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GENTLEMEN: Are you a mighty motivated individual, who understands the role of COMBINED ARMS? Are you sick and tired of all these LAME FAST MOVERS AND THEIR FRUITY PHOTOS? Are you none of the above, but IN DIRE NEED OF A VIDEO WITH A REALLY BORING NARRATOR WHO WILL RENDER YOU UNCONSCIOUS? Boy have I got a video for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI0Vprf7FBo It's about 30 minutes long, but it's the video recording of a Battalion Task Force breaching operation, conducted at the National Training Center (I think somewhere in the video it puts a date to it, but the hardware is all circa 1988-1992 or so). Breaching operations in the armor world rank up there with "brain surgery" in terms of complexity, so it's actually rather cool in terms of all the moving pieces. The video covers clearing a lane through a minefield, then a wire obstacle and finally clearing the trenchlines beyond. It is a live fire, with pyro, so there's some sweet MICLIC detonations, and lots of cool engineering vehicles/tanks/IFVs rolling around. Downsides: It's taken from a VHS so there's some weird tracking issues from time to time. It predates modern video editing and powerpoint, so the graphics and charts are all dinosaur style (it is literally the camera pointed at a white board, while someone uses a pointer for the diagrams). Narrator is sleep inducing. Artillery is not included for safety reasons, so none of that. Still. If you like armor, cold war era US Army stuff, or are just curious, give it a whirl. You've already wasted your time looking at all them purty planes, might as well spend it wisely watching something cool for a change.
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Mar 5, 2013 10:59
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 15:23 |
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Well, again that video was from the 90's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBfby1Gkln8 All hail the new sexiness. They're still semi-new, but pretty sweet. There were some engineering vehicles based on the M1 in the works in the late 80's-early 90's, but by the Clinton era, money to move tanks out of the motorpool, let alone buy a new specialist vehicle was hard to come by. It doesn't do some of the things the old CEVs could do (no real dozer blade, no crane, only weapon system is the .50 cal on the turret). Conversely it's got a very capable mineplow, carries two MICLICs (which allows for anything from having a simple back up, to having a single vehicle blow two lanes, to clearing one bigass line through a very large minefield), and actually can mark lanes as it goes (it has little stakes it can shoot out as it drives along). Add to this that it can keep pace with the M1 and M2 platforms, and maintain's the M1's armor levels, and it's a pretty handy attachment. In terms of stand off mine clearance...well. a MICLIC is a few hundred feet worth of C4 on a string. to keep the "snake" from just bunching up and going all over, it needs to be secured to a fixed point. If it doesn't lay straight, then it doesn't cut a lane, and then why even show up? Some sort of large FAE or other just, massive explosion could work, but then it would still likely leave a fair number of left over mines in the impact area (many modern mines are proofed against overpreassure, it's why you still plow the lane, to get the sneaky mines). It may sound crazy, or dangerous, Well okay. It is dangerous as hell. But what the video doesn't show is that there'd be 1-2 companies worth of tanks and IFVs firing at enemy positions, the defensive positions would be getting plastered by indirect and the occasional aviation assets, along with enough smoke and obscuration fires that if that video had been filmed with smoke in effect, it'd just been a lot of tank noises and swirling white clouds (that's why they take so much time to mark the lane, you might not be able to see more than a few dozen feet without thermals). While it's still tricky, the idea is the amount of hurt being unloaded at the breach site will be enough to allow the breach assets to accomplish their mission.
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Mar 5, 2013 14:15
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As Cyrano4747 stated already, infantry has this perplexing complex with not dying when they're supposed to. You don't want to move armor through defenses until the enemy has been cleared from the area. In practice, the artillery keeps all enemy forces suppressed, but rarely does it destroy much. The CAS/rotary wing assets kill a few of the more obvious targets (tanks, bunkers, etc), the direct fire support kills what the aviation misses (pretty much everything), but none of those really does much to destroy or force the enemy infantry out of it's holes. In reality, there's a decent chance the surviving defenders might just surrender after getting that sort of plastering. Or be so disrupted that they break and flee. Or any number of situations that result in the infantry moving through trenches filled with abandoned enemy equipment. However, if you're going to train, it makes the most sense to prepare for the situation that requires exercising all the pieces to their fullest.
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Mar 7, 2013 00:25
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunship_2000 This game got me started on tanks oddly enough. Helicopters were pretty cool, but the manual described in loving detail pretty much every armored vehicle in use in the early 90's. The game was fun, even if I couldn't really play it on anything but the easiest level, and thought the FARP was the objective, and "decline" was some sort of pilot slang for "deck line" which I imagined was some other sort of pilot slang for "screw this I've got cooler things to do." That and "Battlehawks 1942" sucked up hours of my early life, destroying countless Zeros, commie-FARPs (Foreign Anti-American person Resting Point?) and trains (god how I loved blowing up trains).
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Mar 11, 2013 09:45
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So I found a thing: Yep. That would be Team Yankee, the "Graphic Novel" whatever that is.  I'm not cool enough to scan the whole thing (and I don't have a scanner handy) but it's certainly...different? The plotline is mostly intact, although things have been reordered (rather than the limited nuclear exchange being the end of the book, it's at about the 75% mark). Art isn't bad, although it feels like the artist got some vehicles jumbled/proportionality strange. Also, bonus points for having an M60A2 in passing earlier in the book. The really neat part for me, is that the guy who wrote the adaptation makes commentary at the end of what had to be each original issue. If you've already looked, then eh. But if you haven't, basically it's a page worth of David Drake of "Hammer's Slammer's" fame talking about what World War Three would look like, with all sorts of period references (misunderstanding of T-72 use, T-64/T-80 specs, the A-10 as a unproven weapon system etc).
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Apr 5, 2013 15:29
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