Cross the old night - Fan Wennan
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Description: >Cross the old night 跨过旧夜 This generation just built a bridge for future strangers to use. You may see him one day...
source: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/EvX2xe
Ukraine started off as the most well-armed European army besides Russia. Thousands of tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery pieces, hundreds of jets, large stockpiles of artillery ammunition and small drones, etc. This was all backed by years of ideological hardening and training and the willingness to conscript right off the bat.
All of that has been whittled down and the delusion nurtured both by Ukraine and the Western media to dominate the (English-speaking) information sphere. This has the effect of the West sending minimal replacements for the equipment spent and lost because they believed they only had to kick in the door for the whole rotten structure to fall apart.
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/620436462
Chinese blog post that contains higher quality versions of the leaked documents and the poster's own analysis of the leak.
It was less the tendency for liberals to be drawn towards ubermensch sentimentality and more the material conditions the Western tanks were created under. The Soviet T-64/72/80 series would end up with about ~43.5k produced. The production run for Western tanks are around ~16k total. Add in the vast amount of T-55s/62s and various BMPs and that would create some pressure on them to somehow cope with fighting the Soviet and Warsaw Pact where being outnumbered 3:1 is to be expected.
Combined with the fact that Western procurement has to factor in the profit motive for armaments production and having missed out on the weight-saving technological solutions of autoloaders and ERA at the time, Western tank development would inevitably be drawn to weight busting, costly tanks.
Ever since the Russo-Japanese War artillery has been the main cause of death in conventional wars. There are exceptions but those are often under conditions of a guerrila war or between combatants unable to sustain enough forces to maintain an unbroken front line. In the face of artillery, armored vehicles are required to maneuver and the tank remains the only ground-based platform able to survive artillery shrapnel and simultaneously deliver firepower. IFVs, APCs, and the various fire support vehicles can survive shrapnel relatively better than their unarmored counterparts but are vulnerable to the many anti-tank munitions from all angles including their frontal arc. Contemporary main battle tanks still force their opponents to wait for better opportunities to fire into less armored sides, rears, and tops with the wrinkle being that the much more available FPV drones can easier find those opportunities. Tanks and their support arms will evolve in the future to take into account the work of enemy drones such as electronic warfare units becoming more involved and active protection systems being incorporated into new designs and retrofitted onto existing tank fleets.
What is most definitively dead however is the legend of Western tank supremacy. It used to be that because of battles like 73 Easting, Medina Ridge, and Norfolk that Soviet tanks are qualitatively inferior in all aspects for the common layman. Losses incurred during the Global War On Terror era can always be brushed off to exceptional circumstances or the weakness of auxiliaries. If anything, the deficiency in anti-tank weaponry among the guerilla forces during this era only reinforced the stasis of Western tank development because the existing tank fleet is good enough despite the criticisms of sustainability leveled against it. But by failing to create victory out of thin air in Ukraine, the legend of Western tank supremacy is forced back into reality that it is not just firepower, armor, and speed that matter but also their numbers.
The propagandists will be hard at work to stop common layman from drifting off into this reality by blaming Ukraine's inadequacy and "Soviet-style thinking" while denigrating bean counting as a measure of military strength by invoking the first Gulf War. For the generals and designers however, they can either accept reality and silently make concessions to it or pay the cost in blood by reaching for the comfort of myth and propaganda.
The fact that usable gallium is a byproduct of aluminum smelting combined with the political economy that is neoliberalism is pretty much a slow death by inflation for producing military radars. With only privatized actors from the resource extraction stage to the final stage of manufacturing, either the US pays exorbitant ransoms to Northrup-Grumman to keep the production line of AESA radars open or it wastes away and the US cannibalizes its stockpile of AESA radars when the captains of industry shift the use of gallium towards more reliable civilian production and contracts.
Letter to Future Strangers
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Art by Fan Wennan of China 2098 fame made for Lenin's birthday as of 2023.
Source: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/X1r0xw
With an upgraded 9M117, even these lads will threaten Abrams and Leopards from the frontal arc.
German cats burning in steppes of Eastern Europe. The year is 2023.
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Lostarmour currently counts two Leopard 2s, though more will inevitably will accumulate as the counteroffensive goes on.
$824B budget is puffery.
>Took some time today to flip through the 2024 Pentagon budget proposal, the unprecedented $842B budget.
>1) Production isn't being dramatically increased >2) Increased $ topline comes from inflation and switch to more advanced variants
>Something basic, like the JLTV will not only cost more for fewer vehicles (3108) but will likely miss production goals in 2023 (3311 out of 3721 projected).
>Same story for the AMPV, which instead of the 72 for $380m will only see 43 deliveries this year. 2024 has 91 projected.
>Certain systems like the M1 Abrams and the PIM sp-arty production will be increased but seem to be capped out at a production capacity limit. Note the increasing costs over last year's projections. 2024 budget reduces order numbers substantially, though additional upgrades slated
>As for defensive systems, no new Patriots complexes, but research on the next iteration of the system has been funded with a dramatically larger R&D budget. As for interceptors, fewer will be built at a higher overall bill. Navy, SM-3 and SM-6 will be procured in tiny numbers.
>JASSM unit numbers steady but per unit cost expected to skyrocket as production shifts fully to ER variant. LRASM numbers increased. Could also include facility upgrades. Meanwhile modernization of tomahawks crawls. Naval strike missile, small numbers at greater cost.
Pictures are linked in the twitter thread. TL:DR is that the US MIC is not actually increasing production throughput despite all the proclamations being put out by the informal state media but is rather adjusting to inflation.
US MIC in One Image
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This is also by the same think-tank who claimed that in their wargames the US would be able to win a confrontation with China over Taiwan around 2027 so don't get your hopes up that they would be able to connect what the data says for future prognostications.
Voroshilov Academy Lectures and Materials
This is an online collection of course material that would be used for teaching Soviet, WP, and other allied officers military theory and doctrine.