Same as someone here under 30 getting into an old truck with 3 on the tree.

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The US has promised money almost equal to a year of Russian defense spending but only spent like half of that, and in any case you guys have to decide if the money was all stolen or not.


East Germany was never in the USSR and the west didn’t promise not to expand NATO.


The US put nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Tell me more?


I get that you hate America but calling for nuclear war against your own country is a bit much don’t you think?


Russia didn’t hold much of ukraine until much later, and they took it in large part from poles and tatars. They want you to believe it’s always been theirs, but it hasn’t.

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East Germany wasn't "allowed to leave.". The Berlin Wall collapsed through typical commie government incompetence and ennui and the East Germans left as fast as they could.  Plus, any promises made to the USSR are as binding as promises made to the independent nation of Bavaria



The U.S. did not "threaten nuclear war", the U.S. Navy embargoed Cuba to prevent missile bases from being built.  The only threat of nuclear war was if the Soviets escalated.  And afterwards, we removed our medium range missiles from Turkey in a nod to the Soviets.



Germany set the rules when they began the Blitz, intentionally targeting English cities with bombing raids and V1s.  To say nothing pf the genocide they carried put on conquered territtories.  They got back a little more than they bargained for to be sure.  Japan did even worse than Germany in the murdering civilians category, and they did it personally rather than aerial bombardment.  Then they decided to sneak-attack the U.S.

The U.S. didn't forcibly take Okinawa from Japan and then 8 years later invade Honshu, and then nuke it.  It nuked Japan after it was attacked by Japan, fought a long, bloody war to get close enough to actually attack Japan back, and after the Japanese refused multiple opportunities to surrender.



Ukraine has made its choice.  The Ukrainians may be relying on western money; but it's Ukrainian blood doing the heavy lifting.  They don't want to be part of Russia and they're willing to fight over it.  Nukes aren't going to change that and will further isolate Russia.



Yeah, that's not the adult level of war-gaming.  Grown ups would consider the reality of broadening a war when you're already getting your ass kicked by the kid you tried to steal lunch money from.

Pretty sure North Korea makes it too.




Until you have to break track, hump ammo, pull security, put up/take down camo nets, hand-dig a two-tier fighting position, perform crew maintenance, dig concertina wire out of the drive sprocket, fill in an antitank ditch by hand, manually de-mine a route ....

Sure; but when your non-compartmented ammo blows up and sends your turret flying 200 feet into the air, you only lose three guys instead of four.

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just saw a picture of our troll.

Perhaps you missed the video of a German captured T-34 that they ran into a swamp when they were done with it.  It was pulled out of the swamp after 50 years of being underwater, dried out, fresh fuel and oil put in it, a charged battery, and it fired up and drove.

I can't picture Russian depot storage/maintenance being QUITE that bad ...

I think some Arab countries ended up with 62s.

Russia supposedly jacked India out of several of T-90Ms that India had returned for upgrading.  At least one of those ended up in Ukraine.

Several issues might be in play.  The economies of the Soviet Union and vessel countries is vastly different than the US.  Our goverment needs pork to spread.  We needed to keep producing, so we did not maintain our antiques.  A communistic country would not work that way.  They needed to be able to arm there vessel states, but probably did not feel the need to manufacture new shit for them.  So their antiques probably went into storage.  Likewise, the ammo for those antiques probably went into storage.  Even if they have plenty of modern equipment - right now they may be running low on ammo.  Easier to dust off the old equipment that has not been given to other countries and use old surplus ammo than figure out a way to increase ammo production for the new stuff.

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Why would they bring them out if the T72 tanks were easy pickins? Anyone?

They don't have anything else?
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They had a bunch of T62s they were "modernizing" to sell abroad.  Those tanks are relatively intact, upgraded, and work because they were going to be sold and stealing parts off them would have been discovered when they were delivered.  Same with embezzling funds used to upgrade them.

The T72s in inventory are primarily Russian army.  So, not only have they been stripped of anything valuable by their own soldiers, their commanders probably spent the money that was supposed to be used to maintain them on boats and hoes.  And that cycle has been going on so long you can always say "It was like that when I got here" if you grt caught.

I have read reports that Russia has lost over 90% of its combat armor vehicles in this.  It’s certainly makes the case for the obsolescence of tanks.  Anti tank weapons have far outpaced the development of armor.

Wrong lesson to take.

Do the T72s being stripped of things explain why they have lost a lot of them in Ukraine?

I'd say it makes the case that the current Russian army can't even pull off 1944 Soviet armored doctrine.  I'm not sure using tanks like a drunken halfwit means tanks are obsolete.  If you read the Russian reports, they don'teven have reliable comms with other tanks in their platoon, and no comms with infantry, artillery, or air support except at the command levels.  Kind of hard to do combined arms without communication.

Well, if you were a Russian commander who had embezzled funds and then got orders to move out on combat operations in the next 24 hours out of the blue, reporting non-combat ready equipment as "destroyed by the enemy" and then abandoning it in a field is probably better for you than saying "Yes, on that last report where I said we were at 97% readiness, I meant 47%.". But that's just speculation on my part.

I do know from reading Russian language reports that radio sets, headsets, and other critical communications gear is in short supply and much of what they do have is old, analog stuff.  That's probably not helpful.

Russia makes a case for a smaller amount of quality equipment rather than thousands of obsolete vehicles and weapons - especially without Chinese-level manpower where they could deploy a lot of junk all at once to just overwhelm with their numbers while taking heavy losses.

I recall before the war people thought Ukraine was wrong to operate 800-1200 T tanks instead of 200 modern tanks. Who is the genius now?

Same thing an MTLB, bmp1/2, bmd would do with less crew?

Yeah, North Korea does make it.

Sounds like maybe the top Kremlin leaders didn't know about this before sending orders to invade Ukraine.

The Soviet Union believed quantity has a quality of it's own. Maybe the Kremlin leaders didn't know the condition and maybe theft of equipment until they went into Ukraine.

Russia is broke and it's cheaper than a T80 or 72. They still come with a pop-up turret.

Its really hard to say.

If you look at wars like the Boer War, Russo-Japanese War, which preceded WWI, or the Spanish Civil War, which preceded WWII, or the Armenian-NK fighting...there are definite indications that the new weapon systems are changing the balance.  How much...really really hard to say.

I think high intensity conflict between peer competitors is absolutely more of a crap shoot with much more uncertainty.  And a world power that invests in UAVs has more of an advantage.  Besides that...the old status quo is out and the future is uncertain.

The big advantage of a three man crew is a smaller tank that is lighter, and can have thicker armor. Harder to hit and better frontal armor then it if was big enough to house four. But that is assuming business as usual and there arent so many top attack threats.

And you missed the part about being sunk in the swamps is what actually preserved the tank. The very low oxygen levels in the swamps there inhibits corrosion.

Moot point really.  I get the strong feeling they are sending out only two per tank.  Driver and TC.

I'd hate to be the guys trying to keep old Russian War Stock equipment running, I sure as hell wouldn't want to have to crew the stuff.

I worked a lot with the Maritime Prepositioning Force, we a had a lot of equipment stored on those ships. The MPF works hard to keep war stock in good condition and our stuff was routinely pulled off the ships to go through depot level maintenance and repairs before being put back on the ships. We still fought with stuff like dry rot, hardened seals, corrosion, contamination of fuel and lubrication systems, dead batteries and a lot of other maintenance headaches. War stock stuff required more man hours to keep operational than equipment in our TOA that stayed active.

I'm sure the Russians haven't dedicated the manpower and expense to maintaining their war stock like we have. Just throwing some batteries, fresh fuel and filters at a piece of equipment that's been sitting for years neglected may get it running but it doesn't make it operational. I doubt the stuff getting rushed through the Russian maintenance depots are going to get the repairs and upgrades that we would enjoy.

I don’t follow what’s going on over there. So I don’t have a dog in this fight.

But stuff like this doesn’t pass the bullshit test. There was another one of these about small arms fairly recently. I don’t believe either for a minute.

The T62 is like 4 generations of tanks ago. T90/T80M, T80/T72M, T72, T64, then T62 and T55. They didn’t make any of these in small numbers. We’re talking about literally thousands upon thousands of tanks. Even if half of them didn’t make it through the post Cold War era, that’s still a shitload of tanks.

The war over there is not yet a year old. They’d have to be taking Eastern Front WWII scale loses daily this whole time to go through that many tanks. They made so many specifically so they could sustain those kinds of losses.

I think a more realistic explanation is that if they’re seeing those older tanks in usage: they’ve either been upgraded or they’re using them for some specific task.

Small arms production is on an even grander scale by virtue of the fact that it’s a shitload easier to make AKs and PKMs than it is tanks. Even the AKMs are 2-3 generations obsolete. The AK-74M(which have been out for 20 years or better) and the AK-74s(which were produced all the way back into the 1970’s). So there are at least 2 full generations of 5.45x39 weapons production that was sitting there waiting on a war-possibly a 3rd if they produced the AN-94 in any quantity(but that’s a pretty big if to be fair). But even so, they’d have to be taking WWI type loses daily to burn through that many weapons. Because they literally geared their production to sustain those kinds of loses.

After WWII the Soviets really prioritized small arms production. They had ended up seriously short of weapons in two World Wars. They even kept stocks of captured weapons for issue if things got REALLY bad(that was all of those Russian Capture K98s that were available here 15-20 years ago). They never really stopped wartime level production during the Soviet era. Sure, QC got a bit better because they weren’t under duress anymore. But they kept production going as though there would be another war in short order. It’s hard to imagine, because we didn’t do that over here.

We’re literally talking about MILLIONS of AK-74s sitting in Cosmoline waiting for issue. SVDs have basically been in constant production since 1963(though they are probably not making the original model anymore). Think about how many weapons that is. They simply haven’t taken those kinds of loses-it’s not possible. That giant import of 7n6 ammo 15 years ago or so-it didn’t even scratch the surface of what they have. I never saw any of it dated after the 70’s, and I was looking(I wanted to find a crate marked from the Afghan War era). That means all of that imported was from the first 5 years or so of production. And I’m sure it probably wasn’t even all of that.

So to sum it all up-It isn’t possible for the Russians to have taken so many losses as to be forced to use a late1950’s era tank because they’ve lost everything else. That’s propaganda to convince you that one side is winning.

Again, I have no dog in this fight. I don’t keep up with what’s going on in Ukraine for a number of reasons.  But I have studied Russian weapons for long enough to have some sense of reality.

Doesn’t make sense to introduce another MBT platform in yet another main gun caliber to the UKR front when their lines of communication are already marginal to begin with.  

Besides, an analog tank like the T-62 with a simple stadia range finder and an intact supply chain of parts to support it is probably a lot easier to teach and maintain than a more modern Russian tank that uses electronic components sourced from foreign vendors that dried up at the start of the conflict.

Is Ukraine going to have space for all these T62 after the farmers tow them away?

And yet T-62s are showing up in the fight, along with the oldest T-72s, and North Korean marked ammunition crates.

I think Putin's secrecy served him poorly.  His commanders didn't have time to get their shit in order and we were still way inside his OODA loop on decision-making.  On the other hand, that shit had been going on for decades.  Even if his commanders had 2-3 months to get ready, they couldn't undo decades worth of embezzlement.

There was a Russian language story about a Russian unit commander whose unit had gotten called up   They had reported 90~% readiness about 7 months earlier.  When he had to actually move out, maybe 10% of his tanks were operational.  He shot himself before they deployed.

That's what I was thinking.. weren't they already using T-62s? Lol

The other advantage the T-62s have is they are diesel.  The Russians seem to be having issues keeping their newer gasoline powered tanks fueled.

All Russian tanks are multifuel, and run in normal operation on diesel.

Yes, what I typed was all fucked up.  Thank you for the correction.  They are having trouble keeping their new gas-turbine tanks fueled.

Easy!  Add whatever their WIA is (since Orc combat evac sucks, figure 2 WIA to 1 KIA)  +120,000-ish,  then add whatever percentage of their MAM population has fled since February; conservatively, this number probably is around +600,000.  Add in the roughly 1,000,000 or so that are physically incapable of any form of military service: Add in roughly 1,300,000 that have to be retained for other military and paramilitary duties, and your total is roughly 2,180,000 MAM not available for Ukraine.  Given Russia's age distribution (skews really old), they may not be at the bottom of the barrel now, but they can see it from where they are at!

The T-80s are the jet engines and they are expensive thirsty beasts. They like them for the arctic though because turbines start easily in low temps compared to piston engines.

I wonder if the T-72 refurbishment/modernization requires more chips and such that are suddenly in much shorter supply, making refurbishment of T-62s more attractive on a "tanks per chip" ratio.

They are both just going straight to the grave, so a T-62 will explode just as easily as a T-72, and the "marginal costs" are less.  Hell, they've been paid for so long ago that it might cost more to send the anti tank weapon than the Russians have into the T-62!

Awkward thing about Russia, their median age is only slightly older than us (39.6 vs. 38.1) despite their male life expectancy that’s almost 6 years shorter than ours. They are also dramatically unhealthy.

People puzzling over the numbers have to remember, the Russian military has other commitments besides Ukraine.  Maintaining troops along the border with China for example. They cannot sent EVERYBODY and every vehicle  to Ukraine.

It’s hard to estimate the value of something that’s 50 years old. Certainly they were the equivalent of several million dollars when new.

I don’t think many of the tanks they are rebuilding have much digital anything on them.

They’ve sent most. Reports at that from Poland to Finland they have 1/5 the normal manning. 6,000 guys.