{"id":39607,"date":"2014-02-02T16:59:52","date_gmt":"2014-02-02T21:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=39607"},"modified":"2014-02-02T16:59:52","modified_gmt":"2014-02-02T21:59:52","slug":"the-end-of-tanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=39607","title":{"rendered":"The end of tanks?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post<\/a> speculates that the Pentagon is moving away from tanks (they throw the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in the mix under that term) and towards drones, submarines and fighters. The Post claims that the reason we’re still buying tanks is because Congress is trying to save jobs in Congressmen’s respective districts;<\/p>\n

The manufacturing of tanks \u2014 powerful but cumbersome \u2014 is no longer essential, the military says. In modern warfare, forces must deploy quickly and \u201cproject power over great distances.\u201d Submarines and long-range bombers are needed. Weapons such as drones \u2014 nimble and tactical \u2014 are the future.<\/p>\n

Tanks are something of a relic.<\/p>\n

The Army has about 5,000 of them sitting idle or awaiting an upgrade. For the BAE Systems employees in York, keeping the armored vehicle in service means keeping a job. And jobs, after all, are what their representatives in Congress are working to protect in their home districts.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The Army is pushing ahead on a path that could result in at least partial closure of the two U.S. facilities producing these vehicles \u2014 buoyed by a new study on the state of the combat vehicle industry due for release next month.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is short-sighted thinking. The Chinese and Russians aren’t buying fewer tanks. But, of course, I suppose the brain trust in the Obama Administration has the next war all planned out. They hope that it’s an island-hopping war in the Pacific, or that it will look like the last war. <\/p>\n

They want to do away with the Warthog tank-busting aircraft and our own tanks – they’ve already pulled all of our tanks out of Europe, I guess, in hopes that all of the other countries in the world will do the same. Most likely, the next war will be with Iran, or with North Korea since those two are doing their best to rise up our shitlist. Both are heavily tanked-up armies. Maybe they’ll do like Hussein did in 1990-1991 and give us a chance to build up an armored presence before we attack. Only, the next time, they’ll have to give us years, so that we can build from scratch an armored force, that is if we can a manufacturer who will retool and make the commitment.<\/p>\n

It appears that the Pentagon is forgetting the simple rule that the only ground you control in war is the ground between a Joe’s feet and they’re bound and determined to pull all of Joe’s support, so it will be like Kasserine Pass all over again – an untrained, ill-equipped force facing a better-trained, better-equipped Army paying for the politicians’ ill-considered defense policies in their own blood and lives. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post speculates that the Pentagon is moving away from tanks (they throw the Bradley … The end of tanks?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-army"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}