Quote:
Originally Posted by scorpio_rocks
There are plenty of videos showing untrained "users" scoring hits with ATGMs but none showing the misses. I wonder how many are fired and miss / are countered?
OR is it really that easy to kill a MBT?
|
There is a pattern in all the videos. All the tanks being hit are static, on top of a hill, sometimes dug in as well and almost always hit from the sides. That means the turkish army (and the syrian one most of the time tbh) is using tanks as gun platforms most of the time, supporting by fire whatever operation is carried. Using tanks like this is quite tricky, since if you don't secure the area well (and they don't), you're quite vulnerable to attacks like this. Tanks are an offensive weapon and they perform excellent at this role. Using them as glorified direct artillery will be hard for the men and the machines.
It seems that the Turks try to use the irregular fighters they support as the grunts in this conflict. Problems is, they aren't exactly top notch fighters and in the latest disaster in Al-Bab, they fled, forcing Turkey to use a commando formation to do the trick. That didn't help them though. Anyway, the above strategy helped minimize casualties somehow, since if you see the service branch in the casualty list, armor together with special forces bears the brunt of suffering. However, none of them (especially armor) is used correctly as a result. If more infantry formations arrive and the irregulars are sidelined, it will help the turkish army perform better (which will mean they'll have more casualties though and it'll make their political leverage for this operation diminish).
Finally, it is quite debatable how much "untrained" the ISIS fighters are, considering they're doing this trick for over 3 years now and many of them were ex-military personnel.