American Tanks Will, Tank By James Reed
Much fanfare has been made about the American tanks being sent to the Ukraine, to supposedly tip the balance of the war; allegedly, real game changers. However, there is no realistic discussion in the mainstream media who celebrate this, that I could find, of how this will actually work. But, someone highly trained in tank warfare, retired US Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, has tipped cold water over the idea, saying that there will be little impact.
For a start, the Ukraine has been given tanks, and still has plenty, so it is not proven that the more modern US tanks will change anything, since here have been few tank versus tank battles. Most importantly, the new tanks being more technologically sophisticated than the lot the Ukraine now has, require trained operators, and the Ukraine lacks them. It would take some months to put the required training in. Hence, as I see it, I would not be surprised to see the tanks grind to a halt, and be left to rust in some Ukrainian former wheat field. I suppose the US tanks would make great homes, if left open for a whole host of furry creatures over the bitter winter.
“Providing new tanks to Ukraine won’t change the reality on the ground of the current conflict with Russia, according to retired Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, who claimed the United States has “no plan” or strategy and warned of the real-world danger of invoking NATO’s “mutual defense” clause, which would trigger a nuclear war.
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Thursday, Davis discussed the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
Davis, a Defense Priorities senior fellow and military expert, spent over two decades in active service, which included combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was awarded two Bronze Star medals.
“It just doesn’t work that way in reality”
Calling the recent decision by the U.S., Germany, and other European nations to send tanks to Ukraine a “huge information operation ‘game changer,’” Davis cautioned that “information operations and claims don’t translate into reality on the battlefield.”
“From someone who has done combat operations in tank-on-tank fights; in operations patrolling the East-West border during the Cold War and its potential Soviet invasions; and was the second-in-command of an armored cavalry squadron for the First Armored Division in the mid 2000s in Germany; I can tell you that just having NATO tanks does not equal battlefield success,” he explained.
Davis cast doubt on the perception many have on how effective the new tanks will prove on the battlefield.
“The problem is that what works on video games and on paper — you have to make it work on the ground,” he said. “And very few people anywhere in the western media or anywhere in the other media, for that matter, understand how combat power is made.
“And it’s not just the platform, though that is very important, but roughly 90 percent of the success is the people who operate the equipment,” he added.
In order to achieve that, he explained, a “trained individual at each of the positions within a tank” is needed, in addition to “a trained crew that knows how to fight well together.”
“And then you have to have a trained platoon, platoons in a company; and a company in the battalion; and if you’re talking about the inner-level operations, battalions within brigades etc,” he said.
“So all of those are necessary and they all take time,” he added.
Recalling his unit’s “intense training” in Europe and Saudi Arabia prior to battle in order to “replicate” how war would play out, Davis noted that it had all taken place with military officials in key positions with many years of experience — something he asserted could not be “manufactured.”
“You can’t send 500 [Ukrainian] dudes to Germany and conduct six weeks of maneuver training and think you’re going to get the same output, because those guys don’t have the experience,” he said. “They don’t even have the baseline understanding that we had a whole career and our whole training before we even arrived at that one year preparation.”
Davis suggests imagining the chances that someone who has “never even seen this equipment” will “have to just fall in on it while they’re in [combat] potentially a few months from now — which is what they’re saying they’re trying to do — and it’s somehow those things are going to be effective in combat.”
“I mean just on the surface of it, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “I mean it’s people who just don’t have any idea of how actual combat power is generated that would believe that.”
“Because maybe it works for movies and in video games — just getting this capacity on your video game and poof, you’ve got the full capacity as though you were fully trained, but it just doesn’t work that way in reality,” he added.
“What makes somebody think that just the presence of a different kind of tank is suddenly going to change all that?”
Another problem Davis pointed to is that Ukraine has already possessed strategic weapons on the ground throughout the conflict.
“It’s not as though Ukraine has no tanks and so they need tanks to operate because suddenly [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky said he needed 300 new tanks,” he said.
“Well, the fact is they’ve got — depending on who you want to believe — somewhere around 1,000 tanks already and, according to Bloomberg, something along the neighborhood of 410 Soviet-era tanks have been given to them since the war started in addition to whatever survives from when they first started,” he continued.
“So they have tanks; they have artillery pieces,” he added. “We’ve given a bunch of those. They [also] have rocket launchers.”
As a result, Davis questioned “just what an Abrams or Leopard tank is going to do differently than the T72s, the T80s or the T64s that they have right now?”
“And that’s the part that no one’s even talking about,” he said. “It’s like, look, you have tanks already; you can say that our Abrams is more capable but what is that going to do in the field?”
“I’ve been scouring the internet and any report I could find for months, and there’s hardly any tank-on-tank engagements,” he noted.
Highlighting how Ukraine “in a year of fighting, has never pushed Russia back [from the Donbas area],” Davis questioned, “What makes somebody think that just the presence of a different kind of tank is suddenly going to change all that?”
He also noted that Ukraine “has no experience in maneuver warfare.”
“They have lots of experience in trench-warfare, in static warfare, and in defensive warfare — they’ve actually gotten very good at it and that’s why it’s so hard and taking Russia so long to push Studenok, because they’re actually very good at defending,” he said.
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