with a combination designated rangefinder and indeed the germans tried it out with the leopard 2a4 for trials but the hat shoots at 8 kilometer ranges and above such fields of fire are optically common for most western nations at least not in places where there aren't plenty of other assets capable of also doing the job leon woo thoughts on the t-72m2 moderna with a pair of otter cannon on each side of the turret i seem to recall covering something like this a q a or two ago it's worth noting that that was just the first prototype the second prototype had but a single autocannon on the right rear of the turret and it came at the cost of a commander's machine gun such systems have the advantage of having a high angle of elevation for urban fights with the disadvantage of overloading the crew limited ammunition for the autocannon obviously folks have been mucking around with the idea for quite some time and it's probably telling that no country has really adopted them it seems that if you're going to go dealing with urban combat have an accompanying vehicle and troops and if you really want something for anti-helicopter defense it's probably lighter and simpler to just stick a man pads on the roof but like the north koreans seem to love doing adam schindler back in the dark ages circa 2010 i read an account of u.s general who was involved in the development of the f-22s cockpit and said computers are good integrators of information while humans are good differentiators we've tried to design the user interface around that distinction does that apply to the ui in tanks it's an interesting question i had not really considered such a thing and i can only speculate as to how the f-22 cockpit uses the distinction for example i can certainly see how the aircraft's computer might be able to process and link together multiple sources of information such as radar emission ir emission and data link and so on so that the pilot doesn't need to figure out that all those three sources together equals one blip and that he's in range of all of them with missile x a tank though will have fewer such sources of information to integrate it already does a lot of it with taking all the data used by a modern fire control computer taken out of the hands of the gunner i'm sure it's possible to integrate a system so that a let's say a laser warning receiver will cue a thermal imager to a target which then locks itself onto a hotspot for engagement maybe the battlefield tracker can similarly integrate into the display to show no fire zones or estimated friendlies and the like or tell the driver no this bridge won't hold your weight but really in a three or four man crew they haven't gotten to the point of information or processing overload yet to require such levels of automation and just nice to haves the discrimination for the crew is still which one to shoot first where to move to and does that look like good ground for the tank to be and i don't see how that can be integrated by a computer to be more useful so yeah it seems to me that tank uis do integrate what little information can be integrated and just leave the mess vast majority of it the judgement call city humans leon patera malone a project has started to design a modern support tank what am i designing this tank to do what are you arming it with how do you integrate it into the armor division what features must it have it's a very broad question and your first question of that lot nails the problem what am i designing the tank to do now i've discussed in the past how the military kind of bounces in between developing equipment to meet doctrinal requirements or taking something newly invented and then seeing whether or not it has a place in doctrine if you want to do a bit of hair pulling look for the jsids process flow chart that's the joint capabilities integration and development system i'm speaking here now the us process part of the system is the capabilities based assessment which includes the functional needs analysis this determines whether or not there is some capabilities gap which needs fielding what shortcomings are you trying to fix then you go into the dot mlpfp analysis that's doctrine organization training material leadership and education personnel facilities policy in this they look at the problem area by area to see what the best solution is for solving the identified problem which needs fixing so for doctrine is it possible that the doctrine is wrong should we not be bringing tanks into the situation which requires escort and instead should we be relying on air power organization if we reorganize assets we already have such as maybe pairing a tank with bradley will that fix the problem training do people simply not know the fine details of how to operate in accordance with the doctrine materiel do we need a new thing or gadget in order to fix the problem and so on so as you can see it's not really a simple matter to say we need a support tank and you will note how few countries have come to the conclusion that they need a support tank let alone exactly what it is that the support tank is supposed to look like it's worth noting that bmpt was developed by ural wagons independently not in response to a requirement by the russian ministry defense the closed system i think to the requirement would be a heavy ifv but even then they don't seem to be in widespread service instead heavy apcs seem to be the predominant solution for that so the question isn't quite so much what would a support tank look like as much as what do you want one for in the first place the only country which seems really to have gotten in on the concept is algeria which started taking deliveries of 300 bmp t72s last summer now what exactly they're planning on doing with the things remains to be seen presumably it meets some identified need that algeria has which no other country has yet felt requires such an investment so leon long answer to tell you i have no idea simply because like apparently most militaries i have no idea what i'd want one for the best tank escort vehicles i can think of are either an ifv or an air defense vehicle matthew lesice during world war ii which country's armed forces were underrated and why are there any which are underrated today well i'll say that with nearly 600 t-90s to 300 terminators and 500 boxers algeria certainly slipped under my radar until i did the research for the previous question i don't know if underrated is quite the right word but i might say treat with more caution than many seem to for certain countries which includes particularly china the stuff may well be better than we think but it also may not be so you can't say it's underrated better to assume that they're good though normally countries which are better than you might think are also well enough known so you don't think poorly of them in the first place look at singapore or uae two small countries which shed loads of tanks but this is well known then there's the matter of training i mean so let's take chile they're not exactly still using the shermans that they were famous for and now they're running around with leopard twos and martyrs are they actually any good at using them i have absolutely no clue is there any reason to believe that they're not with world war ii finding overrated armored forces is easier than finding underrated ones in the early part of the war i guess you can make a claim for the soviet army being underrated possibly sweden as well but by the end of the war i don't think anybody was under any delusions about the red army's armored force being as good as it was and sweden just never really kept up with the arms race so genuinely couldn't be inaccurately rated as poorly but the other tank using nations maybe can anyone think of any which were genuinely better than the beliefs of the time indicated maybe japan i mean its use of tanks in the early war certainly had moments of excellence and results but i don't know if anybody particularly expected them to be poor usually went the other way around with forces being considered better than it turned out that they actually were j modern tanks have intercoms for the crew yet in gunnery the loader can be heard yelling up is this accurate why yell when you got nidocon and are they not blowing the cruise ears off well it's not a full-on yell but yeah it is kind of set above normal speaking volume i think there's a couple of reasons for this firstly there's usually a bit of adrenaline involved so it's partially subconscious secondly it's a very short call and it's very noisy environment so being louder means there's less chance of the call being missed so again i don't know if that's necessarily a conscious decision to shout just the mind taking over a bit given the circumstances and no it's not going to blow your ears off felicity longus now your question gets an answer which is a better part of 10 minutes long so look for a specific vehicle on your subject in a couple of days it's about the m18 caleb engelhardt have i come across a documented instance of panther or tiger road wheels being stuck in place due to frozen mud i definitely remember reading it possibly in some memoir but i can't cite it off the top of my head i have to go through the library and start looking at books more than i have time for right now had germany won the war what vehicles would have continued to see service and probably panther except product improved i can see king tigers saying in production as well the eggplants are four is an interesting option originally developed as a stronger shots and so if germany had won i'm sure that they would learn that these stimulates would have been worth continuing so possibly with a little less armor up front it likely could have continued in production although i do think there would have been an argument for stough panthers basically like a smaller jake panther in effect the eggplants of 38t egg tiger they would have gone away i can see the 251 being removed from production as well replaced by catching i wouldn't be surprised if they built their own copy of the jeep and sorted out their 6x6 truck problem the really big question is whether or not they would have restarted mouse and e100 production common sense would say no but common sense also would say that they wouldn't have started those projects in the first place so who knows also jay where are the tables and shelves from i seem to recall that the shells came from crate and barrel although my memories bit off on that and i'm pretty sure the desk is made by hooker and i've actually had an interesting number of people asking me that minion in the late desert campaign how well did the teaming up of early model tigers with panzer iii ashford ends work in practice i have no idea for those who aren't tracking shwera panzer ab tailong 501 had five panzer three ends with the short 7.5 centimeter gun in the subs company and both first and second companies had nine tigers each partnered with ten panzer three ends that that's per company not like 10 pounds or three inches each tiger so they were an integral part of the unit and not just attachments or crossover i guess you'll have to draw your own conclusions the reports coming back from the field about the panzer 3 and in general were to quote a german document from november 1942 extremely positive so the troops certainly seem to like the combination of the small reliable tank with the 7.5 centimeter high explosive punch however it's also difficult to find instances of such integration of panzer 3s with tigers later in the war so make of that what you will i have not encountered nor honestly have i looked for any unit evaluations of the combination so if anybody out there has feel free to comment below and i'll come back to in the next q a michael skipper question about tanks and the noise they make which is both an advantage and a disadvantage we used to make use of friendly tanks to mask the noise of movement of other units and the germans supposedly would run tanks around near poland before the invasion to unnerve polish troops are there any doctrines in modern armies which use the sound of tanks for tactical uses not so much for the m1 because the turbines are pretty quiet you can't really disguise anything with them the loud part of an m1 on the move is the sound of the tracks both whirring around and slamming onto the ground as a result in iraq it was impossible for us to partake in a firefight which didn't involve us to begin with as they would hear the tanks coming from like a mile away or more and disengage rapidly so it's going however if an m1 is proceeding slowly and you would say trackpad to trackpad which is basically like the tank version of tiptoeing i kid you not i've got my m1 to within 10 meters of a chap without hints knowing that i was there which caused him quite the shock when the little voice inside his head said look left to be clear it was a busy city street but still now if it was a leopard i'm pretty sure you'd have heard it still a standard practice is to act as if your tank noises can be heard although i seriously suspect that a lot of it is just holdovers from the m60 days for example a short count on the radio net so that all the tank engines start at once and it's impossible to hear just how many tanks have started i mean if you're close enough to hear m1 starting up you're probably close enough to hear everything else going on or just count turrets in today's days when it seems like every platoon has a drone the main use of tank engine noises is to use non-tanks for deception purposes not usual in the desert especially if the deception units are dragging chains along behind them to create the dust clouds indeed there were even u.s deception units which used m10s with massive speaker arrays in the turret so not only did they look like tanks if they were actually spotted but they sounded more like war tanks deception is still a thing in military is today even in the us we probably don't emphasize it as much as some of the other nato countries i mean the british for example are heavily into the concept but i guess the us feels like it doesn't really need to be particularly subtle whether or not they bother with audio signatures though i'm not sure about it the us army's field manual on deception is fm 3-13.4 approved for public release so you can go download it and have a read of the 90-some pages yourself two points from the manual are magruder's principle which states that it is easier to induce a target to maintain a pre-existing belief than to deceive him into changing a belief and jones's dilemma which means that as there are more ways for a target to confirm or deny a suspicion it gets harder to deceive them but on the other hand if you can deceive by multiple methods at once the deception is more likely to be believed josh conte can i explain the use of british armored forces during military operations during the troubles and what was it like to live in ireland at the time well the first one is easy enough barry wheeled apc's the british army didn't use armor the one exception was operation motorman a massive undertaking which basically broke the catholic insurgency and turned it into a terrorist campaign instead centurion avres were used to breach the barricades to allow the lighter vehicles to pass through that was pretty much the only use of heavy armor in the entire period as for what it was like i only just caught the tail end of it and even at that you know only made never two forays into the north it may have only been 150 miles away but it really didn't affect us in dublin it just became part of the 61 news like anywhere else really suffice to say i was one of the 94 percent of the population who voted in 1998 that it really wasn't worth all the bother and can we live on a peaceful island now please that referendum we don't know changed the irish constitution to remove the territorial claim on the north generally it seems real worked out that said i've not been north of the border since 1994 or so s face tanks in southeast asia the british concluded the tanks were impractical in malaya's jungle terrain and were proven wrong since japan used tanks in their attack and the us stationed tanks in the philippines from the very beginning why did the us army and ija reach different conclusions on the use of tanks and jungles to the british army well for starters i'm not sure i would say that the jungles of malaya and the plains of the philippines were quite the same operations in central and southern luzon were as close to european conditions as existed in the pacific to the point that the japanese had an entire tank division on the island in the defense the defense plan for the philippines at the beginning of the war for the us made no intention of moving with anything let alone tanks into the dense jungles of northern luzon so i'm not entirely sure i agree with the premise that the u.s use of tanks in the philippines was indicative of similar thinking to japan versus that of the uk now that said the british position also requires clarification i've seen several books where it says that the british didn't think that the terrain was suitable for tanks which may have been true from their perspective perhaps but they obviously were not so utterly convinced of this that they didn't think to bring anti-tank guns along just in case the opposition didn't agree australian troops in particular took something of a toll on japanese tank forces along the way it seems as likely to me that the british simply felt that there were better places to send what tanks they had malaya simply being less suitable compared to say north africa or india tom hardy what color was the bottom of german world war ii armor what color was the bottom of your tank i don't know i'll look underneath next time i have a chance but i'll lay bets they were the base color of grey or dunkle gelb my tank was green underneath i don't recall if it was camouflaged or not and you'd need to look for a photo of a flipped m1 i guess i don't recall it being camouflaged christ in how do you defend against atgms what atgm or anti-atgm systems exist and how do they work step one identify the launch if you can fortunately most missiles have some form of signature step 2 announce sagar exo clock if you're on the move commence the sagar dance no it doesn't matter that it's not an actual sagar it's like saying any vacuum cleaner is a hoover or any cav hat is a stetson the sagger dance is basically the tank trying to jinx to throw off the other guy's aim these days it's of limited benefit unless you can get a second factor in other than just making a driver feel better step three send around back down range the chances are your round is faster than his missile it'll probably miss but it might make him flinch if it's a fire and forget missile it won't help but you won't know that pop smoke then reverse obliquely a bit it's such a simple thing to do that people forget that they can do in the 2006 lebanon excursion an israeli tank battalion took another battering from hezbollah missiles of the 30-some odd tanks present not a single one of the commanders thought to pop smoke it's honestly the best defense for multi-spectral smoke only radar-guided missiles such as longbow hellfire should be able to continue to home in on you you probably can't see out but at least you'll survive the first salvo and you'll be able to have a crack you're getting the first aimed shot off next time assuming that he's even reloaded by then at least if it's a man portable launcher anyway then you have the active defenses soft kill systems such as dazzlers or hard kills such as trophy or arena and finally of course you got the armor so era composite and other anti-chemical effect round mechanisms would do nicely alexander h i once mentioned that we and the staff develop a plan to defend our fob against zombie attack in afghanistan can i share some details absolutely so of course this was done mainly for the sa partially for the sake of entertainment partially for the sega actually running the processes so even the cdc says you probably should consider your zombie defense plan because the things that you do for a zombie defense plan are probably at many shared things that you would do with a hurricane survival plan or an earthquake survival plan things like that so when you get to a new base or not new base you take over from a base that's already pre-existing from a previous unit they will hand you the battle book and it's the the book of standard operating procedures that they've already done a lot of the hard work if this happens do this call them and so on but there's no exercise in just reading the book so we ran through a let's create a zombie defense plan exercise to go through the entire process of you know analyzing the problem coming up with possible solutions to deal with the problem and so on and our base at the time was a joint base with afghan forces kind of splitting the two with a with a wall down the middle and so we have the afghan liaison there you guys don't already have a zombie defense plan do you what i didn't think so just checking do you know what a zombie is what the zombie do you know what one is uh maybe you call it something else okay here's the concept behind a zombie explain the zombie and uh no we have no such thing okay problem number one half our base cannot identify the enemy uh so that was the first criterion then we had to have a think about this because if you're going up in you know it's a zombie apocalypse you're probably screwed anyway in the long term but uh then you got the question well how important is effectiveness versus style and so we had to think about that one we decided okay well let's see if we can get a little bit of style points in somehow so we decided that uh one of the primary forms of defense is going to be airburst artillery because you're going to get the brains so air bursts coming down from the top would do nicely but you're going to have all those you know the crawlers the guys that have lost their limbs below and they're just crawling along with their arms and it turned out we had a road construction unit on the base as well and they had road rollers so we figured that once you know you fired off the artillery you'd finish off the job with the road rollers uh there were a couple of them we put a fair bit of thought into this anyway i don't know we we handed over the battle book to the subsequent unit but i don't know what they thought of it george paramour historically what has typically been the first design principle for new tank guns caliber penetration turret sizes shell shock weight etc probably depends on the era in the nation i guess the british in world war ii for example basically had a directorate of artillery which developed the guns and the director of the mechanization which developed the vehicles it was the job of some poor schmuck to figure out how to put the one onto the other and if you look at the development of british tank guns in the war you will see that the three famous ones two pounder six pounder and 17 pounder were all developed first as towed guns and then they tried to shoehorn the things into a tank not necessarily well the 75 millimeter would be an exception though that did have the criterion the commonality with all the usama which is coming over they weren't alone in this the u.s had a similar problem for a while in the interwar period will it fit became an overriding criterion after a while witnessed the 77 millimeter for the british or the 76 millimeter for the us for where the 17 pounder or the three inch which fire exactly the same projectiles of the 77 and the 76 would not fit these days it seems armor penetration is at the top of the list for an mbt but it really does come down to what you want the tank to do and how much money and resource time you have to spend on developing a gun for the tank b7 everyone knows about the bob simple and there's the lesser-known ni tank effectively ukrainian equivalent there are probably many more improvised afvs are there any cases of successful combat use of these vehicles even if just a psychological effect actually yes you mentioned it the tank which goes made by the odessa shipyards out of the stz5 artillery tractor 68 of them were built and though yeah they would have perhaps been a bit outclassed by the germans they ended up fighting against the romanians and silly though the tanks may have looked against what the romanians had what you have basically is a military service chassis and powertrain two machine guns and armor plate it was good enough of course today there are all sorts of homemade vehicles created especially around syria and some even are designed to transport exoskeleton iron man type suits thunderchild the us army is seeking submissions for a new and needed afv what do you think is something the u.s needs to replace or a vacant need filled by the xm87 mooring why 87 i'll go for a new cavalry vehicle the us cavalry hasn't had a truly purpose-designed vehicle really since world war ii although i guess an argument could be made for the m114 which wasn't exactly a resounding success it should be smaller and more nimble than the bradley for recon but it still has to have the firepower to conduct the range of cavalry tasks that the us army's cavalry is doctrinally supposed to do it probably will end up looking a bit like a mini bradley or an enlarged xm800t general jack ripper have i ever seen a commie drink a glass of water well i am i can't say i have jack though i do note the argument that they drink vodka and never water it is worth noting that the word vodka is derived from voda which is russian for water it is not unique to kami's however note that ishka is irish for water from which is derived ishgabaha the water of life and thus whiskey and then there's aquavit from the nordic countries which translates as water of life and the french have odavi which translates as water of life and it's a type of brandy then there's the roman aqua vitae which is water of life and ukraine has ocovita water of life one starts to see a trend one does wonder though if one could get creative if you were put on a diet of bread and water was across that bridge if i ever get there andrew what is my opinion on the new army green service uniform and related items i like it a lot best new uniform we've had for a long time however i don't like it enough to spend a thousand dollars on a bloody thing with accessories the saving grace is that we have quite a few years before the mandatory possession date so i may be able to see up my career without having to buy one i find it an interesting comparison to the change from the greater the black pt uniforms which seemed to be a case of my waking up one morning only to discover that the uniform changed i am not convinced by the air force's style crushed cap but i acknowledge that there are some folks who may like it it may also take up less space on the shelf which is a positive i guess striker 1959 how did german equipment such as tanks end up in the post-war middle eastern czechoslovakia spain and france the two obvious items are the me-109 and the panzers the me-109 continued to be built by avia as the s-199 with a new engine they weren't particularly good but they did form israel's first fighter squadron and the israelis in 1948 were not in a position to be picky after the war the czechs operated over 200 pounds or fours in service but by the 1950s they were starting to follow the ad of favor about 50 of them were sold to syria in 1955 a few more came from france where they were sitting around in stores and 17 virtually factory fresh panzer fours were delivered from spain in 1965. alongside the panzer fords about two dozen stone threes were sold by france czechoslovakia and spain six jagdpanzers came from france in 1950 together with five hummels officer crabtree good morning a certain discussion a short while ago about the merits of having the green mace 5-inch automatic aa gun on a self-propelled mount as a tank destroyer aside from the obvious need for a large vehicle to carry the thing at the 96 rounds per minute what are the pros and cons of such a system would anyone have considered it for service except maybe albonia so for those who don't know green mace was going to be an absolutely massive thing which required a gun trailer an ammunition trailer and a power trailer though labeled the 5-inch the prototype which was built ended up using a 102 millimeter what's interesting is for an aa gun it was intended to fire fin stabilized discarding sabo ammunition which based the question what happens to the rounds on the way back down again once it misses or even hits the airplane but anyway it's not impossible to fit an explosive warhead to fin stabilize sabo ammunition see the mpat round for example but what you have then is a gun which in theory should be quite effective against armor of the 1950s so really it's not the worst idea the rate of fire is stupidly high the 36 rounds per minute of some of the contemporary us autoloader tanks was plenty fast enough after all you want to be able to sense the round and the effects on target before firing the next shot reloading is going to take a few minutes after all but let's say the autoloader can be detuned to maybe half speed or 28 rounds of ammunition capacity is nice but remember you want to try to get the thing to fit into a self-propelled vehicle so maybe six round revolvers are again demonstrated as being feasible by us auto loaders so maybe one or even two of them will be a lot more reasonable than the large magazines on the green mace prototype the gun can probably be mounted much lower as there isn't the same need for the high angle of elevation so of course as you elevate the breach and all the autoloading system has to go down as well so it can be done the question though becomes just how much merit is there to the idea if the normal process for a burn drill is you pop up you fire two rounds with the tank before dropping back down to avoid return fire which takes say five or six seconds just how much bang are you going to get for your five or six seconds of exposure for a green mace tank destroyer if you think about the entire lay engage assess cycle the big advantage really is you can put two rounds into each of two targets in an engagement instead of one but if the tank is expected to normally kill the target with a single hit double tapping is really just a luxury of ammunition so is it really worth the money and manpower into building this new tank destroyer vehicle becomes arguable at least hammer of terror whilst nuclear artillery was very much extant in the cold war was any effort ever made to develop nuclear tank shells no nuclear no no i don't know how you pronounce it in america or were such factors as near certain proximity to thanks to the blast sufficient to ensure that the idea never got off the drawing board i don't think proximity was such a problem if it was considered acceptable to lob nukes from unarmored jeeps then firing from armored tanks is surely within the acceptability bounds i would say it's more question of whether or not it's possible to miniaturize around such that it would work in something the size of a tank around and then the question of if there's any point to it at all because i mean if you can lob nukes by artillery or a man-packed tripod i if you're in such a situation that you need to fire a tank-sized nuke just get on the radio and ask for support from one of the non-tank nukes thunderchild what is my favorite variant of the man russ much though i am a fan of the vanquisher the reality is that i tend to feel the bog standard rust in games as a general purpose tank on occasion my demolisher may make an appearance but i found it a little bit limited admiral tiberius who learned more from the six day war and yom kippur wars nato or warsaw pact and is the love of the kv-2 with the 152 millimeter wrong i think both sides learned some extremely valuable lessons if he hasn't covered it yet go ask drac how nato reacted to the naval engagements in 1967. nato and israel both basically realized that they needed to make some very significant changes in order to survive in the new anti-ship missile environment and the results were very evident to the astonishment of the egyptians and soviets in 1973. thank you 1973 had all sorts of astonishments the egyptian crossing into suez was considered a virtual impossibility without nukes by the soviets and required at least a week in western thinking both sides had to seriously rethink their opinions on such things after the egyptians proved them wrong similarly the devastating effects of atgms against armor surprised even the soviets who supplied the things suppression of missile teams was the primary reason that bmp-2 swapped out the 73-millimeter gun for an auto cannon and was also an important factor in the consideration of the chain gun for the bradley i'm not sure i can think of any particularly dramatic revelations other than that most everyone knew the importance of training the jordanians being the best trained and thus the toughest oppositions or the advantages of western tanks in the defense and of course the experience in 1973 was the primary guideline for merkaval with its rear turret and door which it's worth noting neither warsaw pact nor nato countries followed loch ness hamster if an armored unit comes on a chemical attack how long can it stay buttoned up the normal requirement is 24 hours you'd be a little bit hungry and hopefully you left some canteens of water inside but that's the general thinking in reality i presume two or three days will be theoretically possible but i can't imagine how you would do that without running out of fuel and battery to run the nbc systems the swedish armor museum director observed that if there was any tests that the m1 was far superior to the leopard 2 in when they were running trials it was the ability to survive 24 hours in a chemical environment is it possible to operate a tank in full mop 4 that's the the full get up gloves boots huds etc yes although i wouldn't be thrilled about doing it just the mask alone is bad enough seabourn engagements are mandatory in a u.s tank qualification and you need to wear the mask to do it is it absolutely required if you have an overpressure system probably not but why not be held you know why not take advantage of it plus the air is forced into your mask so it makes breathing quite easy compared to a standard protective mask for those who are curious the masks do come with drinking tube which interfaces with the canteen cover so you can drink safely so if you ever wonder what this little lid up here was for you pull it off and you attach your drinking tube which is integral to your mask into the canteen cup the canteen cover forgive me you also will attach a microphone to the front of your mask and sort of hooks into the cream and helmet in the plug socket that the boom mic plugs into joe powell i've mentioned the relatively no number of u.s tankers killed in world war ii and the british subject suggesting that the protective effects of berets was not the standard might another factor be that the british did more tank on tank fighting in raw numbers perhaps but in terms of loss ratios i'm not sure it would have made very much of a difference the problem was particularly so normally for two reasons firstly the british were in tank country to the east and they also started running out of infantry and had no choice but to take hideous tank losses such as goodwood but towards the end of the war i suspect the americans actually ended up facing more armor such as the bulge and alsace operations which would have evened things out a bit i guess the question to ask is of all the tankies the brit sent overseas how many came home again sim crawford congrats on lieutenant colonel thank you what's the most ingenious way i've seen a piece of equipment used for something which it wasn't intended for i don't know about ingenious i mean i remember when we mobilized in 2004 they shipped our container of equipment to the new armory but they forgot to give us a container loader to take the thing off the truck we ended up having to use two forklifts borrowed from warehouse across the street and then because forklifts are not designed to operate in dirt and gravel we had to undertake a recovery mission to rescue the one forklift with the other forklift that said i can't really think of anything off top of my head i'm sure folks can chime in on the comment section below oxygen a conversation came up in a group on how army reserve training cycles work what's the limiting factor on size of training elements and at what level do officers go from reserve to full time i am fairly sure that's a discussion currently quite heated in both ireland and uk right now both have in recent years changed their reserve structures from the fca and the ta respectively to army reserve and in both cases it's more than just a change in the name your single biggest limiting factor is going to be the manpower pool you have to have enough people near to the unit to fill it up different countries have different perspectives and what reasonable distances are in my 20 years in the national guard my shortest commute was about 70 miles each way for all of four months home of record to my current unit of assignment is 550 miles according to google maps a british reservist may bark at going to the other side of the city current u.s regulation defines a reasonable commuting distance as 150 miles for a brit that's about the distance between luton to leeds then again it is rare for a u.s reserve unit to be on training for less than two days british irish units will meet up for a couple of hours on a particularly weekday evening with occasional field exercises and weekends i personally think that this latter mechanism is highly inefficient but the brits do seem to merit to it such as using the weekday evening before a range day to do all the refresher training it also means that one does not have to sacrifice many weekends unlike the us system where basically lost one weekend out of every four for the last two decades birthdays anniversaries etc a british reservist isn't asked to give them up anywhere near as much as an american army doesn't care of course but if you're trying to get volunteers to volunteer their time especially in countries where the pay and benefits for showing up are negligible these are the sorts of things you have to think about as for size the real killer is minimum size they have to be enough people present to make the collective training worth the time you can't conduct company and attack exercises if your unit is staffed at only 40 people instructors have to be made available and it's more efficient to train 20 people on you know the operation of a piece of equipment than to train three there's no restriction on a maximum size beyond the size of the facility that you have available as a general rule states try to have all the national guard units trained on the same weekend as it's a lot easier to support both from state headquarters and all the interactions at unit levels for example a unit requires annual medicals they can go over to the medical unit which is on duty the same weekend if a tank unit wants to go to a base for tactical training it helps if the transportation company or the fuel company is also training the same weekend and so on it's not mandatory these things can be worked around if they have to be but why not leverage everybody to work together just like they would in a war as for the question of when officers go from reserve to full-time there is no set answer for that believe that there are no full-time reservists in the british irish army reserves indeed i seem to recall that command of a reserve unit after command of a regular army unit was a prerequisite for command of a battalion for regular army officers in ireland that's probably changed since if i even got it right in the first place but i always thought it was an excellent idea for the circumstances the full-time cadre would be regular officers or enlisted and they would basically be on a tour of assignment to the reserve unit and eventually they would cycle back out to the regular army for the u.s there's no practical difference between officers and enlisted in the reserves with respect to full-time policies the full-time cadres are themselves reservists they apply for full-time job positions which are announced just as you would apply for any job they were just requirements for rank for the jobs these are normally called agr active guard or reserve but there are alternatives such as federal technicians or adolfs active duty for operational support this applies both at the unit level and at the state level so if you go to austin let's say the texas state capitol one of the government departments is the texas military department and it has its own series of office buildings over on camp mayberry and in it or a bunch of full-timers to do everything the department needs to do to keep ticking over from personnel paperwork to procurement to financial accountability operations they will man the state operations center think of it as like the war room for emergencies such as natural disasters there are others that say on a full-time counter drug mission there are full-time mechanics doing the required period services on vehicles or repairs on vehicles that were damaged during training each state normally has a schoolhouse of some sort and under the total army school system students from any state of the federal military can attend to get the same training so i spent four years in nevada's rti regional training institute it's mainly a 25 series schoolhouse if you are a 25 series and you want to spend six weeks in las vegas continue going there for your ncoes or your skill school of course the instructors have to be full-timers so again agrs and so on even if you do make the absolute top rank in the state there's not always a requirement for you to be on full time so the nevada tag a while ago preferred to stick with a civilian job however the requirements of the position are probably such that the reality is you'd be doing army work every evening anyway so you may as well go full time when you're offered a position national guard bureau in dc also consists of a lot of guardsmen assigned from the 54 states and territories for a couple of year tour duty opportunities for folks to move between regular army and reserve components start getting more limited as you go up in rank both enlisted and officer you have to have a slot that you can go into so for a captain who just did his minimum six years in the active army and wants to go into the reserves it's easy enough if you're a full colonel however things start to get a bit more complicated i've similarly known junior officers who converted from the guard to active duty but no senior field grades probably for two reasons firstly they've likely long concluded by then what they want to do in life and would have made the decision earlier and probably they also have a similar problem of finding places to put them the slavin what are my thoughts on wheeled afvs such as the m1128 are they a stop gap hold the line until the mbts get their role or are they in themselves effective ways to produce mbt killers now of course as a couple of days ago the us army announced that it was getting rid of 1128s they obviously weren't overly wedded to them given that they had already reduced the basis of issue from the initial equivalent of one per rifle platoon to one per rifle company into striker brigades i think the rifle platoon lost a fair bit of capability when the mgs became a platoon in the battalion but i don't think the army is losing much now by divesting themselves at the vehicle entirely but they were basically infantry support guns not tank destroyers or erzatz tanks centauro was more of a tank destroyer and as such had a valid concept within its limitations at the other end of the scale is a japanese type 16 which from what i can gather is a tank in doctrine designed to fill the role of the mbt when the mbt is not available due to logistical limitations and where arguably for the same limitations the other side won't have proper mpts either and is also down to light tanks for lighter vehicles there may be less of a requirement for tracks and for all the logistical hassle which tracks also come with what's the practical difference between centauro as a wheeled tank destroyer and type 16 as a maneuver combat vehicle probably not much but i'd say protection and ammunition loadout i can see the mcv may be having a bit more protection against rpgs missiles and the like and a greater emphasis in general purpose around types and fusing more ammunition but really the difference is probably slim so they very much still have a place the u.s can use the entire striker brigade as a stop gap pending heavier forces and indeed the 1990 experience was in large part the impetus for it though i have to admit it completely befuddles me while the permanent u.s army presence in europe is a striker brigade and not a brigade of heavy armor i'm sure somebody who's paid much more money than i am has a good reason for it grim with m60s basically being everywhere and so many countries keeping them in the inventory do you think they will become like t-34s and shermans where they are kept in service and updated for much longer than originally designed surely the tank which is going to set the record for being kept in service a ridiculous amount of time is t-55 i've kind of covered the m60 upgrade question in a much much earlier q a and i don't think my answer has changed much since i'm not convinced that m60 is going to have the same length of service life as countries which could get m60s tend to be able to get next generation tanks instead be it morocco getting m1s or greece getting leopard twos interestingly greece is keeping the m48s around longer than the m60s due to the nature of the upgrades they were given taiwan is kind of doing something like the same thing with brave tiger egypt or they're just building more m1s themselves to replace the m60s so if you think about it the countries which use m60s nowadays they're either countries which really can't afford to upgrade them like sudan or maybe don't really need to so maybe brazil the only notable exception is turkey which would like to replace them all with altays but they can't yet so they're doing the two upgrades either sabra which includes the 120 millimeter or the tm which is suited more for the lower intensity fight in syria despite the large amount of upgrade options available nobody's really going for them they're just replacing them outright with better tanks i'm going to pass on the aesthetics question i think though usa usa with all rubber tracks being used in civilian and lighter military vehicles will they ever become standard or main battle tanks also were us half tracks the first military vehicles to use all rubber tracks with respect to mbts something will be a very long time before all rubber tracks are tough enough to handle the abuse as for the first use of rubber tracks one would first think of the kegress half tracks which saw some use in a number of countries but kegress didn't just do half tracks the first tank to be equipped with full rubber tracks was an ft actually about two dozen of them i think in an attempt to make the vehicle a bit faster they were trialled in the mid-1920s and saw service in the rift war the tracks were also used on early versions of the nc kazuki k since m110 was retired the russians are the only one with spgs over 200 millimeters most everyone else uses one five five one two two one five two given that we are now looking at smart munitions for artillery would it not be an advantage to have a larger caliber to accommodate a greater payload as these smart systems are bound to take up space inside the warhead maybe but remember what replaced the m110 it wasn't a tube artillery system it was a rocket system and for long range fires those rockets can take the job of tube artillery quite nicely and each rocket will lob quite a good payload it could be cluster or smart munitions or it could just be a nice big 227 millimeter high explosive warhead which in the case of mlrs is 90 kilograms of boom and they are guided indeed the french lance rockette unitaire pretty much fires only big guided hagee rounds so if you're looking for rate of fire for tube artillery which is arguably more important than a couple of large booms a minute you'll want to stick with the smaller caliber if you want to lob a big round over a long distance to provision a guidance on rockets fills the gap for you no longer much of a need for eight-inch plus tubes as for the question on motivation between the various jumps and sizes in us servers i'm actually not sure the answer obviously the 240 didn't hang around too long but as a general rule the 155's for howitzers and the 203s were guns presumably there was some tactical reasoning behind why a gun couldn't be bigger or could be bigger the 175 was a bit of an oddity just to get range juna why do company and higher commanders ride in tanks in most countries wouldn't that be better served riding command vehicles not really i regret i don't have accordingly's book with me i think i left it in earlier but he basically had the choice between riding his tank into iraq in 1991 and sticking with the brigade staff he decided that if he could command a battalion from his tc's position he could do the brigade as well after all he had a staff to do all the admin work he just needed to make the decisions and he could be closer to the front with his troops when he made them it also turned out at one point that the brigade headquarters was under threat from an iraqi armored unit and his tank was the best thing that they had to defend themselves i guess they figured that if the ceo was going to be up upfront in an armored vehicle anyway why not give him a vehicle which could fight a company with 14 tanks is going to be more capable than over 13 tanks in the command track the co also normally gets the most experienced gunner in the company on the basis that when he needs to do co things he can hand off control of the tank to the gunner and focus on his map and radio or when the british tank you'd hand off control of the tank to the loader because the loader is a senior man for the brits in the meantime he has in addition to the radio access to the view on the ground through the sites of the tank normally he will go with the company main effort the xo if he has a tank may go with the main effort or the supporting effort it also gives him a vehicle that he can circulate in which won't uproot the actual command vehicle so for example when i was a troop commander i had a bradley my exo had the command track so if i had to get the briefings or otherwise you know circulate around i could take the brad whilst letting exo continue doing his battle management in the 1068. back in the day command tanks were different from regular tanks using dummy guns and the likes simply because of the amount of space required for all the equipment like bigger radios with today's technology there's no requirement to disarm the tank just because the co is in it charles charange any post-war reports on uk or u.s opinion on tetrarch are locus well locust the u.s realized it was a stupid idea to have a tank which is transportable by c-54 they weren't going to be using such a big strategic asset on tactical missions and besides you needed to own the airfield you were landing on with the c54 slash locust which likely wouldn't have been the case for the air assault in the first place the british used them of course in gliders and fletcher in operation think tank covers them briefly the takeaway from him was that there was no particular record on performance but he doesn't think there were any practical use i think he might have been slightly overdoing it i mean i can see having a small tank around to deal with armored cars machine guns etc but why not just use an armored car for that and less hassle van owen returns us to albonia after the former procurement chat blew the nation's budget on garbage vehicles pending some solution to fix it what instructions would you give the militia or military to deal with armored vehicles mines lots of mines roadside bombs command detonated mines pressure-dated native mines getting artillery around rig it up with a trigger mines were already responsible for a good quarter or ten casualties in world war ii so it's not as if there's no precedent for their effectiveness use turning obstacles to direct the tanks to where the mines are which reminds me i probably need to do a video on obstacles ideas like digging a big hole and getting the tank to fall into it are fine but why not just dig a much smaller hole into which the munition can be placed have the mines preregistered with artillery fires you need to kill the mechanics remember these are the days before rapid mine clearing techniques so this would be much less likely to work in the 1970s for example save your presumably few anti-tank guns for flail tanks and hope the opposition doesn't obscure the breach points flame through gases may be an option here abatis is time honored if the terrain allows as does dynamiting a hillside to get big rocks to land on top of the tanks or flooding an area which is of course also terrain dependent note i ain't going for the direct approach here saying that you should kill the fuel trucks or whatever is all very well but in most cases it's going to be easier said than done presume that you will only be allowed to see and engage combat units if you can get looking at a fuel supply convoy great but it's probably not worth relying on josh conte in normandy the hedgerows provided a natural and dangerous obstacle what was deadlier against allied armor columns panzers at guns or infantry units the problem with the premise of your question i think is the idea that an armored column would be trundling along in the hedgerows of normandy this was close nasty terrain and an infantry fight an american unit would rarely lead with the tank going around the corner and then you know come face to face with a pack or a panzer from doing a quick check in the 80's infantry's armor the priority threat to m4s was the hand-held anti-tank followed by at guns the ranges tended to be extremely short with hedgerows averaging about 70 meters from each other sebastian cranen how does one as tall as me trick the army into letting me be a tanker i just wrote that i was 6'3 on the application form actually it turned out that nobody checks once you're in the system when you sign your contract there is a check that's a criteria against which you were rated so for a 19k a tanker i would have been prohibited as being too tall and too colorblind i would have passed on the aptitude requirements though for 19 delta cavalry scout out of being too colorblind which is another piece of silliness and colorblind personnel were specifically sought for reconnaissance roles in world war ii however i signed on as a zero nine sierra which is a contract for a shot at ocs there are no height limitations for ocs and my color vision was good enough to read a map so that was that at the end of ocs we did the branching process at which point it was just the case of putting names to slots and nobody was asking for pulling medical records either that or i just begged sufficiently well as you could see from the form philip gertler thoughts on challenger 3 what the hell is it with you dog this is the wife's dog so the dog is not evil like a cat but i still don't get on well with her philip gudler thoughts on challenger 3. it seems like it'll be a reasonable tank but i'm wondering about some of the fitted 4 but not with options challenger 2 is already one of the heavier tanks out there and this challenger 3 is listed officially as 66 tons metric adding trophy to the abrams and as i recall correctly the better part are four tons to the vehicle and charity three is listed as having the option to add aps maybe they're waiting for something lighter than trophy to be invented the apparent lack of a remote weapon system is also interesting given the trends that most other countries seem to be going with the fusible rounds and battlefield management system i'm sure are fine and if the auto target identification and tracking system works so much better for it i'd like to take a good look at the turret front there are one or two extra objects there i'm not quite sure that they're for the laser warning system as new armor good new suspension good hopefully they retained the automated track tensioning system the upgraded engine has improved cooling but i know the advertising doesn't say it's actually any more powerful they do say that it's faster but that may just be a suspension thing the big question and i haven't seen anyone address it is why the british kept with the former and crew i've argued in the past and i stand by it that there's no point in just fitting an autoloader to a current turret you would need to design an entirely new turret to take advantage of it chaly 3 has an all-new turret but a human loader and i would refer to the earlier comment about weight presumably they have their reasons but it does seem a little bit odd when the entire rest of their army is going lighter guess the only other question is why they're talking about a full service capability in 2030. m1a2 sep v3 was announced in 2017 and was being fielded within three years i'd also be very curious to see the crew interfaces particularly gunner's control handles and no i doubt that there will be a captain scarlet watch party seb cranen i'm starting to see a couple of people asking multiple questions here was there anything i really wish i'd had in the m1 other than an air conditioner cool running water not that it was incredibly inconvenient to get out of the tank and get water or gatorade out of the cooler in the bustle rack challenger 2's track tension system hg ammunition pretty much the same answer for the bradley a way of getting the gun mountain feeder in and out of the body without removing skin would also be nice flipped sherman odd name i've been reading spearhead and the book mentions how one tanker had as many as five shermans knocked out from under him is it possible that the sherman's reputation stuck because so many crewmen lived to tell the tales p.s if you haven't read spearhead i recommend it you'll find them mentioned in the book as having gone over it before release but anyway but yeah somewhat facetiously maybe i have observed in the past how many of the sherman crewmen calling it a death trap are not actually dead of course it's a bit self-fulfilling i mean even if 90 had died the 10 percent who were left would be the 100 percent of the people talking and equally not dead but predominantly yes there is a bit of an effect of people who are alive to remember the negative experiences which themselves are not neutral so every one of the 90-some survivors of a tank company will remember and talk about the time that the company jokes they're a popular man and friend burned to death in his tank they will not much remember and talk about the three germans who they never knew and were killed in the burning panzer that they encountered a few hours later perception bias is a thing jay it's been said that tracks don't necessarily mean that something is a tank does it even have to be land capable to be a tank witness the tank boat and i actually do call it tank boat sounds like something from the sci-fi channel if the mi 24 is a flying tank i don't see why tank boat can't be a floating tank i think though it's actually closer to being a fire support vehicle than a tank mike quintin does an infantry company carry enough anti-armor ammunition to kill a tank company thinking particularly with regard to era and the requirement to blow through blocks probably not if you're relying on blowing off of era panels for a second shot in the same place you won't be accurate enough anyway hopefully you'll hit lower hull side engine compartment hatch era does help protect but it's not complete coverage light infantry anti-armor anyway is really more geared towards light armor i think leave the tanks to the guys with the proper anti-tank missiles like javelin or tow right i think that's about it q a complete i hope you found it interesting and informative and i will talk to you on the next one take care

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Published: Sun May 16 2021