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Is the day of tanks coming to an end as we know them?
Recently a few of us on the chat circle talked about the U.S. phasing out
tracks in favor of treads (Tanks for nothing). I forwarded your comments to
a top notch active duty soldier, a platoon leader now serving with 82 ABN
(also an army sniper). He had some interesting responses to your comments
that I thought you would like to read.
I am posting his comments/opinions as they might be of interest to everyone
who wants to debate this latest move by the US.
"Jim has it right on. You can say all you want about (warfare) theory, but
the fact is that when I am getting shelled by enemy tanks, damn it, I want
our tanks there to fight back!
A T-54 is an out of date tank, but get rid of all of our tracked vehicles and
you've made it an asset again."
"Bill Benson is a lot more in tune to how things work (military wise)."
"Has Steve served in a line unit? Because it would apear that way. The fact
of the matter is this: It is wise to bulk up our lighter forces with more
sophisticated anti-tank and anti-personnel weaponry, but how does depleting
our current armor forces help them? Case in point, the North Koreans and the
Chinese combined have around 12,000 main battle tanks.
Even though an infantry man can take out an Abrams with say... a Javelin
round, they will learn to adapt to those tactics. If you miss, an Abrams can
really tear up two soldiers carrying a couple of rockets. Not to mention the
fact that where an RPG7 might do some damage against a humvee, it wont do
anything to an Abrams."
End
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 02 2000 - 22:30:22 PST