WWIII, The Threat is REAL

I don’t know if that’s true or not. What I do know to be true is that giving Ukraine Abrams tanks, which have no hope at all of arriving in less than six months — because they have to come off the assembly line and cannot be provided from current stocks — because they have to be ‘dumbed down’ to send them to Ukraine … Will absolutely not trigger a global nuclear armageddon. Incidentally that dumbing down of the Abrams can only be done during assembly. There’s no way to retro-stupidify a working Abrams tank.

They have to be ‘monkey-modelled’ as the Russians put it, because we know that some will be captured or destroyed and fall into the hands of our adversaries. That’s a given. So there is no plan or scheme to give Ukraine M1 Abrams tanks that are full powered and fully equipped versions of the tanks American crews ride into battle.

America also sells M1A2 Abrams usually suitably downgraded for foreign service to Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Iraq. Of those defense equipment purchasers only Australia gets the real deal full gauge Abrams.

America is not the only supplier of main battle tanks to Ukraine. The German Leopard 2 and British Challenger 2 are also being sent to Ukraine in much larger numbers than the Abrams. Both of those tanks are easier by far to operate and maintain than the Abrams.

The idea that they “will be sold on the black market to out (sic) enemies” is ignorant and laughable. Only those who know nothing at all about the topic could say such a ridiculous thing. The M1 Abrams tanks takes very nearly the same amount of maintenance as a helicopter. Not a civilian helicopter, an American attack helicopter.

For every one hour of operation the M1A2 Abrams tank needs 8 man hours of maintenance to operate correctly. This not something you just hop in and take for a spin then park it until you want to go for a ride again. If you don’t know things like this you have no business speaking about that tank in any capacity. Let alone this scaredy-cat bullshit about them being sold to “out enemies”.

Where are ‘out enemies’ going to find trained and skilled crews do to that maintenance?

For that matter where are “out enemies” going to find trained and skilled crews to operate an Abrams? The M1A2 Abrams tank is a difficult tank to operate and takes a considerable amount of crew training to achieve any hope of proficiency.

All we need to do to render an Abrams tank inoperable is to refuse to supply parts. It will die an ignoble death all on its own in short order. Short order as in days not weeks or months. It’s a great weapons system but it takes a lot of work and spare parts to keep it operating.

America has the resources to keep a tank like that in the fight. Not so much a third world nation that thinks it’s going to field that tank without American aid and support. They might be able to buy some of those tanks but what they’re purchasing will in quickly become useless piles of scrap metal all without ever being hit by a single round.

Hardly the basis for panic over a global nuclear annihilation or even serious concern about those tanks being sold to “out enemies”.

Russians don’t f**k around. If they can do something they do it. When they can’t do something they act like they can and lie. If Russia is saying “We’re serious this time, we’re really going to use nukes and start WWIII. We’re not joking around anymore. Really.” then you can be assured that is not within their capacity or they wouldn’t threaten, they’d act.

Because what they’re doing is pointing a pistol at their own heads and saying “Nobody move or the Russian gets it!” It’s just not a credible threat. They know that. We know that. They know we know that. They’re hoping to scare the cowards and ignorant into letting them get what they really want.

This whole “OMG, the Russians are SERIOUS about destroying the world in a nuclear armageddon!” noise is just plain, and I’m sorry there’s no other way to say this, chickenshit. Give Russia credibility in making that threat and the end has already come. All Russia needs to do to frighten the old women and cowards in America into cowering in compliance is to say “This time we’re serious” and watch American policy melt like a warm ice cream cone in a hurricane.

People who are saying this sort of thing are playing the Russian’s game for them. They should be ashamed of themselves. I wrote a big long essay on this member’s previous comment on this subject explaining the facts. I’m tired of this shit, it’s nothing more than empty fear mongering.

Chickenshit is putting it mildly.

The M1A2 Abrams SEPv3 upgrade has had a 10KW 350A+ APU manufactured by Marvin Land Systems out of Inglewood CA for quite some time now … Decades I think but I’m not sure regarding that specific upgrade’s adoption date. Before that it has always had some sort of APU as part of the standard package.

The tank can also be ‘plugged into the wall’ to get electrical power similar to shore power on a boat or ship. You must be talking about either older models or models that were sold to AU sans an APU for some reason. Or models where Australia replaced the APU for a better one.

It could be that it was cheaper to buy the tanks without an APU and then add them later under a separate contract purchase from MLS. While that’s not really an upgrade it’s exactly the sort of thing that starts as scuttlebutt and eventually becomes ‘known as a fact’ — Like the ridiculous idea that an M16’s 5.56 round “tumbles in flight” sort of thing as an example.

(I heard that absurd nonsense about the 5.56 round for decades. People were so absolutely convinced that the person who told them that couldn’t possibly be wrong that it was impossible to get them to understand how rifling works and that the whole idea of the bullet tumbling in flight was just dumb. This absurdity originated in the early days of the adoption of the Armalite rifle designated as “M16” by the US Military. The original rifle barrel had an insufficient rate of twist in the rifling and the bullet tended to destabilize and tumble WHEN IT HIT SOMETHING. That was quickly corrected. Due to the round’s ballistic coefficient and sectional density it still tends to flip over occasionally when it hits something solid but it does not tumble in free flight. If it did that it would be completely inaccurate and could go just about anywhere except for what is being aimed at. I qualified Expert with the M16 the first time out on the range with it. That would not be possible if it tumbled while in flight.)

The M1 Abrams tank has always had an auxiliary power supply. It was designed in at the prototype level because it would be a waste of maintenance and fuel to fire up the gas turbine drive engine just to use the radio. That tank guzzles fuel like crazy. Unlike a diesel piston engine the turbine in the M1 drinks considerable fuel even at idle. Not having an APU would mean truncating the effective range of the tank if it had to run the turbine drive engine when not moving.

That was a fun side note but the thing that really chaps my ass is this nonsense about the war in Ukraine inexorably marching the world to global destruction.

Joe Biden is a corrupt bastard and may even meet the bar as a traitor in some people’s minds. I don’t like him as POTUS one bit and there’s no argument from me that his policies are disastrously detrimental to the US. What’s bad for the US is directly or obliquely bad for the whole world.

Adding some tanks on the side of the Ukrainians is not going to usher in a nuclear holocaust. It may tip the scales of firepower in favor of the Ukraine but that’s not even close to a trigger for a spasmodic agony of nuclear global destruction.

Saying that Joe Biden, Potato Head in Chief and Glorious Leader of the Women’s Hair Sniffing Regiment, is purposely setting us up for a global nuclear armageddon so he can go sit in some hole in the ground for the rest of his life — Is absurd stupid bullshit.

Why would Joe swap the White House for a hole in the ground? He’s senile and he’s a crafty though stupid man but no one, even Joe Biden, is that senile or stupid. To want that he’d have to be certifiably insane and I don’t think he has enough firing neurons to get all the way to insanity. Especially that kind of insanity. Joe’s in the game for Joe and a hole in the ground to hide in is not Joe’s idea of an optimum outcome for Joe.

This nonsense is hyperbole and it’s exactly the same thing as the Democrat Left in the US calling all white people racist. Which makes it exactly the same kind of LIE.

I get that people passionately ‘hate’ Potato Head Joe. I despise him but I reserve ‘hate’ for situations that actually merit that sort of emotion. Most people don’t even know what real, gut wrenching, do-or-die hate really is. They mistake their lesser emotional distaste and disgust as hatred without realizing that’s what they’re doing. The same as when a child tells its parent “I hate you” in that moment it thinks it does but it doesn’t.

None of that is any excuse for lying, believing liars or spreading lies. Lying comes with its own cost. People need to stop believing and spreading this absurd lie.

The 5.56 NATO round was developed from the .223 Remington varmint cartridge. Varmint rifles have to be supremely accurate because of the long distances and tiny targets.

The 5.56 round was adopted because it is a very high velocity round that does a similar amount of wound damage to larger, slower rounds. Not quite as much but close and a troop can carry a lot more 5.56 ammo than he can 7.63.

But a 5.56 round doesn’t have anywhere near the same penetration as a 7.62 round so it’s a trade-off.

I’ve shot a lot of things with both cartridges and if I had my ‘druthers I’d still go with a 7.62 given the choice.

But I’m a Marine and was an excellent marksman trained in military style shooting by my father long before I enlisted in the Marines. I got even better and refined my technique greatly after I enlisted. That means I make every round count. If I can see it, I can hit it.

I come from a rural American background. As more and more enlistees came from urban areas with no firearms experience at all prior to enlistment — The lighter, easier to use, more forgiving, greater ammo carrying capacity of the M16 pattern rifles increased in advantage for combat military personnel. The advantages in training and deployment of the lighter rifle outweighed the disadvantages.

But they’re still using a varmint cartridge or as real riflemen like to call them — “mouse guns”

All of that said, the 5.56 round has a ballistic coefficient and sectional density that tends to allow it to destabilize and upset on impact with a substantial target. It’s a long skinny bullet and long skinny bullets are inherently less stable than short fat ones.

This destabilization is not uniform nor something that can be depended upon. I’ve shot an awful lot of flesh and blood targets with 5.56 FMJ bullets that simply made a neat round hole on entry and the same on exit. Clearly those bullets did not tumble inside the target.

This is the case so often that I do not immediately recall an example where the bullet upset on contact with the target and created a larger wound channel and bigger exit hole.

The original 5.56 military ammunition, the X/M193 round, has gone through an evolution to a slightly longer, slightly heavier bullet and designated as the SS109 cartridge. This is commonly known as “green tip”. The green paint on the tip does not denote anything particularly special about the bullet itself, it’s not tracer or incendiary ammo or anything like that. In order to make the 5.56 round more suitable for military use the addition of a steel penetrator element added some length and it weighs a little more because in order to create a stable bullet in flight there is still lead under the copper jacket in the core also.

The original 55 grain X/M193 round was mated to a barrel with a rifling twist of 1:10, that’s one complete revolution every ten inches. This was not sufficient to stabilize the SS109 round so the rifling was increased to 1:8. This causes the bullet to exit the rifle muzzle with a spin that is just below the cusp of where the bullet would be torn apart and disintegrate due to centrifugal forces.

The now obsolete X/M193 round has a tendency to yaw and fracture on soft targets. The SS109 round has a much, much lower incidence of that (statistically zero) on soft targets but is more likely to penetrate light armor like body armor.

The reason for the green paint on the tips of ‘green tip’ ammo is to let you know it should be fired from a barrel with a 1:8 rifling twist. That’s all the paint is there for.

America did not intentionally adopt and field a round designed purposefully to skirt the Geneva Convention specifications about small arms ammunition and corrected that issue with the SS109 cartridge. If we had done that intentionally the SS109 would still yaw and fragment. Which it does not. When fired from the barrel it is designed for/is designed for it.

The Russians caught on to all of this several decades back* and introduced the 5.45×39 round (designated the 7N6 round) in their redesigned AK-74 pattern rifles. This round is intentionally constructed to yaw and fragment. There are a few problems with it though.

The AK pattern platform of rifles is inherently inaccurate. At least by my standards. The Russians don’t care about accuracy, they just send a lot of bullets downrange and hope they hit something. The 7n6 cartridge compounds that inaccuracy by being a marginally stable bullet. It’s barely-stable-bordering-on-unstable flight adds to an already inaccurate platform by contributing even more inaccuracy.

That’s not to say you can’t get hit by one of the damn things but if you do get hit it’s very likely by accident. There’s always more air than meat so accuracy, at least to Marines, is tantamount.

I’ve never shot a soft target (I’m being nice, this is a family channel) by accident. Every ‘soft target’ I’ve ever hit was the culmination of training, practice and skill with a competently accurate rifle and cartridge combination used with direct intent.

*(In fact, in the mid-70’s as the ’74’ in AK-74 denotes. This is yet another example of why it’s impossible to keep secrets and developments in military hardware out of the hands of our enemies … If we want to use them in the battlespace. The Bad Guys are always going to learn from whatever scraps of our superior weaponry they can get their hands on and that is factored into our R&D programs. In the case of a yawing, fragmenting bullet design the Russians learned the lesson and implemented it. Badly. Which is common for all Russian made junk.)