Subject: Re: The Brits have...about 25 tanks
Britain has 25…or 140, depending on the count. But they have a navy, even though it has been shrunk over the years, sufficient to bottle up Russia’s northern fleet. That’s Britain’s strength, diminished though it is. That’s the part Britain would play in any NATO response to a conflict with Russia

As for tanks, France has 222 Le Clerc main battle tanks in service and another 184 in storage. It also has a pile of oler tanks in storage- you know, the kind of older tanks that Russia is increasingly using on the battlefield as their newer tanks are destroyed by Ukrainian drones..

Similarly Germany- 310 active Leopard 2 tanks

Sweden has 110 active MBT’s

Finland- 239

Spain has 327


And then there’s…. whoah! Poland!! 612 active main battle tanks


And therein lies one of the value of NTo alliance.

It has been argued that Russia has thousands of tanks, and that would be true, but most of these were manufactured during the Cold War- many of them before 1965. The more modern tanks have been decimated by Ukrainian drones.


Have I mentioned drones? My bad. Or antitank missiles?

The majority of Russian tanks destroyed have been destroyed … first by antitank missiles manufactured by America as well as other NATO countries…but in the last two years- increasingly by cheaply produced anti-tank drones, which Ukraine alone is manufacturing in increasingly huge numbers. NATO countries have taken note and are upping their own drone production.

The days of fearing a huge Russian tank charge through the Fulda gap are over. Hell, last summer Ukraine launched a small attack of its own into Russia, capturing several hundred square kilometers of territory around the Russian city of Kursk- and they still hold much of that Kursk salient ( “Kursk salient”, my God, how history echoes).

And despite the expenditure of six months of time, tens of thousands of Russian and North Korean lives and hundreds of armored vehicles, Ukraine still holds a significant portion of their gains from last summer.


And Russia is going to charge into the heart of Europe through the Fulda gap?


The Baltics? Estonia, Latvia, Estonia and throw in Finland for good measure? Could be, but that would trigger NATOs mutual defense clause…


But much more likely……… Russia, which has been unable to recapture several hundred kilometers of it’s own territory in a war that Russia started……… is unable to defeat NATO militarily, so its propaganda is embarked on a strategy of convincing the rest of the world that its army is composed of echelons of rock-jawed, super-masculine behemoths (while not mentioning that they are being slaughtered in echelons in Ukraine) and that their hardware inventory contains multiple super weapons (while not mentioning that several of those “super-weapons” have not proven to be so “super” on the battlefield- the T-14 Armata tank, for instance, or its “game-changing” Iskander hyper-sonic missiles…. Both deadly, to be sure, but hardly “game-changing”.


Seen online this morning- not any sort of heavy analysis, but it does sum up the issue:


500 million Europeans and 350 million Americans are dreading a future death blow that will be inflicted by a country 140 million who haven’t been able to defeat a country of 40 million in three years