I hope Al Zarquawi isn’t reading this …
You don’t need to take out the M 1, just the crew. A neutron bomb can do that and afterwards, whoever finds it, can keep it.
Not a problem, I understand he spends all his time on the aircraft boards.
That ‘flawed Soviet doctrine’, as you refer to it, seemed to work pretty well for the US back in World War II. Think of the Sherman versus the German tanks. The Shermans were clearly inferior, but they had the numbers to overwhelm (lots of air cover helped too…). I know, different time and place, different war, yada yada yada. Point is, that doctrine has some historical relevance to it.
This has been a pretty good thread to follow. As I mentioned briefly in another post, I just got back from a tour in Iraq, in the Al Anbar province - that is the REALLY crappy part, in case you are unfamiliar.
While there, we had a number of M-1’s disabled by mines. Early on, one of our tank platoons was getting hit just about every day with IED’s, but they were kinda shitty IEDs and did no damage. Later on (late summer time frame) the IEDs they used against us started getting a lot better. They would obliterate an armored HMMW-V. One of our tracks got launched about 30 meters after hitting one. And, one of our M-1’s was destroyed. In defense of the tank, in many ways it was a ‘lucky shot’ from the IED. The blast itself did no destroy the tank, but it did rupture the hull and cause a catastrophic fire that destroyed the vehicle. So, an IED can destroy an M-1. (By the way, before anyone asks, this is not the burning tank in the video with the crewman on fire. I think that was an Army unit, I’m a jarhead. I also think that might have been a Bradley, but am not 100% on that.)
We also captured some new RPG-22’s which are specifically designed to penetrate the sides of an M-1 hull. Fortunately, we never found out how well they worked.
Another aspect of this conversation is the question of what we mean by ‘destroy’. Do you mean to simply make it combat ineffective or do you mean to blow it into a billion little bits?
Just bust the track and wait out the crew with snipers.
Here, have an Abrams turret… from 2003.
We would run up and down the soft shoulder in our tank. The theory was that it was better that we run over a landmine and lose a track and a few wheels than let a HMMWV hit it.
NTM
Maygbe its been said but…a depleated uranium round?
shaped charge warheads rely on chemical energy rather than kinetic energy for their effect.the velocity at impact would make almost no difference to the destructive effect of a shaped charge on the target.
I don’t know about other SPGs but the AS-90 has direct fire capability so it has some anti-tank capacity. I wonder what the effect of a 155mm round hitting an M1 tank would be.
kaboom methinks. No tank armor is meant to deal with direct fire from heavy duty artillery pieces.
155 HE has little effect on a modern tank. It may be big, but has no penetrating power at all. It is less effective than a 120mm HEAT or HESH round. Aiming a howiter in direct fire is iffy at best as well. They are not made for direct fire, it is only used as a last resort as your position is about to be over-run. It is really designed to be used with BeeHive AP rounds, 1000’s of small darts that spray the area in front of the gun like a giant shotgun. Great against softskins and personnel.