Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
I not only concur but applaud your observation. It is exactly this point I tried to present to the Royal Thai Army. A couple of points are worth expanding.

a.) Tanks are fire support. They can achieve little in themselves, but you still need some. Tanks engender human emotion in a way I can never understand and I believe their generally unchanging form nearing the limit of its usefulness. No the tank is not obsolete. It merely needs to evolve.

b.) Beware the heroic little tank hunter teams. Context is everything, and the tide can very quickly turn against them. In order to be consistently successful they need large amounts of support and preparation. Even then they may suffer considerable attrition, unless they have the ability to very rapidly disengage.

a.) Countries like the Baltic States could probably use some armour if their Russian populations try to break away, but for actual war against Russia, they'd be useless.

b.) During OIF I my unit faced thousands of men acting in hunter killer teams, and it was very ugly for them (even in the cities). Terriean really makes a difference, as the desert is a bad place for the small AA team. However, a place like Georgia, or the Balkans is ideal for this. Another factor in OIF I was the Iraqi weapons. If the Iraqis had Javelins and Carl Gustavs instead of RPG 7's and 14's, we most likely would have had a lot of problems?