Very true Peter.
The vehicles Germany and the US will be sending are both built to accompany main battle tanks into battle, carry and protect Infantry and counter precisely the kind of threats you mentioned, enemy Infantry armed with Anti-Tank (AT) weaponry. In modern Western doctrine, tanks and IFVs and Infantry always fight together, ideally further supported by air support and artillery.
Tanks aren’t “wonder weapons” on their own. They can only play out their strengths in a combined arms effort. The training the Ukrainians will recieve is key. Reportedly, it will take 8 weeks.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
It’s short for “Gepanzertes Fahrzeug” which in turn means armored vehicle. But as far as I have read texts back to WW I it has been used for tank.
I think it’s also to do with the way the word armour started to be used in a military context, particularly with regard to units. Armour became a description, almost an adjective, rather than a strict noun.
E.g.
“The armour is coming over the hill” = the tanks (or other armoured vehicles) are coming over the hill: used in plural, but you would not say that the armour is behind the building if you were referring to one single tank.
Also “an armoured division” is basically a division containing tanks. In WW2 a panzer division meant tanks of course, though it wasn’t literally saying tank division, rather armoured division.
I’m ready to be corrected, but I didn’t think one could point at a single tank and (accurately) say “there is the panzer”, or even “there are the panzers” for a group of tanks, but you could say “there is a panzer unit” about that same group. Hence I suggest it’s an adjective in this context.
Peter wrote:
Armoured vehicles cannot be used alone – as Putin found out. One anti tank missile and poooof it’s gone.
During the time when tank wars were what people trained for in the Cold War, numbers were always the issue. Tanks operate in large numbers and it is fully expected that a lot of them get destroyed. Tank battles are extremely violent and have huge casualty and material cost, also they leave a lot of “burnt earth” behind.
So you are very right, they can’t be used alone but in masses. And while more modern tanks will balance that budget a bit, in the end the sheer numbers of tanks can still make a difference, it mainly puts the balance towards those with more modern equipment.
I recall a cartoon many many years ago said to originate from a NATO/WAPA meeting, where a Russian and American colonel of tank troops are sitting on a rock with a Whisky and a Vodka after beating the cr*p out of each other. One of them asks the other “Oh, by the way, who won the air war?” Shows the attitude of tankers…
MedEwok wrote:
that will require a whole lot more casualties and even then one cannot be sure if the public opinion in Russia concludes that now would be a good idea to wage the war more radically (just think of Goebbels “Total War” speech) than ever before.
Exactly. The comparison to bringing down Nazi Germany therefore is flawed, as a similar invasion and actual occupation of every square foot of enemy land including leveling the capital as it was done then is impossible here. First, Russia is MUCH larger, secondly neither side has the manpower necessary and then of course, there is the nuclear deterrent. The moment NATO troops would enter Russia, they would be employed, long before any opponent comes as close to Moscow’s gates as Germany did. And in any case, an invasion like this would rally the Russians behind no matter who their government is to the extent it was observed by both Hitler and Napoleon.
MedEwok wrote:
However given that oublic opinion, which I outlined in the excellent Spiegel-Interview yesterday, that will require a whole lot more casualties and even then one cannot be sure if the public opinion in Russia concludes that now would be a good idea to wage the war more radically (just think of Goebbels “Total War” speech) than ever before.
Not quite sure about that. They eventually gave up in Afghanistan when they saw that war could not be won. Yes, Ukraine needs to hold their positions, possibly advance to the point of throwing them out totally. But in the end, the only way to “pacify” this conflict will be the introduction of a DMZ between Russia and certainly Ukraine, if not along the whole border to all European states.
Unfortunately, the longer this war lasts the more Ukrainian (and world) economy will suffer. OTOH the longer it lasts the larger chances are Russia will be defeated and Putin will be gone forever.
I don’t think Russia has any more escalation options in terms of waging the war more radically. They are fully committed and using everything they have that is serviceable and can be brought into action. It is currently a 100% effort, they are just not very good.
Except nuclear weapons of course. But he isn’t going to do that.
They need much more, sooner.
Absolutely; even if they are losing 1/5 of the Russian losses (no hard data on that) it is a high cost for a country which we hope will recover to normality at some stage. Also the longer it goes on the more housing Russia turns into rubble and it will have to be rebuilt, and the current estimates are around 500BN Deutchmarks Euros.
Actually, an interesting aside is the attempt to root out corruption; Zelensky was elected largely on that mandate. But no European country has ever rooted out corruption in peacetime. [insert your favourite country] is the same today in personal, corporate, and institutional transparency as it was pre-EU, etc. Ukraine has the opportunity of martial law, which won’t last for ever.
The comparison to bringing down Nazi Germany therefore is flawed
This topic, even after 84 years, is hot enough to trigger a forum exodus 
One highly educated guy – no longer flying GA – would say “the Brits never cracked Enigma – it was only the mistakes of the German soldiers” And he was saying that in ~2018, not 1944. So we should not get into this.
Russia cannot be subjugated by any army which can be assembled in 20th or 21st century; it is too big, the logistics too impossible, and nowadays nobody wants to do it anyway. I don’t know why anybody thought it would work. Russia has nothing of economic value other than raw materials, which they will happily sell you anyway.
They eventually gave up in Afghanistan when they saw that war could not be won.
Russia was in Afghanistan 1979-1989. Russia’s history has always pivoted around its leaders, so let’s see:
Leonid Brezhnev (October 14, 1964 — November 10, 1982)
Yuri Andropov (November 12, 1982 — February 9, 1984)
Konstantin Chernenko (February 13, 1984 — March 10, 1985)
Mikhail Gorbachev (March 11, 1985 — December 25, 1991)
and you can see why it started (the dickhead Brezhnev, who did CZ in 1968, and in 1979 was well into a dementia care home) and why it ended (the forward-looking Gorby who was ultimately unsuccessful in dragging Russia out of the 15th century).
Peter wrote:
“the Brits never cracked Enigma – it was only the mistakes of the German soldiers”
It’s a strong way of putting it, but I think it’s technically correct?
As I understand it, pretty much all decryption starts with an example of decrypted text (a ‘crib’) so that you can test any solution you come up with. If you don’t have a crib you’re pretty stuck, and the cribs tended to come from transmissions of known format and content – in this instance weather reports from U-boats.
It’s a strong way of putting it, but I think it’s technically correct?
It has an element of truth, but it’s very far from the whole truth. Enigma messages were cracked without any cribs because at first the Germans repeated a three-letter key at the start of each message. With knowledge of the wiring of the encrypting rotors in the machine, it was possible sometimes to deduce which rotors were in use. This was all based on work done by Polish cryptographers in the thirties.
It’s true also that German operators made silly mistakes, one of which was called the CILLI by the Brits. For example they would use three consecutive letters on the keyboard – say ASD – as the key.
The weather reports from weather ships (not U-boats) were a big help, as were pro-forma messages beginning every single day with the same text.
There are loads of books on the subject, and I think I’ve read all of them.
The algorithm has dumb weaknesses which anybody today with even a hobby interest in crypto would spot immediately, and which make it useless for deployment in a field (of anybody but especially mostly low-IQ operators). But to do it on an industrial scale took a lot more work and ingenuity, especially the Naval Enigma with its bigram tables.
The Ukraine “crypto war” would be interesting to read about but it won’t come out for many decades. Russia has strong crypto today but deployment is always tricky. The NSA is hard at work for sure, and supplying intelligence to Ukraine. I also noticed US satellite imagery was mentioned early in the war by Ukrainian soldiers but clearly somebody told them to stop it.
What amazes me is how much geolocatable smartphone material is being openly posted. There must be some controls on it…
