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Comment by jdc | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is tanks in general have little use in the vast majority of modern American battles.

I’d say this is false, even as I myself am a US Army veteran who spent a year in Iraq 2003-2004. Tanks are still useful, but aren’t as useful against non-conventional forces.

The pentagon has spent the past 4-5 years retooling for what they call “near peer” threats which is to say China in the Pacific and Russia in Europe. Tanks, and really good ones in specific, would be required to push back a Russian incursion into our allies.

I just can't imagine a plausible scenario where a war between nuclear powers comes down to which side has more tanks. Does the US military actually think that it could invade China or Russia with a conventional army without the other side quickly threatening to use nukes? At that point it would become a two true outcome scenario: either the conventional fighting stops or we are all in big trouble.

Russia would threaten nukes to protect its homeland, but would it start a nuclear war over, say, Poland?

The EU is integrating it's military further. So Poland would essentially be a nuclear power. Even right know, Poland has allies, who have made the mistake of ignoring them being invaded for too long, and would probably not do so again.

I do have some blindspots when it comes to Poland. Would you be willing to elaborate further? From what I could tell, everything was done to prevent Poland from going on nuclear path. Why would that approach change now?

What I was hinting at was: France is a nuclear power and given a joint military, Poland also would therefor be one. Still a long way ahead before something remotely like this will happen, but there is movement in that direction.

Yes. Fear of this is why neither the USA or France ventured to protect Ukraine even after signing the Budapest Declaration.

You don't keep tanks around for what happens before the nuclear bombardment, you keep them around for afterwards. Most nuclear assets are pointed at either other nukes or military infrastructure; you'd still a large amount of civilian infrastructure around filled with angry civilians that would want to finish the fight one way or another before nuclear winter fucks everything. And tanks being tanks a fleet would survive everything short of nuclear carpet-bombing fairly well

I could be totally off base here but my impression, based on the staggering amount of nuclear warheads that could be deployed in a war, is that this line of thinking is wildly optimistic. I expect that any humans who survive a nuclear war will be focused primarily on staying alive and preventing human extinction, not continuing whatever geopolitical conflict led to the war.

The nuclear winter has been downgraded to nuclear autumn, and it is really really really bad if the war happens in the right time of the year. (Otherwise, it's only very very very bad.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...

Anyway, people is people, and after all the nuclear warhead are used, the survivors will seek revenge with conventional weapons.

You're talking about threat assessment while I'm talking about something slightly different, which is the usefulness of tanks in past (modern) and active conflicts.

Anyway I'm not sold on tomatotomato37's claim that recent levels of American tank investment are unwise, but also don't have enough information to know otherwise.

Is that really true when modern American battles seem to always evolve into endless occupations?

They should be building something that more closely resembles an armoured RV with a gun. Perfect for achieving and maintaining occupation.

You're describing the Stryker Combat Vehicle, and it has a remotely operated weapons turret. However, it can only carry 9 infantryman (in addition to its crew).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stryker

However, tanks are strategic weapons as well as tactical ones. Similar to why we have ICBMs but never hope to launch one.

Generally speaking, ICBMs are strategic weapons exclusively. The tactical version of ICMBs are just tomahawk cruise missiles, and they're in nuclear submarines all around the world just waiting for the signal.

I donno, the "fingers of god" are also loaded in submarines ready to go whenever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)#/media/File:...

Oh of course. Missile submarines carry both however. They're more likely to use the tomahawks however. The Navy loooooves to use them.

During the very first 48 hours (sustained) in the war in Afghanistan, a tomahawk missile was launched, on average, every 12 seconds night or day. The amount of boom those things made is unbelievable.

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