Rheinmetall Lynx KF41 armored fighting vehicle - GIF

[Altair]

Rheinmetall Lynx KF41 armored fighting vehicle.




Previously:

Lockheed XM800W articulated armored car - video
SOUVIM-2 mine clearing vehicle - photo
Volvo Arquus Scarabee armored vehicle - GIF
MOWAG Piranha turret cutaway - photo
1926 Vickers D3E1 armored vehicle - photo

[Frank S]

This is one of the reasons why the USA can not win a war. They drive around playing Tokyo drift with expensive toys shooting at white pieces of plywood while watching it on an X box screen. Carpet bomb every square foot of the place with incendiaries' for a long enough period of time to scorch the earth then send in a division of foot soldiers to finish off any of those unfortunate enough to survive. you've effectively reduced a 20 year non winnable war to 20 weeks or a 19 1/2 year war to 19 1/2 weeks. There is no such thing as an innocent in time of war when a 5 year old kid comes up to a GI begging for a candy bar then drops a grenade at his feet while running away. or a 7 year old runs up to a group of Gi's with a back pack loaded with explosives grabs his chest and pulls a cord.
The toys are nice to have if up against a roving patrol of pickup trucks but totally un-necessary if there is no one to drive them in the first place

[WmRMeyers]

This is one of the reasons why the USA can not win a war. They drive around playing Tokyo drift with expensive toys shooting at white pieces of plywood while watching it on an X box screen. Carpet bomb every square foot of the place with incendiaries' for a long enough period of time to scorch the earth then send in a division of foot soldiers to finish off any of those unfortunate enough to survive. you've effectively reduced a 20 year non winnable war to 20 weeks or a 19 1/2 year war to 19 1/2 weeks. There is no such thing as an innocent in time of war when a 5 year old kid comes up to a GI begging for a candy bar then drops a grenade at his feet while running away. or a 7 year old runs up to a group of Gi's with a back pack loaded with explosives grabs his chest and pulls a cord.
The toys are nice to have if up against a roving patrol of pickup trucks but totally un-necessary if there is no one to drive them in the first place

IIRC, Rheinmetall is a German company, and the Lynx is German, too. Been a while ago, but I was involved in testing weapons systems for the USAF in the late 70's. We were dropping bombs on, and shooting at, real armor. Sherman tanks, admittedly, but I've seen an entire formation of tanks obliterated by one drop from one F-4 of 4 cluster munitions. Each one released nearly 100 smaller bomblets which blew holes through the armor and weapons of the tanks, and shredded the the plywood cutout "tank crew." The holes were big enough I could stick my thumb into them. It took a couple of days to document the damage to all the tanks.

Aircrews call tanks "Targets." Heck, infantry calls armor targets, too. And if you want your tanks to survive, you send them out with infantry to protect them from the other side's infantry, because both sides like anti-tank weapons.

As for carpet bombing, it's more a terror weapon than anything else. Precision munitions do a better job when you really need to destroy equipment.

There was a cinetheodolite video of one of the early versions of the GBU-15 dropped on a 2-1/2 ton truck. Bomb dived through the drivers side window. It was an inert bomb, and still destroyed the truck. This was just testing the guidance package. If it had been a live bomb, it would have destroyed not only that truck, but everything within about 100 feet of the truck, with a damage radius around that of about 2000 feet. Much more "bang for the buck" than you get with carpet bombing. Here is a still from a similar weapons test with a newer version of the guided bomb: https://laststandonzombieisland.file...th-a-truck.jpg

Though if you want to leave your enemy needing to change their underwear, carpet bombing is the way to go. If you just want to kill them and destroy their stuff, precision munitions are the way to go.

Though one lesson of war is that winning the war really does involve divisions of troops going in and clearing out the survivors. Aircraft and bombs can't occupy territory. That takes boots on the ground, and a rifle in the hands of someone trained to use it.

One of my friends/mentors when I was a teen was a Marine at Iwo Jima. Soldiers can survive a tremendous pounding and still be dangerous. It took five weeks to make the Japanese defenders of that island ineffective. And we didn't drop nearly as much stuff on them as the Iraqi's caught at what became known as the The Highway of Death when they retreated from Kuwait during Desert Storm.

My unit was running the air war there. That lasted only a couple of days.

Unfortunately, the politicians decided to quit before Iraq was truly defeated, so later my young cousins were back in Iraq, and one of them died there.

Bill