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by greedo 1528 days ago
The secret has been out for 40+ years. The Sagger decimated Israeli tanks in the Sinai in 1973 until the IDF started using combined arms tactics. The TOW (and to a much lesser extent, the Dragon) gave NATO the ability to blunt a potential Soviet invasion of Europe. The Hellfire (and to a lesser extent, the TOW) dominated Iraq during the Desert Storm, and during the Iraq invasion in 2003. The Javelin itself is almost 30 years old in design.

The only reason we're hearing so much talk about the Javelin/NLAW is because of cheap cellphone videos capturing so much of the war in Ukraine. (And extremely poor Russian tactics...)
1 comments
hef19898 1528 days ago
>> The TOW (and to a much lesser extent, the Dragon) gave NATO the ability to blunt a potential Soviet invasion of Europe

That's what I call over simplification.

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greedo 1528 days ago
Yes, because conflicts between superpowers can be easily summed up in a HN post.

The point is that modern, competent armies have been preparing to counter the ATGM threat for over half a century.

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hef19898 1528 days ago
You can't sum up highly complex topics in one sentence? Shit! ;-)

On a more serious note, I would have counted the Russians in the group of competent armies. Maybe they were during the cold war, Afghanistan is not really a good measure. Maybe they were not, no way to ever find out. All being said, I'm happy that we never found out so far. Because one thing is sure, finding out involves turning whatever region is used to find out into a war zone.

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greedo 1528 days ago
I grew up a military brat, and have studied this shit for years. While I never thought the Russians (or Soviets) were 10ft tall, I never in a million years thought they would be this utterly incompetent. I have some Estonian friends who were concerned about Russia steamrolling them before NATO could really respond (they joke that Russia considers Estonia a suburb of St. Petersburg). And I always empathized with them. No strategic depth, minimal forces, ethnic Russians in the Baltics who could be used by Putin as a casus belli. And NATO seemed sclerotic and weak.

Now? I think that NATO could easily handle almost anything Russia could throw at it, short of nukes.

It really is amazing how poorly they've performed. And the BTG concept has been utterly disproven as a brittle, unsustainable force.

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