As of: January 30, 2024, 4:52 a.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
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The M2/M3 Bradley: With a good crew, the US armored personnel carrier becomes a feared opponent of the old Russian main battle tanks.
© Imago
Russian T-90 defeated by a Bradley infantry fighting vehicle: its commander has trained himself for the battle;
on the home games console.
Stepove - This duel within the Ukraine war seemed to be one between David and Goliath: A video went viral in which an M-2 Bradley armored personnel carrier from Ukraine makes short work of a T-90 tank from the Russian army - nickname “Proryv” (Breakthrough);
The drone video can be seen on X (formerly Twitter) on the blogger’s channel “Special Kherson Cat”.
According to
Military Watch Magazine,
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin celebrated the T-90 as the “best tank in the world” - the colossus was probably lost near the town of Stepove in the south of Ukraine near Kherson.
For three reasons, as you can read.
The Ukrainian magazine
ArmyInform
now claims to have found the recipe for cracking the steel colossus.
Even in the technical comparison between a main battle vehicle and an infantry fighting vehicle, it seems clear from the outset who will win: a 125 millimeter gun and 800 millimeters of upper front and 500 millimeters of side armor in a combat vehicle compared to a 25 to 30 millimeter Millimeter guns and thinner armor in an infantry fighting vehicle simply make the latter look old.
But war always has surprises, and the tank is fundamentally designed as a disposable product.
Tank duel: “Human factor” leads to Russia’s immense losses
These imponderables always come with the “human factor” in the steel casing, as Brigadier General Björn Schulz made clear in the Bundeswehr podcast
Asked
- he has headed the Bundeswehr's tank troops school since February 2022 - according to him, Western technology is just one aspect of the superiority of the Bundeswehr NATO against Vladimir Putin's troops.
“In addition, there is the much better training of soldiers and the leadership culture in the Western armed forces, which allows individual officers to lead the troops flexibly and independently in combat.
This is where the most important advantage over Russia lies.
Because the age-old principle in firefighting is: whoever shoots faster and hits better wins,” said Schulz.
According to retired Ukrainian tank officer Mykola Salamakh to
ArmyInform
, the lost duel between West and East is due as much to human weaknesses as to outdated technology.
The T-90 main battle tank crew needs at least eight seconds to reload;
the Bradley, on the other hand, fires an M242 Bushmaster autocannon, and this 25mm cannon has a standard rate of fire of 200 rounds per minute;
their effective range is stated to be 2,000 meters;
Their standard ammunition is more effective against armor steel up to 70 millimeters thick, so it is ineffective in a frontal attack.
Bradley Commander: Prepared for battle with video games
In a video interview on Germany also uses its experience of “gaming” video games as an advantage over Russian tank drivers – for example through the tank simulation “War Thunder”.
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In futurezone
magazine
, Serhiy describes that he first fired the armor-piercing shells at the T-90M.
But problems arose and he switched from armor-piercing ammunition to feeding high-explosive ammunition.
It is possible that the supply of armor-piercing ammunition was blocked or that the ammunition had simply run out.
So Serhiy switched to high-explosive ammunition, which is not actually intended for combating armored vehicles: “And here I suddenly remembered my experience from video games.
I remembered how and where I had to hit the T-90M.
I had to stop him at all costs,” as
futurezone
quotes him
Serhiy only returned to Ukraine in December after completing his Bradley training at a US base in Germany.
He and his driver were on only their second mission together when they encountered the T-90M.
Their job was to protect infantrymen who had come under fire from Russian tanks in a trench.
“I can't describe what it's like to see a battle tank in your sights,” says Serhiy: “During training I always thought to myself: Hopefully I'll never experience that.
And then it happened.
And pretty close too.”
T-90 main battle tank: Many weak points in Putin's miracle weapon on tracks
Optics are actually the second weak point of a T-90 at short range, as Ukrainian Lieutenant Colonel Mykola Salamakh explained to
ArmyInform
magazine .
According to him, the dueling distance of an estimated 150 to 200 meters was too close for the built-in optics in the T-90 to accurately target the enemy.
Salamakh estimates that the blind spot of the optics may have been around 150 degrees due to the enlargement of the sight - altogether too much for a quick blade shot at a moving opponent.
On the other hand, Salamakh believes that the optics of the T-90 on the turret for the gunner and the commander are so large that they can be easily disabled at a short distance by an unerring enemy gunner - the reports say that the T -90 is said to have turned his turret wildly back and forth after the first hits;
this could be an indication that the Russian crew was disoriented.
The crew obviously could not figure out where the fire was coming from and began aiming the turret toward the enemy to no avail.
To make matters worse, a good Bradley shooter probably has a relatively easy time of it: the Bushmaster cannon should miss by a maximum of 40 millimeters at a distance of 200 meters.
As a result of numerous hits from armor-piercing 16 mm shells, the dynamic armor of the T-90 also had to give in - anyway, the armor around the commander and around the ammunition is given as 20 to 40 millimeters.
This is the Achilles heel of the T-90, which the Bradley crew probably exploited skillfully.
Russia: The best tank crews are probably dead long ago
The crew of the T-90M may also have been insufficiently experienced and panicked; due to Russia's high losses, it is very likely that Russia had already lost its experienced tank crews at the beginning of the war of aggression against Ukraine.
According to reports from US secret services, Vladimir Putin is said to have lost a total of 315,000 soldiers, as was announced from Washington DC.
Russia's losses in armored vehicles are said to be around 3,500.
The
Wall Street Journal
, citing the documents, reported that the war set Russian forces back 15 years in their modernization efforts.
The Russian losses were particularly high, among other things, in the fighting for the eastern Ukrainian front-line town of Avdiivka - this is the primary result of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
The reason was the frost, they said.
The hard ground allows the Russian attackers to make increased use of armored vehicles, which then makes them extremely vulnerable.
In contrast to the M1A1 main battle tanks, which Ukraine also received from the USA, the Bradleys delivered are a relatively modern version.
The M2A2 Bradley were produced starting in 1988.
The M2A2 ODS Bradleys delivered to Ukraine were upgraded from 1995 onwards with knowledge gained from Operation Desert Storm.
Upgrades include an electronic friend-or-foe recognition system, GPS and an improved vision and targeting system.
Historian Ralf Raths explains the technical differences in the western and eastern tank building schools by saying that the Russian tanks are simpler in construction, making them smaller and harder to hit.
However, this would also come at the expense of resistance to fire.
Raths: “The Russian tank is much more rustic and cruder than the western one.
In Ukraine, however, it is now very clear that the Russian doctrine of being able to 'use up' the tanks because you have more of them is no longer tenable.
Tanks are there to do their job and be destroyed in the process.
The military is planning for losses.” According to him, it has been shown in Ukraine that the quality of the craftsmanship of the Russian tank command is “abysmal poor,” as he says.
Over the past 107 years since tanks were introduced on the battlefield, large numbers of them have been destroyed, says the director of the German Tank Museum in Munster - that's part of their nature.
The impression of invulnerability is completely wrong - a tank can also be a trap for the crew.
(Karsten Hinzmann)