I like the point about the effectiveness of modern tanks without sufficient training of the crew. I counter this with 2 words. Chobham armour. The challenger 2 has never been destroyed by an enemy tank and can survive direct hits from Russian and any other competetors tanks for that matter. When you have the tank of tanks it will - regardless of the crew's training - be massively effective.

Obviously angling and whatnot is important to prolong the life of the tank. Not necessary for it to be a force to be reckoned with. Especially being backed by the Abrams and Leopard.

So you are saying the Challenger 2 is challenging anyone to come up with a weapon strong enough to destruct it? Unusual, yet bold.

No, no. Just saying that modern counterparts have trouble penetrating it's armour.

The T-34 was unquestionably superior technically to any tank the Wehrmacht could field until 1943. My impression is that the superior training, tactical doctrine and coordination of the Panzer crews allowed German tank units to dominate opposing better tanks manned by less well drilled crews.

But I do find the claim about the Challenger 2 interesting. Historically, the British military perhaps more than any other has emphasized the value of intensive, high quality training in committing to weapons systems and tactical doctrines. This is going back to the redcoats and the carronade armed frigate. Also, would the 2003 advance on Basra be the only tank-on-tank combat experienced by the Challenger 2?

But any way, I am sure that all of the Western tanks are markedly superior technically to anything that the Russians have. The commitment of NATO countries to genuinely impressive, sophisticated weapons systems generally increases the importance of training to optimally exploit the technical superiority of these well-designed (and expensive) wonders of advanced engineering.

Spanish public broadcaster RTVE reported a few days ago:

"
Para que las nuevas armas tengan un efecto real en el campo de batalla, se necesita una gran cantidad (entre 100 y 300 carros); formación de las tripulaciones (que puede llevar semanas o meses); apoyo logístico continuo; municiones; la participación de otros vehículos blindados y zapadores... Y cobertura aérea.

De momento solo se han comprometido en firme 32 carros Leopard 2 (14 de Alemania, 14 de Polonia y 4 de Canadá), más los 31 Abrams estadounidenses y otra docena de Challenger británicos. Varios países europeos tienen Leopard en sus arsenales, pero no está claro cuántos ni cuándo llegarán, como ocurre con España. Hay que tener en cuenta además que los sistemas de comunicación de distintos carros son a menudo incompatibles entre sí (como ocurre entre los Leopard y los Abrams).
"
https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20230128/guerra-ucrania-rusia-tanques-leopard-analisis-aviacion/2417727.shtml

I would translate, but Google Translate does a good job with those paragraphs. Without air cover, my understanding is that any tank is vulnerable, no matter what fancy shielding they have. The communications incompatibilities contradict GOD's claim that "western main battle tanks are . . . designed to work in an interconnected way with the other supplied western armored vehicles." Both of these challenges combined with the complications related to resupply logistics, crew training and the seemingly small number of tanks that will get delivered in a timely manner suggest that the Ukrainians won't be able to use the western tanks to launch massive offensive operations, at least not anytime soon.

On whether the war will end anytime soon, I just attended a lecture yesterday by history professor and former State Department employee Michael Kimmage where he persuasively argued that Ukraine, Russia, Europe and the States are all committed for the long haul and that all four also have the resources to be committed for the long haul.

So tanks are part of a stone soup pretext to ask for fighter jets?

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

Well that's what Zelensky is asking for!

And he wasted no time:
https://www.rtve.es/play/videos/telediario/la-puesta-a-punto-de-los-tanques-occidentales-antes-de-su-llegada-a-ucrania/6787655/

From the 43rd second is the relevant part.

We have to help. We saw what happened the last time we appeased another country and let it invade Poland O_O.

I believe you are correct Gopher. The training is completely essential for them to operate well. As you made the comparison between the Panzer and the T-34. That is probably what would happen if the Ukranians just used the newer tanks without training. However, my point was that the armour of the Challenger would make this a lot less of an advantageous position for the Russians. They can exploit the crews sub-par training but not the tank itself. For example: (this is a quote from the infamous Wikipedia but the information is correct.)

"During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Challenger 2 tanks suffered no tank losses to Iraqi fire. In one encounter within an urban area, a Challenger 2 came under attack from irregular forces with machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. The driver's sight was damaged and while attempting to back away under the commander's directions, the other sights were damaged and the tank threw its tracks entering a ditch. It was hit by 14 rocket propelled grenades from close range and a MILAN anti-tank missile. The crew survived, safe within the tank until it was recovered for repairs, the worst damage being to the sighting system. It was back in operation six hours later. According to the British army, one Challenger 2 operating near Basra survived being hit by 70 RPGs in another incident.

25 March 2003: A friendly fire ("blue-on-blue") incident in Basra in which one Challenger 2 of the Black Watch Battlegroup (2nd Royal Tank Regiment) mistakenly engaged another Challenger 2 of the Queen's Royal Lancers after detecting what was believed to be an enemy flanking manoeuvre on thermal equipment. The attacking tank's second HESH round hit the open commander's hatch lid of the QRL tank sending hot fragments into the turret, killing two crew members. The hit caused a fire that eventually ignited the stowed ammunition, destroying the tank. This is the only Challenger 2 to be destroyed on operations."

It came into contact with T-54s and T-55s mainly during the siege of Barsa. Therefore, a good comparison for assuming how well it will do in Ukraine.

I will articulate an unpopular defense of Neville Chamberlin. The UK was a democracy; matters were never so simple as one leader charting a course of policy action merely because he thought it the best on policy substance. The idea that Churchill would have roared and brought the country along with him seems quite naïve to me. Chamberlin won the Munich Conference.

He induced Hitler to publicly draw a line in the sand, declare that this marked the limits of his ambitions and swear that he would not cross it. When he then immediately cross the line that he himself had drawn, the British electorate was largely reconciled to the inevitability of war. Listen some time to Chamberlin's "Peace if Our Time" speech and imagine if it came from a place of supreme cynicism as opposed to foolishness. Notice language about Hitler's own terms and signed with his own hand, etc. In his position, with our modern knowledge (excluding the inevitability of Germany's luck in northern France), I would have to follow the exact same path. Let us all remember that the British Labour Party voted against conscription even after Hitler's tanks rolled into Prague. I say this not as some contemporary attack on the Labour Party, but to demonstrate the realities of the political situation.

The British Government had committed at Locarno to not defend Poland's borders against German revisionist demands. Neville' Chamberlin's older brother (along with everyone else involved) won the Nobel Peace Prize for that disgrace. Neville Chamberlin was able, in the aftermath of Prague, to re-institute conscription, dramatically increase defense spending and to commit the UK to defend Poland.

To be honest, I would have done the same if I were in his position.

I would have told Hitler that it is illegal to occupy other countries, many people don’t know this.

For something to be "illegal", there must be "laws". For there to be "laws", there must be a "state". For there to be a "state", there must exist a hegemon asserting a respected monopoly on the use of coercive violence.

Also, I suspect that Hitler would have responded by saying that it was "illegal" for the "Nation of the Czechs and Slovaks" to oppress Germans and forcibly prevent them from rejoining the recognized "Nation of the Germans" in accordance with the agreed upon "principle of national self-determination" much as the "Nation of the Germans" had been told that it was illegal for them to so mistreat the Poles of Upper Silesia. And that is presuming that he did not respond by pointing out the then fairly recent occupations of the Rhineland and the Ruhr Valley by other countries. Until Hitler drove his tanks into Prague, there was little practical hope of mobilizing popular support among the British voters to commit to war with Germany or agreeing to a defensive alliance with Poland, which one might point out was not honored with regard to the Soviet Union's half of the invasion.

In practice, "International Law" is the ever shifting set of principles over which the United States (as embodied by its politicians and voters) is willing to unilaterally deploy its military force to defend.

To go back to an earlier point, one can't build wind turbines without Russian minerals over the long term.

https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1620744555145613313

International law is real, and it is divided into customary international law (such as the immunity of heads of state) and codified international law in the form of treaties. Whether great powers like the United States ignore it at their pleasure is another story.

Resorting to war has been illegal under international law since 1929 for the vast majority of countries given the sheer number that have signed and ratified or adhered to the Treaty for the Renunciation of War (also known as the Paris Pact or the Kellogg-Briand Pact). The treaty came into force on 24 July 1929 (or a few months earlier for states which signed or adhered to the Moscow Protocol). There is a reason why we don't see declarations of war anymore. The murderers know that what they do is illegal and are afraid to call it for what it is.

Thank you JECE. Germany at least declared formal war instead of a Special Military Operation (SMO), whatever that is supposed to be.

Since it is a SMO though, materials can still flow, Ukraine is still pumping Russian gas and oil to Europe and we get the minerals that we need to build wind turbines, while the Russians get the funds they need to sustain the war. While Ukraine gets...money for allowing the transfer and continued support from the EU that might be cut if they were to cut the gas and oil flows? War and peace, even economic embargos, seemed to be more binary situations in past times.

Remember when OG Napoleon conquered almost all of Europe to, among other reasons, enforce a continental barrier vis a vis the English.

"To go back to an earlier point, one can't build wind turbines without Russian minerals over the long term.

https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1620744555145613313"

correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like Russia and its minerals are mentioned neither in the article by windeurope, nor the top comments that I saw? O is there some other relation

"I would have told Hitler it is illegal to occupy other countries"

Yes it is, but in Hitlers mind the ceeding of Germany territory after WW1 was illegal also. The Danzig cooridor and the Sudetenland were German territory to begin with I beleive. I'm sure this is a similar argument that Putin is making to the Russian people to justify his actions.

@GOD....the prices of wind turbines are up 40% due to higher input costs. I believe that that was stated explicitly. Admittedly, the point was made a bit into the body of the document.

@JECE....Did not everyone declare war on each other between 1939 and 1942? Aren't those years after 1929? If Europeans believe such nonsense, then there is not much that can be done for you. These are the sentiments of children. "International Law" exists in this sense only so far as fairy tales exist in that they are written down on paper. Or one might say that the Ten Commandments exist or the laws of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy exist. But if no one is willing to stone adulterers to death in the town square do such laws really exist? I mean when was the last time you banished your wife to a shed in the backyard for a week as she started PMS to protect the purity of your household?

In other news, George Foreman is finally getting some love from Hollywood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMUedD5ID-w

"Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!"

LOTR is better than Star Wars.

And the original Battlestar Galactica was better then the reboot..

The Desert Fox: The Sudetenland was Austrian, FYI.

gopher27: You spoke (before your Christian/Jewish fundamentalist tangent) from the so-called 'realist' school of international relations. But note that the United States, despite waging war on a regular basis, hasn't formally declared war for almost as long as European countries.

And note that the agressors of 1939 and 1942 paid the price at the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals.

Gopher the freedom of movement does not cease to exist when someone is being kidnapped. Likewise, international law does not cease to exist when it is being broken.

This contempt for multilateral contracts is helping me understand you deep disdain regarding the EU.

Hit the nail on the head @JECE and @GOD

Laws against kidnapping are actual laws made and enforced by states within their own territory over which they exercise a hegemonic monopoly over the use of coercive violence. Three of the five books of the Torah spell out "laws" dispensed by the Abrahamic God. Do these "laws" exist as we break them every day? I would say "no" to that proposition. And if they do exist, then I will point out that their regulation of the proper way to kidnap gives lie to your argument any way.

My disdain for the EU is rooted in its anti-democratic nature. My position is not that far removed from that of the late Tony Benn. Look up Tony Benn's Five Questions about Power (alternatively titled the Five Essential Questions of Democracy), and the EU's lack of democratic legitimacy and the impossibility of its ever constructing democratic legitimacy should be fairly self-evident. When the objectives of the EU structure are put to a vote and the voters fail to endorse them, the voters are inevitably required to vote again and again until they comply. There is no conceivable manner in which the people of Europe could vote that would fire the people running the EU or in any meaningful way alter the direction of public policy within the EU. That makes the EU something requiring the disdain of righteous people who value freedom. Instinctual subservience to the state is not generally viewed as a virtue in the United States and arguably lies at the heart of the tragic nature of German History. I think that you may have learned the wrong lessons from your history; I read much of my position here in the guidance that Wilhelm Roepke offered your grandparents' generation after the war. Additionally, as we have discussed previously, I firmly believe that in practice the EU has led directly to Germany and most European countries being less well governed and nearly incapable of addressing even the most pressing issues outside of crisis management scenarios. Giving politicians a perpetual, ready made excuse for buck passing and responsibility shifting is not something that I expect to ever end well.

To me one of the more inarguable conclusions that must be drawn from the Ukraine Crisis is that Europe possesses neither friends nor soft power. The US had to do its usual arm twisting at the UN after the invasion, and I at least could not identify even a single UN member state that lined up with Europe beyond those the US usually rounds up. The supposed attractive force that the EU ideal (and the European Dream) was said to exert globally in competition with harsher American methods seemed non-existent in the most critical moment for Europe. The banner of multilateral contracts gathers exactly zero multi-lateral support. Even the states dependent upon the largesse of your foreign aid felt no attraction to your side on a genuinely existential issue for the conceived system that undergirds your generosity to them. Supposedly, Eugene of Savoy in his later years repeatedly scoffed at the preoccupations of Emperor Charles III and consistently told him that a full treasury and a strong army were the only things that would enforce the Pragmatic Sanction and that signatures procured through effective bribery were less than worthless. What you are articulating is not merely silly and childish, but actually dangerous as it detaches your actions from systems of reality.

@JECE....little more than victors' justice inflicted upon the defeated. John F. Kennedy famously praised Robert Taft for his veritable denunciation of the Nuremburg Trials as self-serving, political theater. While he died when I was a very small child, I had a fair bit of exposure growing up to Leon Jaworski's closest friend and legal partner. Jaworski refused to participate in the Nuremburg Trials after being offered a senior position precisely because he viewed the proceedings as illegitimate. And obviously, the Tokyo Trials were a very different creature.

The US declaring war or not declaring war is largely a function of domestic US politics and the nature of executive power relative to legislative power. It has more to do with the US Senate actively expressing its opinions about the Treaty of Versailles than the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

gopher you are misunderstanding basic principles here.

The EU is NOT a democratic state, but a union, created through multilateral contracts, OF democratic states. This setup leads to voters participating democratically in the direction that the EU is taking indirectly through their governments (which they voted for).

So much for the legislative branch. On the judicative branch, we get a wholly different picture in which any EU state, citizen or entity can apply to the EU court in case their rights have been infringed.

The executive is mostly in the hands of the (democratic) member states themselves, who execute the EU legislation.

I am also not happy about the current state of affairs concerning the confusing multitude of institutions and levels of power within this structure, but since this framework exists since roughly 30 years, I am impressed with the progress that has been made to achieve common goals by this multitude of states in the timespan of a mere generation.

Hopefully we can come to a even better centralised and directly democratic form of EU government in the coming one or two genereations. During or after the current crisis that we live through might be a good moment.

Maybe even guarantee future peace between Russia and Ukraine by getting both of them into the EU? Would require a lot of convincing within the the EU, especially the eastern members, the US and China, but might solve some underlying issues, kind of as it did between the western European states after WWII.
Would also make Russia the new numerically biggest member state, which would be unacceptable in the current climate, so might be only possible if Russia splits up following a collapse of the state due to the Ukraine war.

Just some hypotheticals.