I doubt that the current leadership actually gives any fucks about Russia's demographics. The nice thing about Kadyrov and his "savage divisions" is that he is fiercely loyal to Putin personally as opposed to some idea (be it communism, Orthodoxy, Russian nationalism etc). Because Kadyrov has staked everything on Putin, and will likely not be able to maintain control if Putin is gone without a smooth transition of power.
The fact that this basically makes one region of the country a Sharia enclave, and a breeding ground for extreme Islamists from where it spreads across the rest of the country, is not quite as important to Putin, even though the citizens might differ.
Russia's long term future has been defined rather clearly now: it will be a Chinese protectorate. It was either that or European integration, and they have abandoned the latter because they wanted to be on top of that particular ladder, or at least close to it, and that was not viable.
I don't really want to keep arguing about the rest of it, but regarding this:
An interesting thing about that whole conflict, I don't know why the Russians didn't just push that population out of their country. Putin is doing this whole "return to the old Tsarist ways" thing with the reintroduction of the Orthodox church as a state religion etc. And in that context, I don't know why they'd tolerate anyone not orthodox in their territory.
Putin has basically re-conquered Chechnya by striking a deal with one of the prominent families that put them in power and made the province basically their own personal fiefdom, in exchange for loyalty. It wouldn't make sense to expel them now, especially when not only they are loyal, but they provide him with shock troops to suppress internal unrest, and for external invasions (Chechen battalions were present in Georgia in 2008, and now also in Ukraine) . This is actually a time-honored Russian tradition - look up info on the Savage Division for an earlier example.
More generally speaking, Islam is actually very widespread in Russia - depending on who you ask, anywhere from 15% to 20% are adherents. And it's not just Caucasus, but also e.g. Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, well-developed and highly industrialized regions.
Historically, Russia has preferred amalgamation over assimilation in its imperial period, so most peoples who were forcibly incorporated, got to keep their faith - again, in exchange for loyalty. This found its way into various geopolitical theories popular in Russia, such as Eurasianism, which postulates that Orthodoxy and Islam actually have more in common as two "traditional" religions, while Catholicism is somewhat suspect, and Protestantism is dismissed outright as an "atlantist perversion". From the perspective of these people, they would want Russia as a whole to be an Orthodox country, but those part of it that are traditionally Muslim should remain so and be protected as such.
It doesn't have to come to it, but with sufficient social pressure as more jobs are lost to automation and there's inadequate welfare to support those people, it will eventually.
Soviet Union had nothing like basic income. What it had is guaranteed & mandatory employment (you had to work - "parasitism" was a criminal offence; but the state also guaranteed you a job), with salaries set by the state for all positions. You couldn't earn more by working more or better, generally speaking. And there was no free market for labor or employers.
Canceling more complicated social assistance programs and removing the minimum wage when this is implemented would actually result in a system that is MORE free market rather than LESS.
We could also simply the tax system by replacing progressive income tax with flat rate + (untaxed) basic income. That way everyone's income is inherently taxed progressively depending on how much they earn on top of BI, and it's much simpler to figure out who owns what. We could also get rid of a lot of deductions - e.g the one for children is not necessary if they also get BI on their own (perhaps at a reduced rate).
Oh, and on the funding side? If we start taxing capital gains at the same rate as regular income (and why shouldn't we tax economic rent at least as much, if not higher, than sweat-of-the-brow wages?), that's not a problem at all.
Imagine this. A simple, straightforward tax system where all your income, regardless of the source, is taxed at the same rate. An equally simple welfare system where everybody just gets a check. Thousands of government bureaucrats and offices rendered redundant overnight. What's not to like?
GP was specifically responding to a comment that claimed that guaranteed income would sap all the motivation for people to actually work. Regardless of financial viability, one thing that the Mincome experiment did show is that no such drop in motivation was observed. That is a valid take-away.
The reason why they're calling these "experiments" is because we simply don't know how the motivation would apply on a large scale.
Note, however, that these are not the first such experiments, and those that happened before have shown that the fear of most people sitting on their ass doing nothing on account of getting a check either way was largely unfounded.
Granted, MINCOME was not actually a living wage. Still, most people in that experiment didn't actually work less, which is the obvious conclusion of the "must motivate with money" theory.
Anyway, I don't really have a problem with a few people sitting on their ass doing nothing, if it vastly improves the situation for the rest of us. And with less administrative overhead (and the possibility to simplify the tax code for further overhead reduction - once your basic income is high enough, you can just use flat tax on personal income, and BI will effectively make it progressive), it may even save money over the existing complicated welfare systems.
Better yet, because those jobs would require a higher pay to make some human do it, it would provide more financial incentives to automate it. Basically anything that effectively raises the cost of one man-hour, be it minimum wage or guaranteed basic income, encourages more automation of human labor. And that is a good thing.
Look up Mincome. This was the name of a Canadian experiment that tried it on a fairly small scale (small town) several decades ago. It was pretty successful.
As to the Israelis having issues with AT rockets, they were surprised every time that happened from what I can tell. The two wars they had issues with were with the Egyptians in around 1973 and they had problems again in 2006 in Lebanon. In both cases the Israelis were surprised by the weapons and their doctrine did not account for them... and I think that more than anything caused the problem.
Well, yes - but the doctrine in question is exactly the one you're arguing is viable, advancing armor ahead of infantry that could back it up and engage enemy AT:)
As to the wider issues of urban warfare etc... this is just a question of enemies hiding behind women and children. If you're willing to kill women and children then this defense is gone. If you're not... then the enemy is invulnerable.
It's not so simple. Chechens weren't hiding behind their women and children in Grozny in 1994, for example, and Russians didn't really care either way in any case. But they didn't have the luxury of sitting there and demolishing the city building by building (and in any case they wanted to have the city, not to reduce it to rubble). Grozny still saw very extreme destruction in that war from bombs, artillery and tanks, but that rubble itself then provided plenty of cover to Chechen AT teams.
And again, the key deficiency in Russian planning was that they assumed that tanks could crush enemy infantry, and that they therefore had to lead the assault, while friendly infantry would follow them back at a distance to mop up & secure the area. It was during that initial assault that armor suffered heaviest losses. When they adjusted and put infantry in front as a screen, the losses have dropped significantly.
"According to many Russian officers, Chechen use of the antitank, or rocket-propelled grenade launcher (RPG), was the most effective city weapon. It could be used in the direct or indirect (that is, set up like a mortar) fire mode and was effective against people, vehicles, or helicopters as area or point weapons.... Two other initial Russian mistakes were that they did not always properly employ infantrymen in support of armor attacks (they followed behind armor instead of feeling out Chechen ambush sites), and they did not hold an area once it had been cleared."
"Too many Russian tanks made advances without covering infantry"
"The problem with mobility can be seen in the vertical obstacle clearance capabilities of example tracked and wheeled vehicles. The M2 Bradley is able to clear a three foot obstacle, while the LAV, which has eight wheels, is only able to clear a one foot, eight inch vertical obstacle. In an urban environment, there are many short obstacles, some placed by the enemy and some a natural part of the city. If a vehicle is not able to climb over these obstacles, then it will become trapped in the street, and the Chechen tactics of taking out the lead and rear vehicles will work well against U.S. forces"
"The importance of an effective combined arms team became very evident in this MOUT situation. One of the major problems with sending tanks in by themselves was that they were not able to engage targets above or below the first floor. The main barrel on the T-72 tank, for instance, will not elevate higher than 14 or lower than –6, which is not enough to engage above or below the first floor of a building at close range. To add insult to injury, the Chechens developed a tactic of engaging Russian tanks with more than one RPG simultaneously. The tanks, however, were only able to return fire again
In Iraq 1 we had armored columns attacking dug in Iraqi defenses all by themselves and annihilating everything. They blew up tanks, they killed soldiers...
What kind of AT weaponry did Iraqi troops have? So far as I know, it was mostly just RPG-7, which by now is very dated and doesn't work very well against reactive armor and such (as opposed to e.g. Kornet with its tandem charges) - as I recall, some figures cited something like 20 hits (not shots!) on average to disable a modern tank with RPG-7, though I don't remember if that figure is out of 2nd Chechen war, or Iraq & Afghanistan.
Also, in Iraq in 1991, American armor had one huge advantage against the enemy (both tanks and infantry) - they had night vision as part of the standard equipment, while the enemy did not. I hope it's obvious why it makes the battles very one-sided any time you get to choose the timing for your attack. I don't know about tank-vs-inf in Iraq 1, but I do know that most tank-vs-tank kills happened at night, precisely because of that. I assume it played a factor with infantry, as well.
US also enjoyed air superiority in that conflict, For example, in Battle of Medina Ridge, CAS aircraft both engaged enemy armor directly, scoring several dozen kills there alone, as well as suppressed enemy artillery and infantry positions. Iraqis didn't have anything similar on their side.
As to the Israelis killing these guys... I don't know... I think if you look at what was going on in the air, you see a pattern of the Israelis just wiping out their attackers across the board at a very very high k/d ratio. I question how much of that was tech.
I think you misunderstood the claim. It was not Israelis killing those guys, it was the reverse: those guys (Egyptians, and later Lebanese) blowing up Israeli tanks in numbers that were uncomfortably large - so large, in fact, that when it first happened in 1970s, many military strategists have been seriously talking about the "death of tank as a concept" (obviously that's an exaggeration, but it goes to show just how much the tables were turned with modern AT missiles). At that was all due to the AT tech finally catching up with MBT armor.
No-one is disputing that air supremacy is king either way. When air is uncontested, you can just rain death on enemy infantry and armor alike, and that's a whole different story. But that is not always possible, and obviously air isn't sufficient to exercise proper control on the ground, so at some point you still have to roll your ground forces in - and then the interactions between tanks and infantry start to matter.
What we can see is that the old soviet tech sold to the arabs is shit compared to slightly news American hardware which is what the Israelis had.
The tech in question was relatively mainstream and up-to-date in both cases. In Yom Kippur, it was upgraded Centurion tank for Israelis, and AT-3 Sagger for Egyptians; Sagger was only 10 years old at that point. In Lebanon in 2006, Israelis had the brand-new Merkava tank of their own design and manufacture, which could handle RPG-7 and AT-3 just fine, but Hezbollah acquired and used the newer Vampir (design finalized in 1989), Metis-M (1992) and Kornet (1998) AT systems to great effect.
As to your notion that infantry can fight without tanks or air cover or all the other elements of combined arms... I categorically disagree.
Perhaps you misunderstood. I didn't say that infantry can fight without air cover in general. I said that when we're talking specifically about tanks and infantry, with nothing else in the mix, tanks cannot fight alone successfully, while infantry can.
The tanks can shell at over 2 miles away.
The tanks can't shell what they don't know is there. They need a target. The problem for them is acquiring said target, and with their limited visibility vs extreme mobility of infantry (not in terms of top speed, but in terms of how easy it is to change direction and advance across non-flat terrain) they will lose this game against infantry every time, excepting a large flat field with no vegetation. In other words, the reverse of what you claim - the tank needs ideal circumstances to win against infantry in a solo fight (either the complete lack of efficient AT weaponry, or the lack of any means of concealment that said infantry can use).
If I had a choice of being a tank commander on the battlefield, or an infantry with Kornet or Javelin on the other side on the same battlefield, I'll pick the latter every single time - because my odds of survival would be so much better. A tank cannot hide and lay low; and infantryman can, and should, until the moment where the tank presents a ripe target (i.e. not observing that direction) - and then it's gone in a matter of seconds.
I really think that you do not truly appreciate just how much limited the vision is for the tank crew when all hatches are closed. It seems to be a common perception, and probably inflicted largely by video games that mostly ignore or patch over this.
Can you cite any situation where infantry were taking down tanks with reasonable casuality figures and as close to an apples to apples supply/tech base? Because I can't think of one.
It's pretty hard to find definitive casualty figures, but one well-known example of infantry, without armor of their own (or in vastly smaller quantities), delivering heavy damage to enemy tank forces, are IDF engagements, starting with Yom Kippur War (when Egyptians got the first shipments of guided AT missiles from the USSR, and used them to great effect). Later, Hezbollah also done the same to IDF in Lebanon. Some reading:
There have also been a lot of tanks destroyed in Ukraine in the ongoing fighting, on both sides, and most of them are destroyed by AT infantry (the only massive tank-vs-tank engagement that I heard of was at Debaltsevo).
As I think I said previously... men with spears can hold against nuclear weapons, robotic terminators, and genetically engineered plagues if you have enough men with spears. Unless you're willing to take the attrition though, you can't hold if you have the wrong forces.
Of course, we're not talking about men with spears here. We're talking about men with modern guided missiles capable of hitting a tank from over a mile away and penetrating the armor with a single such hit.
It's generally incorrect to assume that infantry is inherently inferior to vehicles. It's a trade-off - you gain some advantages (for tanks, firepower and armor), but you also lose some (for tanks, agility and ability to quickly detect, identify and engage targets).
You don't need to believe that BTC has long-term value to use it. It's a perfectly valid way to transfer money, for example, and the exchange rate really doesn't matter in that scenario.
There are many cases where breaking various countries' laws is a perfectly legitimate and even routine activity. A country can ban porn, for example, or weed, or something equally ridiculous.
And Sanders will be fine until you get the tax bill to pay for the blue haired and every other group he feels the rich (the rich being people like you) ought to pay for.
"The rich" are people who get most of their income from economic rent. No, they're not me, even though my income is several times higher than the national average - most of it is still sweat-of-the-brow income, salary and bonuses and such. As it is, "the rich" get taxed at a rate lower than what I pay. And Sanders is the only candidate who actually wants to raise the taxes on them (i.e. capital gains). Why would I have a problem with that?
Why do you think that he's an idiot on account of not keeping his piehole shut? Seeing what it does to his ratings, it would seem that it's actually a very smart strategy, despite all the naysayers from his own party.
I don't like the guy in the slightest, but he's playing his electorate like puppets, and they're liking it all the way. If anything, he comes off as a master troll and maybe even a sociopath, but stupid? No.
Not military tactics or steel, just dirty, dirty bodies and the immune systems of the Europeans who didn't understand hygiene.
It wasn't a hygiene issue, it was an exposure issue. Europeans had many generations that had to adapt to smallpox etc; the ones that did not were weeded out, the ones that did passed on the genes providing stronger immunity and more resistance to ill effects. Native Americans did not have any exposure to all these diseases, so they never had a chance to develop the immunity. Nor did Native Americans have their own serious infectious diseases, so there was no reverse problem for Europeans.
Don't discount the tech, either. Steel (versus stone and bone, and a few bits of copper here and there) is a big enough deal of its own, but firearms and horses were even more so.
My understanding is that these laws started to appear pretty much as soon as there was significant number of settlers and some organized government on those territories, same as other water rights laws - so second half of 19th century.
They actually make sense when there's not much water to go around, so something that you take for yourself in that manner also happens to be something that your neighbors don't get. Obviously a single barrel won't make a difference, but this is something that scales easily and can make an observable effect. It was easier to just ban it outright than to try to draw the line. They're experimenting with some limits now, but it's more akin to welfare - all water is still owned, but a (relatively small) part of it is allocated for redistribution.
My general answer to people who complain about this is to not live in states like Colorado if that's a problem for them. Any environment where natural resources are scarce is going to have a tragedy of the commons issue about those scarce resources unless some central management and allocation system is in place; water is not an exception. And it's not like there is shortage of places in US where water is abundant and not strictly rationed, for those who prefer it that way.
California is kinda sorta special in a sense that it had abundant water until recently. But then the problem was known for a long time, it's just that people were in denial or simply ignoring it as "not for our day". Those who were paying attention knew that this would be the endgame all along, and had ample time to move or otherwise prepare for rationing. As for the rest, their troubles shall serve as an abject lesson on the long-term effects of environmental denialism.
The point that I'm trying to make (and note that I'm not the same guy to whom you originally replied) is that on most modern battlefields, well-equipped infantry will pwn tanks if the latter have no infantry support of their own. In other words, tanks cannot fight alone, while infantry can.
As far as "stealthy" tanks go, this tech is to counter enemy tanks with thermal or night vision, not so much enemy infantry. A tank is large enough and loud enough that infantry will always be able to detect it before it detects them, if both sides are aware of each other's general presence. The main problem with visibility from inside the tank is vastly limited cones of that visibility. An infantryman on foot has up to 100 degrees FOV at any given moment, plus the ability to rapidly shift it in any direction, and quite acute hearing to aid his sight. 3+ infantrymen can easily cover the entire 180 degree arc in front and on the sides. In contrast, tankers only have the cupola and their periscopes; to get anywhere near what infantry enjoys, they have to open the hatch and ride exposed, which of course makes them that much more vulnerable to even basic small arms fire from infantry.
It's not nonsense, and the Snopes link that you gave only pertains to this specific case in Oregon. There are, in fact, laws on state level that make it illegal to specifically collect rainwater on your property. I have no idea if any are in California, but they certainly exist in Colorado, for example: "unless you own a specific type of exempt well permit, you cannot collect rainwater in any other manner, such as storage in a cistern or tank, for later use".
The nature of warfare has changed significantly since the tanks were first invented. Back then, they were essentially mobile bunkers, the whole point of which was to advance together with a wave of infantry, providing cover to it while suppressing enemy MG emplacements and such. Since AT weapons didn't exist yet, they were quite successful in that role.
Like any other new weapon on the battlefield, it spawned a spiral of incremental improvements to armor and anti-armor. AT rifles were developed to punch through steel, and so armor plating got thicker. Tanks themselves were equipped with guns that could be effectively used against other tanks, and were made lighter, nimbler and faster to stand a chance in tank-to-tank combat, while on the infantry side the energy ceiling for rifles was hit, and new tech like recoilless rifles and rocket-propelled grenades took over. Sloped armor appeared, because growing the thickness was no longer viable.
WW2 saw several large tank-vs-tank battles, which is something that happened very rarely in WW1. It also had a lot of infantry-vs-tank action, and infantry often had the upper hand in the later years of the war, when Germans had the Panzerfaust in numbers - for example, Soviets lost several tanks to infantry in one of their last advances towards the Reichstag in Berlin.
Since then we've got reactive armor and active defense systems on tanks, and fly-by-wire and fire-and-forget AT systems for infantry, the latter with things like tandem charges to defeat reactive armor. Tanks themselves don't really engage each other all that often (though it did happen on occasion in Syria and Ukraine lately), and have been slowly going back to their original role as mobile firepower support for infantry, as evidenced by newer designs such as Merkava that are explicitly all about tank-vs-infantry rather than tank-vs-tank.
Either way, for most of their history, unsupported tanks have been very vulnerable to enemy infantry. The only exceptions are the very first introduction of them, back when they were the game-changer; and very brief periods when anti-armor weaponry lags behind the newest advances in armor (but because it's generally much easier to blow things up than to stop them from being blown up, the normal state of affair is for armor to lag behind anti-armor).
Soviets had plenty of good armor early on in WW2. T-34 was better than anything Germans had at that moment (better than most everyone had, in fact), and there were more than a few. It's too bad the crews were trained very poorly compared to the German ones.
Soviet infantry's main problem with German tanks was, in fact, the lack of any decent or even just usable anti-tank weapons. All they had was a non-recoilless 14mm rifle (usually single-shot at that), with not nearly enough muzzle energy to penetrate armor of tanks of that period from any angle.
Infantry doesn't generally attack tanks, of course, other tanks do. But infantry can very well hold an area against tanks, especially when it's dense and low-visibility. The tank can only shell things that it has a more or less direct line of fire to, and it has to know that the enemy infantry is there. In practice the infantry will simply hide and wait until the tank comes close enough for AT weaponry. More importantly, visibility from inside the tank is actually rather shitty, so enemy infantry can flank and get very close even with little cover if the tank doesn't have any infantry support. This has actually been demonstrated numerous times in practice, most notably in the 1994 battle of Grozny that started the First Chechen War - the Russian tanks that were rushed into the city ahead of infantry advance were pretty much all burned down quickly, by Chechen AT infantry mostly firing from ground floor and basement windows.
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I doubt that the current leadership actually gives any fucks about Russia's demographics. The nice thing about Kadyrov and his "savage divisions" is that he is fiercely loyal to Putin personally as opposed to some idea (be it communism, Orthodoxy, Russian nationalism etc). Because Kadyrov has staked everything on Putin, and will likely not be able to maintain control if Putin is gone without a smooth transition of power.
The fact that this basically makes one region of the country a Sharia enclave, and a breeding ground for extreme Islamists from where it spreads across the rest of the country, is not quite as important to Putin, even though the citizens might differ.
Russia's long term future has been defined rather clearly now: it will be a Chinese protectorate. It was either that or European integration, and they have abandoned the latter because they wanted to be on top of that particular ladder, or at least close to it, and that was not viable.
I don't really want to keep arguing about the rest of it, but regarding this:
An interesting thing about that whole conflict, I don't know why the Russians didn't just push that population out of their country. Putin is doing this whole "return to the old Tsarist ways" thing with the reintroduction of the Orthodox church as a state religion etc. And in that context, I don't know why they'd tolerate anyone not orthodox in their territory.
Putin has basically re-conquered Chechnya by striking a deal with one of the prominent families that put them in power and made the province basically their own personal fiefdom, in exchange for loyalty. It wouldn't make sense to expel them now, especially when not only they are loyal, but they provide him with shock troops to suppress internal unrest, and for external invasions (Chechen battalions were present in Georgia in 2008, and now also in Ukraine) . This is actually a time-honored Russian tradition - look up info on the Savage Division for an earlier example.
More generally speaking, Islam is actually very widespread in Russia - depending on who you ask, anywhere from 15% to 20% are adherents. And it's not just Caucasus, but also e.g. Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, well-developed and highly industrialized regions.
Historically, Russia has preferred amalgamation over assimilation in its imperial period, so most peoples who were forcibly incorporated, got to keep their faith - again, in exchange for loyalty. This found its way into various geopolitical theories popular in Russia, such as Eurasianism, which postulates that Orthodoxy and Islam actually have more in common as two "traditional" religions, while Catholicism is somewhat suspect, and Protestantism is dismissed outright as an "atlantist perversion". From the perspective of these people, they would want Russia as a whole to be an Orthodox country, but those part of it that are traditionally Muslim should remain so and be protected as such.
That's what we peasants have the pitchforks for.
It doesn't have to come to it, but with sufficient social pressure as more jobs are lost to automation and there's inadequate welfare to support those people, it will eventually.
Soviet Union had nothing like basic income. What it had is guaranteed & mandatory employment (you had to work - "parasitism" was a criminal offence; but the state also guaranteed you a job), with salaries set by the state for all positions. You couldn't earn more by working more or better, generally speaking. And there was no free market for labor or employers.
Canceling more complicated social assistance programs and removing the minimum wage when this is implemented would actually result in a system that is MORE free market rather than LESS.
We could also simply the tax system by replacing progressive income tax with flat rate + (untaxed) basic income. That way everyone's income is inherently taxed progressively depending on how much they earn on top of BI, and it's much simpler to figure out who owns what. We could also get rid of a lot of deductions - e.g the one for children is not necessary if they also get BI on their own (perhaps at a reduced rate).
Oh, and on the funding side? If we start taxing capital gains at the same rate as regular income (and why shouldn't we tax economic rent at least as much, if not higher, than sweat-of-the-brow wages?), that's not a problem at all.
Imagine this. A simple, straightforward tax system where all your income, regardless of the source, is taxed at the same rate. An equally simple welfare system where everybody just gets a check. Thousands of government bureaucrats and offices rendered redundant overnight. What's not to like?
GP was specifically responding to a comment that claimed that guaranteed income would sap all the motivation for people to actually work. Regardless of financial viability, one thing that the Mincome experiment did show is that no such drop in motivation was observed. That is a valid take-away.
The reason why they're calling these "experiments" is because we simply don't know how the motivation would apply on a large scale.
Note, however, that these are not the first such experiments, and those that happened before have shown that the fear of most people sitting on their ass doing nothing on account of getting a check either way was largely unfounded.
Granted, MINCOME was not actually a living wage. Still, most people in that experiment didn't actually work less, which is the obvious conclusion of the "must motivate with money" theory.
Anyway, I don't really have a problem with a few people sitting on their ass doing nothing, if it vastly improves the situation for the rest of us. And with less administrative overhead (and the possibility to simplify the tax code for further overhead reduction - once your basic income is high enough, you can just use flat tax on personal income, and BI will effectively make it progressive), it may even save money over the existing complicated welfare systems.
Better yet, because those jobs would require a higher pay to make some human do it, it would provide more financial incentives to automate it. Basically anything that effectively raises the cost of one man-hour, be it minimum wage or guaranteed basic income, encourages more automation of human labor. And that is a good thing.
Look up Mincome. This was the name of a Canadian experiment that tried it on a fairly small scale (small town) several decades ago. It was pretty successful.
As to the Israelis having issues with AT rockets, they were surprised every time that happened from what I can tell. The two wars they had issues with were with the Egyptians in around 1973 and they had problems again in 2006 in Lebanon. In both cases the Israelis were surprised by the weapons and their doctrine did not account for them... and I think that more than anything caused the problem.
Well, yes - but the doctrine in question is exactly the one you're arguing is viable, advancing armor ahead of infantry that could back it up and engage enemy AT :)
As to the wider issues of urban warfare etc... this is just a question of enemies hiding behind women and children. If you're willing to kill women and children then this defense is gone. If you're not... then the enemy is invulnerable.
It's not so simple. Chechens weren't hiding behind their women and children in Grozny in 1994, for example, and Russians didn't really care either way in any case. But they didn't have the luxury of sitting there and demolishing the city building by building (and in any case they wanted to have the city, not to reduce it to rubble). Grozny still saw very extreme destruction in that war from bombs, artillery and tanks, but that rubble itself then provided plenty of cover to Chechen AT teams.
And again, the key deficiency in Russian planning was that they assumed that tanks could crush enemy infantry, and that they therefore had to lead the assault, while friendly infantry would follow them back at a distance to mop up & secure the area. It was during that initial assault that armor suffered heaviest losses. When they adjusted and put infantry in front as a screen, the losses have dropped significantly.
More reading:
http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys...
http://www.globalsecurity.org/...
http://smallwarsjournal.com/do...
Some notable quotes:
"According to many Russian officers, Chechen use of the antitank, or rocket-propelled grenade launcher (RPG), was the most effective city weapon. It could be used in the direct or indirect (that is, set up like a mortar) fire mode and was effective against people, vehicles, or helicopters as area or point weapons. ... Two other initial Russian mistakes were that they did not always properly employ infantrymen in support of armor attacks (they followed behind armor instead of feeling out Chechen ambush sites), and they did not hold an area once it had been cleared."
"Too many Russian tanks made advances without covering infantry"
"The problem with mobility can be seen in the vertical obstacle clearance capabilities of example tracked and wheeled vehicles. The M2 Bradley is able to clear a three foot obstacle, while the LAV, which has eight wheels, is only able to clear a one foot, eight inch vertical obstacle. In an urban environment, there are many short obstacles, some placed by the enemy and some a natural part of the city. If a vehicle is not able to climb over these obstacles, then it will become trapped in the street, and the Chechen tactics of taking out the lead and rear vehicles will work well against U.S. forces"
"The importance of an effective combined arms team became very evident in this MOUT situation. One of the major problems with sending tanks in by themselves was that they were not able to engage targets above or below the first floor. The main barrel on the T-72 tank, for instance, will not elevate higher than 14 or lower than –6, which is not enough to engage above or below the first floor of a building at close range. To add insult to injury, the Chechens developed a tactic of engaging Russian tanks with more than one RPG simultaneously. The tanks, however, were only able to return fire again
In Iraq 1 we had armored columns attacking dug in Iraqi defenses all by themselves and annihilating everything. They blew up tanks, they killed soldiers...
What kind of AT weaponry did Iraqi troops have? So far as I know, it was mostly just RPG-7, which by now is very dated and doesn't work very well against reactive armor and such (as opposed to e.g. Kornet with its tandem charges) - as I recall, some figures cited something like 20 hits (not shots!) on average to disable a modern tank with RPG-7, though I don't remember if that figure is out of 2nd Chechen war, or Iraq & Afghanistan.
Also, in Iraq in 1991, American armor had one huge advantage against the enemy (both tanks and infantry) - they had night vision as part of the standard equipment, while the enemy did not. I hope it's obvious why it makes the battles very one-sided any time you get to choose the timing for your attack. I don't know about tank-vs-inf in Iraq 1, but I do know that most tank-vs-tank kills happened at night, precisely because of that. I assume it played a factor with infantry, as well.
US also enjoyed air superiority in that conflict, For example, in Battle of Medina Ridge, CAS aircraft both engaged enemy armor directly, scoring several dozen kills there alone, as well as suppressed enemy artillery and infantry positions. Iraqis didn't have anything similar on their side.
As to the Israelis killing these guys... I don't know... I think if you look at what was going on in the air, you see a pattern of the Israelis just wiping out their attackers across the board at a very very high k/d ratio. I question how much of that was tech.
I think you misunderstood the claim. It was not Israelis killing those guys, it was the reverse: those guys (Egyptians, and later Lebanese) blowing up Israeli tanks in numbers that were uncomfortably large - so large, in fact, that when it first happened in 1970s, many military strategists have been seriously talking about the "death of tank as a concept" (obviously that's an exaggeration, but it goes to show just how much the tables were turned with modern AT missiles). At that was all due to the AT tech finally catching up with MBT armor.
No-one is disputing that air supremacy is king either way. When air is uncontested, you can just rain death on enemy infantry and armor alike, and that's a whole different story. But that is not always possible, and obviously air isn't sufficient to exercise proper control on the ground, so at some point you still have to roll your ground forces in - and then the interactions between tanks and infantry start to matter.
What we can see is that the old soviet tech sold to the arabs is shit compared to slightly news American hardware which is what the Israelis had.
The tech in question was relatively mainstream and up-to-date in both cases. In Yom Kippur, it was upgraded Centurion tank for Israelis, and AT-3 Sagger for Egyptians; Sagger was only 10 years old at that point. In Lebanon in 2006, Israelis had the brand-new Merkava tank of their own design and manufacture, which could handle RPG-7 and AT-3 just fine, but Hezbollah acquired and used the newer Vampir (design finalized in 1989), Metis-M (1992) and Kornet (1998) AT systems to great effect.
As to your notion that infantry can fight without tanks or air cover or all the other elements of combined arms... I categorically disagree.
Perhaps you misunderstood. I didn't say that infantry can fight without air cover in general. I said that when we're talking specifically about tanks and infantry, with nothing else in the mix, tanks cannot fight alone successfully, while infantry can.
The tanks can shell at over 2 miles away.
The tanks can't shell what they don't know is there. They need a target. The problem for them is acquiring said target, and with their limited visibility vs extreme mobility of infantry (not in terms of top speed, but in terms of how easy it is to change direction and advance across non-flat terrain) they will lose this game against infantry every time, excepting a large flat field with no vegetation. In other words, the reverse of what you claim - the tank needs ideal circumstances to win against infantry in a solo fight (either the complete lack of efficient AT weaponry, or the lack of any means of concealment that said infantry can use).
If I had a choice of being a tank commander on the battlefield, or an infantry with Kornet or Javelin on the other side on the same battlefield, I'll pick the latter every single time - because my odds of survival would be so much better. A tank cannot hide and lay low; and infantryman can, and should, until the moment where the tank presents a ripe target (i.e. not observing that direction) - and then it's gone in a matter of seconds.
I really think that you do not truly appreciate just how much limited the vision is for the tank crew when all hatches are closed. It seems to be a common perception, and probably inflicted largely by video games that mostly ignore or patch over this.
Can you cite any situation where infantry were taking down tanks with reasonable casuality figures and as close to an apples to apples supply/tech base? Because I can't think of one.
It's pretty hard to find definitive casualty figures, but one well-known example of infantry, without armor of their own (or in vastly smaller quantities), delivering heavy damage to enemy tank forces, are IDF engagements, starting with Yom Kippur War (when Egyptians got the first shipments of guided AT missiles from the USSR, and used them to great effect). Later, Hezbollah also done the same to IDF in Lebanon. Some reading:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mid...
http://www.aaj.tv/2006/08/anti...
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i...
There have also been a lot of tanks destroyed in Ukraine in the ongoing fighting, on both sides, and most of them are destroyed by AT infantry (the only massive tank-vs-tank engagement that I heard of was at Debaltsevo).
As I think I said previously... men with spears can hold against nuclear weapons, robotic terminators, and genetically engineered plagues if you have enough men with spears. Unless you're willing to take the attrition though, you can't hold if you have the wrong forces.
Of course, we're not talking about men with spears here. We're talking about men with modern guided missiles capable of hitting a tank from over a mile away and penetrating the armor with a single such hit.
It's generally incorrect to assume that infantry is inherently inferior to vehicles. It's a trade-off - you gain some advantages (for tanks, firepower and armor), but you also lose some (for tanks, agility and ability to quickly detect, identify and engage targets).
You don't need to believe that BTC has long-term value to use it. It's a perfectly valid way to transfer money, for example, and the exchange rate really doesn't matter in that scenario.
There are many cases where breaking various countries' laws is a perfectly legitimate and even routine activity. A country can ban porn, for example, or weed, or something equally ridiculous.
And Sanders will be fine until you get the tax bill to pay for the blue haired and every other group he feels the rich (the rich being people like you) ought to pay for.
"The rich" are people who get most of their income from economic rent. No, they're not me, even though my income is several times higher than the national average - most of it is still sweat-of-the-brow income, salary and bonuses and such. As it is, "the rich" get taxed at a rate lower than what I pay. And Sanders is the only candidate who actually wants to raise the taxes on them (i.e. capital gains). Why would I have a problem with that?
Why do you think that he's an idiot on account of not keeping his piehole shut? Seeing what it does to his ratings, it would seem that it's actually a very smart strategy, despite all the naysayers from his own party.
I don't like the guy in the slightest, but he's playing his electorate like puppets, and they're liking it all the way. If anything, he comes off as a master troll and maybe even a sociopath, but stupid? No.
Not military tactics or steel, just dirty, dirty bodies and the immune systems of the Europeans who didn't understand hygiene.
It wasn't a hygiene issue, it was an exposure issue. Europeans had many generations that had to adapt to smallpox etc; the ones that did not were weeded out, the ones that did passed on the genes providing stronger immunity and more resistance to ill effects. Native Americans did not have any exposure to all these diseases, so they never had a chance to develop the immunity. Nor did Native Americans have their own serious infectious diseases, so there was no reverse problem for Europeans.
Don't discount the tech, either. Steel (versus stone and bone, and a few bits of copper here and there) is a big enough deal of its own, but firearms and horses were even more so.
35% alcohol? It's not vodka, sorry. Vodka starts at 40%.
My understanding is that these laws started to appear pretty much as soon as there was significant number of settlers and some organized government on those territories, same as other water rights laws - so second half of 19th century.
They actually make sense when there's not much water to go around, so something that you take for yourself in that manner also happens to be something that your neighbors don't get. Obviously a single barrel won't make a difference, but this is something that scales easily and can make an observable effect. It was easier to just ban it outright than to try to draw the line. They're experimenting with some limits now, but it's more akin to welfare - all water is still owned, but a (relatively small) part of it is allocated for redistribution.
My general answer to people who complain about this is to not live in states like Colorado if that's a problem for them. Any environment where natural resources are scarce is going to have a tragedy of the commons issue about those scarce resources unless some central management and allocation system is in place; water is not an exception. And it's not like there is shortage of places in US where water is abundant and not strictly rationed, for those who prefer it that way.
California is kinda sorta special in a sense that it had abundant water until recently. But then the problem was known for a long time, it's just that people were in denial or simply ignoring it as "not for our day". Those who were paying attention knew that this would be the endgame all along, and had ample time to move or otherwise prepare for rationing. As for the rest, their troubles shall serve as an abject lesson on the long-term effects of environmental denialism.
The point that I'm trying to make (and note that I'm not the same guy to whom you originally replied) is that on most modern battlefields, well-equipped infantry will pwn tanks if the latter have no infantry support of their own. In other words, tanks cannot fight alone, while infantry can.
As far as "stealthy" tanks go, this tech is to counter enemy tanks with thermal or night vision, not so much enemy infantry. A tank is large enough and loud enough that infantry will always be able to detect it before it detects them, if both sides are aware of each other's general presence. The main problem with visibility from inside the tank is vastly limited cones of that visibility. An infantryman on foot has up to 100 degrees FOV at any given moment, plus the ability to rapidly shift it in any direction, and quite acute hearing to aid his sight. 3+ infantrymen can easily cover the entire 180 degree arc in front and on the sides. In contrast, tankers only have the cupola and their periscopes; to get anywhere near what infantry enjoys, they have to open the hatch and ride exposed, which of course makes them that much more vulnerable to even basic small arms fire from infantry.
California does NOT work this way
And the way it works, it's never going to fix the drought issue.
So, either come up with a more sensible system, or... wait, are there actually any other viable options?
It's not nonsense, and the Snopes link that you gave only pertains to this specific case in Oregon. There are, in fact, laws on state level that make it illegal to specifically collect rainwater on your property. I have no idea if any are in California, but they certainly exist in Colorado, for example: "unless you own a specific type of exempt well permit, you cannot collect rainwater in any other manner, such as storage in a cistern or tank, for later use".
The nature of warfare has changed significantly since the tanks were first invented. Back then, they were essentially mobile bunkers, the whole point of which was to advance together with a wave of infantry, providing cover to it while suppressing enemy MG emplacements and such. Since AT weapons didn't exist yet, they were quite successful in that role.
Like any other new weapon on the battlefield, it spawned a spiral of incremental improvements to armor and anti-armor. AT rifles were developed to punch through steel, and so armor plating got thicker. Tanks themselves were equipped with guns that could be effectively used against other tanks, and were made lighter, nimbler and faster to stand a chance in tank-to-tank combat, while on the infantry side the energy ceiling for rifles was hit, and new tech like recoilless rifles and rocket-propelled grenades took over. Sloped armor appeared, because growing the thickness was no longer viable.
WW2 saw several large tank-vs-tank battles, which is something that happened very rarely in WW1. It also had a lot of infantry-vs-tank action, and infantry often had the upper hand in the later years of the war, when Germans had the Panzerfaust in numbers - for example, Soviets lost several tanks to infantry in one of their last advances towards the Reichstag in Berlin.
Since then we've got reactive armor and active defense systems on tanks, and fly-by-wire and fire-and-forget AT systems for infantry, the latter with things like tandem charges to defeat reactive armor. Tanks themselves don't really engage each other all that often (though it did happen on occasion in Syria and Ukraine lately), and have been slowly going back to their original role as mobile firepower support for infantry, as evidenced by newer designs such as Merkava that are explicitly all about tank-vs-infantry rather than tank-vs-tank.
Either way, for most of their history, unsupported tanks have been very vulnerable to enemy infantry. The only exceptions are the very first introduction of them, back when they were the game-changer; and very brief periods when anti-armor weaponry lags behind the newest advances in armor (but because it's generally much easier to blow things up than to stop them from being blown up, the normal state of affair is for armor to lag behind anti-armor).
Didn't US Army actually stop issuing bayonets a few years ago?
Soviets had plenty of good armor early on in WW2. T-34 was better than anything Germans had at that moment (better than most everyone had, in fact), and there were more than a few. It's too bad the crews were trained very poorly compared to the German ones.
Soviet infantry's main problem with German tanks was, in fact, the lack of any decent or even just usable anti-tank weapons. All they had was a non-recoilless 14mm rifle (usually single-shot at that), with not nearly enough muzzle energy to penetrate armor of tanks of that period from any angle.
Infantry doesn't generally attack tanks, of course, other tanks do. But infantry can very well hold an area against tanks, especially when it's dense and low-visibility. The tank can only shell things that it has a more or less direct line of fire to, and it has to know that the enemy infantry is there. In practice the infantry will simply hide and wait until the tank comes close enough for AT weaponry. More importantly, visibility from inside the tank is actually rather shitty, so enemy infantry can flank and get very close even with little cover if the tank doesn't have any infantry support. This has actually been demonstrated numerous times in practice, most notably in the 1994 battle of Grozny that started the First Chechen War - the Russian tanks that were rushed into the city ahead of infantry advance were pretty much all burned down quickly, by Chechen AT infantry mostly firing from ground floor and basement windows.