Converting the Abrams for urban warefare

[DickHardman]

check out all the work thats been going into converting our abrams tanks to be more prepared for urban combat, since it seems thats the direction that military combat is going.

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/2006/08/street-fighters-m1-abrams-tusk-tank-conversions-updated/index.php

http://www.defense-update.com/features/du-1-06/feature-urban-armor.htm

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030521-tank-tactics01.htm

look at this pic that shows some of the modifications to our tanks. pretty cool.

[DickHardman]

http://www.armedassault.org/combat-videos/latest-combat-videos/60-hrs-of-maikop-brigade/grozny-95.html

heres a documentary called 60 hours of maikop brigade. its about the first battle for grozny when an entire 1000 man brigade of russian troops and armored vehicles were completely wiped out by chechen guerillas in only 60s hrs. sadly the documentary is all in russian, but theres lots of crazy combat footage. chechen guerillas are fierce, they have repeatedly wiped out entire brigades of russian forces with ambushes and guerilla warfare.

power to the people.

[kerambit]

The demise of the weapons platform has been greatly exaggerated. They've been saying for years that tanks and ships were going to be rendered useless by waves of cheap drones, cruise missiles and RPGs.

That said, the military industrial complex in the US has done very little to "agilize" the command and control structure of the US military, which is what's necessary to fight small groups that are highly but loosely connected in a network structure.

Why? What it would take to do that would impinge upon their primary purpose, which is to make money. The cold-war military is an unbelievable cash cow.

We'll probably shut down Iran inside of two days. Everyone will celebrate in the streets. And then the real war will start. The leadership of Iran and Syria aren't stupid, unlike that of some countries. They will have noticed how much trouble the US military has had against guerrilla attacks. They will have been planning since Gulf War I to wage protracted insurgencies.

Think Iraq's been tough? Iran and Syria have militaries, economies and R&D infrastructures that have been untouched for the last fifteen years.

Good luck with all that.

[DickHardman]

yeah, the president of syria has already stated that he is going to create a hezbollah like gurilla force of its own after seeing hezbollahs performace vs isreal this past summer. iran has also geared a lot of its military training to guerilla style warefare, hitting enemy supply lines, etc.

not only that, but all the sanctions that were put on iran, plus the imposed war against saddam caused iran to buy up all kinds of military equipment and develope a self suffienct military industry that has really come up over the years. iran now exports weapons to nato members.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_military_exports

[DickHardman]

btw, tanks were considered to be obselete by some analysts with the advent of combat choppers, but its really about how they are used. the israelis lost many tanks during their offensive against hezbollah. in the final assault against guerillas before the ceasefire went into effect, almost half of israels armored force was hit by anti tank weapons because they were not prepared and not used properly. however, tanks have proven to be a pretty valuable asset in iraq despite the constant threat from ieds and anti tank weapons.

[kerambit]

Yes, Hezbo hurt Israel bad this summer. Maybe not casualty-wise, but they did cause an Israeli withdrawal. As I remember, many of the Israeli casualties were caused by the guerrillas' use of antitank weapons on Israeli foot squads. As well as hit and run rocket attacks.

As I remember also, Hezbo were using air drones made from remote controlled toys.