Angry Planet - The Long Weird History of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

The Bradley Fighting Vehicle is on its way to Ukraine. Fifty of them, to be precise. This armored personnel carrier on tracks is not a tank. Don’t call it a tank. Once maligned as a boondoggle that represented everything wrong with Pentagon weapon’s programs, the Bradley is now a much desired piece of armor.With us today to suss this all out is Sebastian Roblin. Roblin is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in NBC, Forbes, and—of course—War Is Boring.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. The Bradley fighting vehicles on its way to Ukraine, 50 of them, to be precise. This armored personnel carrier on tracks is not a tank. Don't call it a tank. Once maligned as a boondoggle that represented everything wrong with the Pentagon weapons programs, the Bradley is now a much desired piece of armor.

How do that happen? With us today to suss all this out is Sebastian Roblin. Roblin is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in NBC Forbes, and of course, war is boring. Sebastian, thank you so much for coming on to the show. Yeah, it's been such a pleasure. I've been a fan for many years now. So what is a Bradley fighting vehicle?

So, yeah, when you use the term fighting vehicle, it doesn't necessarily say too much the average person. But the operators of these things are really picky about the title. But a good way to start with it to think is that this is an infantry fighting vehicle. It's meant to transport foot soldiers. But not only. because they actually just transporting foot soldiers that was done quite a bit, even World War II, Vietnam. You had the U.S. used first half-tracks during the Second World War,

and then these boxy rhomba-shaped M1-13s in Vietnam. And they're basically like battle taxis. Like they help the troops get to the front line, and, you know, they could take a little, some small arms fire, and probably the guys being transported inside are safe. But once they really run into enemy heavy weapons, they're in trouble and they're not meant to do too much fighting once they've dropped the troops off. So as an infantry fighting vehicle, though, you then say, well, the vehicle itself should also be a major contributor to the fight.

And, you know, you could battle all sorts of heavy weapons and then you don't have to have the foot soldiers get out and point their rifles in the middle of a tank battle, say. It was kind of the original concept? Well, was that the original concept or was that a concept that came later during the planning phase? as dramatized in a movie perhaps. Yes. Well, it's tricky because, to be fair, proceeding the Bradley by like 20 years almost, the Soviets came up with a similar type of vehicle, the B&P, which is really ubiquitously being used by both sides.

And so that already had the idea of like this is a troop transport for infantry that can also fight tanks. Now, the U.S. plans for a similar sort of vehicle didn't originally envision them fighting tanks so much, and they just went with a light cannon armament to fight other light armored vehicles and provide fire support and things. Towards the end, there's also the cavalry branch that wanted a scout vehicle, and they sort of got roped into also making into the Bradley program. And that's why there's actually somewhat confusingly two designations, the M2, which is the infantry version, and the M3, which is for cavalry. But they're also actually really quite similar.

It's just the cavalry version is only meant to transport a much smaller number of troops and have some different radios and things. Sorry, go ahead. And eventually, the cost of like meshing these two projects together was high enough that there was fear Congress wouldn't approve it. So they're also like, well, why don't we just throw in some tank killing capability too? Because that's like a sexy weapon that Congress will like. So the origins of it still kind of sort. it is like, oh, this is a boomdogal meant to sell the project. And that was dramatized in a film called The Pentagon Wars,

is how this like this program sort of spiraled and became ever more and more ambitious. Now, I think the film also looked at the fact that the, that there was some difficulty meeting the defensive and protective performance expectations. The Pentagon wanted the vehicle to be protected against the very heavy, machine guns the Soviets used up to 14 and a half millimeter and I think originally the vehicle wasn't quite up to that and had to be tweaked

and things. Now, what's a bit ironic about it is that although many people bring up the Pentagon wars about how this is like another F-35 like program with lots of development issues and cost overruns. I think first not only the Bradley has performed well

in combat overall, it has some flaws we can get into, but also it's basically kind of become a standard pattern. Like when the Soviets first introduced their BMP1, it's now retroactively called, it had some design flaws that had to be significantly changed. But since then, this type of pattern of armament, like tracks, a small light cannon and an anti-tank missile launcher is sort of standardized. So I think the implication that it's like it was badly conceived, I think is more dubious

because everybody else eventually did the same thing and is iterating on that general pattern. Yeah, it was meditating on this. Were you really meditating on this? I was thinking about, okay. I was thinking about, let me do malpropisms if I want. I was thinking about the Pentagon Wars last week as all this Bradley news was coming out. And I, it was so funny to me that there's this movie with, Kelsey Grammer from 1998.

There was an HBO movie was not even like in theaters about that kind of dramatizes the the processing of this thing or the creation of this thing and like what a different place America was in in 1998 with regards to its relationship with its military that we were willing to do this comedy kind of lampooning military spending. And then, you know, flash forward to 2023. And the thing that everyone like now. everyone wants this thing and not only that like you said it had been it's been copied and iterated upon you know the it's a movie where uh kerry elwis puts goats in uh in this thing and uh to prove that

the interior of the thing will kill people uh should it you know should it ever catch on fire that there's like they would release a flammable gas that or would release a poison gas that would kill everyone and now this thing is very popular. Yeah, no, no, it's all right. I had to deal with cats earlier. I thought I chased them all out, but one slipped in. Yes, and what's interesting about what you said there is that when the movie came out, the Bradley might also have been easier to see as something that no longer fit what the U.S.

military needed at all. There was the mentality then that, look, now we're in a sort of post-great-power conflict war. There's only going to be, like, peacekeeping or enforcement missions abroad. and a very heavy vehicle like the Bradley is like, you know, overgunned and overarmored for that sort of thing. And so you actually see the next vehicle that the U.S. adopted, the striker, which was on wheels and much more lightly armed, made in response to that. So the Bradley seemed like, oh, this is a Cold War dinosaur, which will be pointless going forward to some. It will never be another land war in Europe, they say. Yes, exactly.

They're talking about sending the striker now, too. too, right? Yeah. You know, it's useful, but it's probably not as urgent for what the Ukrainians would like. The U.S. itself had recently decided that the striker was too lightly armed, and they found ways to modify them to carry a javelin anti-tank missiles and a gun, a 30-millimeter gun similar to that of the Bradley, actually a little bit bigger. So they sort of backtracked on that. I think that there is still a feeling that wheeled vehicles might be more viable than was thought at the time. But, you know, there are also, there's still places where you might encounter more trouble, like when very muddy fields or steep inclines.

And so there's still the argument for a tract vehicle like Bradley, even if there's higher operating costs usually with them. Can I ask you a purely hypothetical question? Mm-hmm. Could you lay out hypothetically how this might actually work? work in practice. Like, what's the situation on the battlefield, then you bring in your how exactly does this all work and does it work with other systems? All right. So here is, ideally the Bradley would work as part of a combined arms team,

which means that you have an attack where the tanks provide the heaviest firepower and also get ready to absorb the heaviest blows coming the other way. But once they encounter, And the Bradleys will fight alongside them and provide some extra fire support, which is how they were used in the 1991 Gulf War. And at the time, it was even said the Bradley's destroyed more Iraqi armored vehicles than the tanks. I mean, there were more of them out there. But eventually, the problem with relying on tanks is that when you get to really dense or constricted terrain where you can't see too far ahead, they become really vulnerable to ambushes. And so the right thing to do, which many armies fail to do, because the tanks and infantry are separate branches and don't practice as much together, is to have some infantry go forward and screen the tanks, scout it out and find where the ambushers are. So even if things are tough for the infantry, at least the tanks survive and can then whack anything that they locate.

And the infantry can enter buildings, set up defensive positions. So there's a number of things they can kind of handle better than just relying on the tanks by themselves. And you still want to keep that infantry moving with the tanks, even if they're coming under like sniper fire or not so accurate artillery fire, which will like still shred a truck with a near miss, but maybe not so much in an armored Bradley. That was like one of the design characteristics was to be resilient to shrapnel from a heavy Soviet howitzer. Like a direct kit would still do one in, but the idea is that you could keep on advancing and not have to not be pinned down when you come under small arms or. or more scattered artillery attention. It's kind of fascinating. After decades, this thing is finally going to the place where people kind of originally

envisioned it would be used, right? Yeah. And I should stress, too, that although the most exciting application, so to speak, is that the U.S. would like the Ukrainian army to fight, like, this very mobile combined arms maneuver battle, I would guess that it will possibly be, at least initially be used. used in a more conservative way because trying the sort of maneuvers the U.S. Army likes, start with. The U.S. Army also has air power, which manages to sort of work over some of the bigger threats to maneuver forces in advance. But, you know, there's already a very

entrenched sort of stalemate where mobility is hard in Ukraine. So they might want to use the sensors and the firepower of the Bradley more conservatively at the beginning. more as like a sort of, you know, as a sort of tank destroyer or assault gun. The tank destroyability is also when you have to use at a distance, because the Bradley has like a missile launcher, which is actually more accurate when it has more time to sort of get aimed on to target. And it also has only a few shots with that. So there's a reason why tanks haven't all replaced their big guns with missile launchers

is that there's a higher rate of fire that can be done when you're in a pin. and also a Bradley, unless they are receiving the newer types of missiles, they actually have to stay still while they're guiding the missile to target to some extent because somebody is actually sort of piloting the missile, which is connected to the tank by a wire that spools out for like up to two miles. So it definitely wouldn't be used the same way you use a main battle tank, but because it has really good sensors and infrared sensors, and there's a lack of those on both sides of the war in Ukraine,

and especially on the Russian side, it could be used as a more offensive platform than, you know, is the doctrinal usage of it. Is it hard to drive one of these things? We're handing over these vehicles to Ukraine, which I assume that most of these people never have used one. And when you think about, like, the Patriot system, we had to bring a whole bunch of Ukrainians over to Oklahoma

in order to learn how to use it. I mean, is this easy just sort of plug-in play? I'm sure there's a YouTube video that'll explain it. I would guess that the complexity will actually be the biggest for the maintenance and support services to learn. I've heard it's a similar issue with jet fighters. It's like the piloting is one thing, but there's a lot of stuff that's been done to try to speed up the ease of use

so that, you know, non-genious recruits can still operate the vehicle. but then repairing the vehicle, maintaining it, and getting logistics is what I would worry more about. One bonus is that Ukraine has already received tow missiles. By now they've already used some, so they at least have some institutional knowledge and there's some efficiency and using the vehicle with a missile they already have started using. But you're right that training the crew will take time. It has more sophisticated sensors and things than the average. Ukrainian brigade receives on its vehicles. But I don't think it'll be as difficult as a patriot.

The air defense is like immensely technically complicated, lots of interlocking parts. And it's to the point that a complete air defense unit for like a Patriot is like a whole large number of vehicles and hundreds of personnel all working together rather than just an individual launcher acting by itself. Is there any kind of good fatal flaw? Is there any kind of good fatal flaw? for the Bradley that we should be looking for. Does it not actually work in the cold, for example, and it's being sent into Russia? Did you not hear me say about the poison goats and the gas? Right, right.

Yeah, the poison goats, I love. The one that the U.S. Army has been a bit fixated on recently is that it's, they added lots more armor to it after the Gulf War, and the version Ukraine is getting, is called the M2-A-2-ODS, which stands for Operation Desert Storm. which was based on them, oh, like, we want way more armor on this, so that several categories of weapons no longer work against it. So they added all the armor, and it is harder to kill, but they didn't change the engine, so it weighs a lot more

and using the same amount of engine power. And that also means it's lower to the ground, which brings up the other related flaw. It's not really designed for mine resistance. They were thinking, the Bradley was built to fight like a defensive war in Germany, So they thought the mines will be mostly ours. And so ideally what you want for mine resistance is like a V-shaped haul and some other features that protect the passengers if something explodes under it. So the U.S. is installing better engines so that the suspension is less strain

and it can lift a bit higher up the ground, which protects it a bit from mines. But that will, you know, the engine being a bit overtaxed and will still be a factor, I would think especially getting through the mud and things. And the fact that it weighs 30 tons and the standard vehicle the Ukrainians use is 16 tons, the BMP2. So again, you'll need heavier vehicles to tow these away, to move these to the front and to maintain them and all that. What about the paint job? Are you worried that they won't receive like the appropriate like winter camouflage? I'm just curious about that because it's funny, I didn't think about it until you said it.

You know, they're getting the Desert Storm model. Every picture I've seen about this thing, every Getty image, every AP image that's been on top of every story has been. It's the beige model, right? I mean, I'm assuming they would winter, they would do winter camo, right, for a European theater. But I'm just curious if we'd know that or not. Honestly, I don't know too much about how rigorously they practice repainting. What I have heard is that the Ukrainians are a bit more. systematic at using camouflage netting for winter and that the Russians have been grousing that they

have not. And so wherever they're hiding or equipment or personnel are easier to spot from the sky by drones. So that's a big consideration. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the initial losses of the Bradley aren't in some like bold attack, but just because Russian frontline reconnaissance spotted them and either hit them with some kind of drone-based weapon or artillery. So why these do you think? I mean, I know that Ukrainians want tanks, like tank tanks, and these are not tanks. And actually, I'd like to talk a little bit more about what is a tank in a minute. But why these?

So I would guess that there is an aspect of like sort of hedging, like trying to push the boundary but not go too far with it. But also tanks are like the U.S. style like Abrams or the Leopard 2, they're like 60 to 70 tons. So they involve an even higher degree of maintenance and support in the U.S. tank ideally runs on different types of fuel. So although the U.S. does have also a lot of tanks in storage, the matter of transferring them to Ukraine is just a higher degree of complication and also, I think, still perceived as a higher political risk, although they might eventually go over that threshold too. So the tank can definitely survive some heavier fire power to the front.

I think is another aspect of that. Also, they're on their way out too, right? They're kind of at the end of their service life or perceived service life or what some people in the Pentagon would like their service life to be, right? Well, yeah, the Pentagon wants to, they had plans to, I talked about how there was an engine upgrade to the Bradley. And they had thought about going an even bigger upgrade after that to have a larger gun on the Bradley and some other updates. And then they said, no, we're going to get a new vehicle. It's been 40 years. So we should feel okay about this. But they've kept on

messing off the competition like time after time to replace it in like utterly spectacular ways, like billions and billions of dollars on like three or four failed attempts to replace the Bradley. And so the current, the latest version, they've tried to release more flexible requirements so that the industry will be more creative. We'll see how it goes. Like the last one that the Pentagon canceled, there were two finalists. And one said, we need a couple extra months to deliver the vehicle, but we can't get a license to transport it. And the other one, I think it was called the Griffin Tank, was basically ready. And the Pentagon said, oh, the first company, you can't deliver it on time.

you're out. Second design that you offered, we're not satisfied with it. Cancel the program. So some people are like, oh, actually, this is good because they didn't waste even more money with something they didn't want, but it means they had to restart it again. The target vehicle that they have will have a larger cannon and some improved protection, and also they hope it will eventually be able to be used robotically. So if there's like a high-risk mission, they won't have to have people on board to use them in battle. Now, one reason, I should add for the Bradley being donated, it's also very available. The U.S. Army is a lot smaller than it was at the height of the Cold War,

so they don't have as many in operational service. And a lot of the older, unupgraded, relatively unupgraded, M2A2 models, there were like 2,000 in storage. So I feel like this is a fairly low-cost thing to give away a vehicle that you're not using anyway and probably will not see service. Like some people are like, oh, no, the U.S. could use it for war. And it's like, well, the main conflict that's happening here in Ukraine will probably be the big one involved in Russia for the time being. And in the Pacific, there's a relatively marginal needs for armored vehicles.

So I think it's really not at all disadvantaging the U.S. Unless you were in a hyper-American tiles, like, what if we sold them to somebody sort of way of mentality? How many people does it carry? So this is actually, to be fair, maybe a weakness I should have mentioned. The M2A2 Desert Storm model has seven, but some earlier versions had six, and it sort of fluctuated between that number of passengers. And that's not ideal because the U.S. Army prefers its infantry squads to have, I think, nine people. So these are kind of lightweight squads, and they're not like the Marines used to go to battle with like 13-man squads, but they've also downsize that. The idea is that those squads can take more casualties and still be effective.

So the infantry teams on the Bradley are a little more dispersed, and they're not like exactly what you'd send to fight a brutal city fight. But to a certain extent, that's when you call in another formation to support the vehicles. Is it named after General Omar Bradley? Yes. He's an interesting character, too. He was kind of like the superior to patent that had just kind of like rein him in and chastise him for sometimes going too hard or other other things. But he was a fairly successful general across World War II and stayed active criticizing political decisions and commenting and defense issues into the 60s.

Okay. So let's do it. Let's have the conversation. What hell is a tank? Oh, it's a good question because if we're honest, I think that if we look at strictly speaking what the first tanks looked like back in World War I and even many in World War II, they might not fit some of the technical definitions we use for tanks today. I would argue that there's two aspects to it. There's the engineering aspect, what design features does it have, and then the functional aspect of what role does it play? And you can see this realized in something called the tank alignment chart, which you can Google on the web, which shows you a matrix of how literal or how strict you are with the definition in the functional as well as engineering sense. Let's look at the engineering sense first, though. I'd say it's a tract vehicle, which has a large caliber gun in a turret, which is meant for direct fire. So we don't count these turreted artillery vehicles that are supposed to fire at targets like a huge distance away and really don't want to get close to the enemy. So moving on to roll, one of the roles of a tank, but not the only one should be ideally to attempt a breakthrough through into enemy lines and lean in advance that exploits the breakthrough as well.

So for that, you also normally want a good degree of protection and you need mobility. But the problem is to some extent, this definition is really sticking close to what we'd call the main battle tank, which is the most common type, which is, if you look at it in World War II terms, it's kind of between the medium and the heavy. It has the ambition of being like the mainstay of the force, like a medium tank, but also of being very tough to kill with even purpose design any tank weapons, which is sort of what we thought of as the heavy tank in World War II. So this is sort of a compromise between these two. And most armies today only field main battle tanks. But there was another class of vehicle you could call a tank to the light tank, which sort of has somewhat different utilization in theory. Like one is that you can send light tanks to places the heavy tanks can't get to

because they're too heavy to transport or the ground is really unforgiving of heavyweight vehicles and you need like rice paddies or steep mountains and so forth. forth. So there you just need a lighter vehicle to be able to use armor much at all. The second reason to have it is if you expect to fight adversaries that have limited anti-tank ability, then a light tank might be nearly as good as a heavy tank. You're the get many of the same things done. And third, you can sort of use it for more armed reconnaissance. So this brings us to one of the vehicles that that was trained. transferred the French AMX-10 RC, which I think, strictly speaking, you'd say engineering-wise is an armored car because it doesn't have tracks.

But it really is used in some of the same ways we'd expect a light tank to be used because it has heavy firepower with like a 105-millimeter gun in the turret. And you can use it for reconnaissance or to fight enemies like, say, insurgents in Mali or whatever, where you don't really need a heavy tank and you're not going to be fighting. encountering too many long-distance weapons that can take it out. That looks like a tank to me. It does. Sorry, just go ahead. Sorry. What are the interesting things about it?

Is it even moves like a tank? Because its wheels don't pivot. They actually have, it's called like a skid tracks or whatever. So you can change which direction the wheels go to execute turns. Like you can have it, it can pivot on spot. by having the wheels on the left side go forward and on the right side go backward, for example. So in some ways, it has actually pretty decent mobility, which is like the downside of the wheeled vehicle to attract one normally.

Why do you think we get into these fights about, I say we, why do you think weirdos online get into these fights about what is and isn't a tank? Well, you know, I think there is an aspect where it's like good for people to have a slightly a good functional role of what things, what things can accomplish. But there's also a sort of elitist or sort of grammar Nazi aspect to it where it's like, well, you know, a certain group of people have specialist knowledge of a thing. So they like correcting it when the public kind of gets it wrong. I think like with the both of Bradley, the MX10, some people said it could be used like a light

tank, which I think is accurate, in my view. Again, it's contextual. You don't use it too aggressively when you're fighting rush up, but if you think that there's a sector where there's not many any tank weapons, you can use it like a light tank, kind of, because they're not in that much trouble. But that mere comment sort of caused a bit of a storm of corrections because they're like, oh, no, you're convincing the public that everything that's an armored vehicle has the capabilities of the main battle tank,

which is, so sure, there's an aspect of, we can promote a more refined view of how these different arms are used, but there's also an aspect of like geeks liking to sort of lord it over the unwashed masses. I can, yes, you got it. Sorry. Yeah, I mean, I can guarantee that a lot of people, including some people I work with, kind of looked at this,

and like looked at the Bradley specifically, we were like, that's a tank. You're not going to tell me any different. Sorry, that's a tank. Yeah. If you're being shot at one, for example, I'm sure it's very much like a tank, except that I guess you'd be hitting

by lots of little blast from its cannon instead of one big one for now, it's right? But as far as, you know, I once wrote like, you know, at Tiananmen Square, right? A very infamous incident where the civilians were killed by Harvard vehicles. There were both tanks and also Arborate

personnel carriers and you know uh you probably did not really care about the difference if you were right in front of them now if you're like a battlefield tactician then you could say okay that other personnel carrier is a machine gun and i've got a whole bunch of weapon systems that can deal with that efficiently and the tank poses a different level of threat and have to and requires different responses so uh you know that there is a higher level of analysis that you can apply to it but for the average person, it still fulfoles that role of being, you know, pretty well armored and dishing out a lot of firepower. I guess there's also going to be the whole thing about whether or not we're stepping up our attack on Russia, right? I mean, if it's, if we're sending propeller planes

versus jets, if we're sending, you know, artillery versus rocket powered artillery, you know, rocket artillery, all of these things, it's partially the amount of destruction they can cause, but it's partially diplomatic as well, right? Why are tanks the line? Good question, right. I kind of wonder if part of it is with the Germans having kind of some trauma still over what they did during World War II.

And so I think that they particularly see the tank as a very offensive weapon. And I think, yeah, on a basic level is yes. If you have a military that wants the most optimal, you know, firepower for defense, it's maybe you can concentrate more anti-tank weapons, you know, portable ones to defend an area. But eventually, that defensive military also wants to counterattack or even go on the more ambitious counteroffensive. And then you still want armored vehicles. So I think it's sure, there's a certain level where having lots of tanks means you might have some offensive intentions. but I think on a practical level,

lots of offensive weapons also are very useful in defensive war, and it's kind of dubious the idea that Ukraine is going to go too far and invade Russia or whatever with tanks. It's a very symbolic sort of thing. And I guess with these infantry fighting vehicles like the Bradley or the martyr, which is pretty similar, which Germany ascending, they felt like this was a sort of comfortable halfway point. but yeah i do have the other thing that i find a bit skeptical i'm skeptical about is that

if you know two things which might be sensitive weapons that cause a lot of destruction like you said and i'd say the artillery uh just historically and it sounds like to me in this conflict too kills way more people than direct fire weapons how loitering unitions now right yeah oh yeah the The videos of the drone attacks are also really terrifying to me because I could see how helpless many that people are detecting them when they creep up and, like, drop the grenades on them. And I'm not sure that we have a robust ability on our side to deter that if we have faced an enemy using that ability. No, it's one of those things that's completely disrupting the battlefield, right? You've got a century of digging foxholes and acting a certain kind of way on the front line to avoid this kind of destruction. And that's just gone.

That's over. Yeah, and actually it has shocked me that the tactic of using these these larger commercial drones, because you need a slightly larger grenade, but large commercial drones to drop grenades on tanks sometimes works. Like I've seen a lot of those videos. Well, I mean, how much of that is like, you know, rotting Soviet tanks that don't have, that's armor's been stripped for parts and sold on 30 years ago, you know,

like there's a lot going on there. well, yeah, and I think that probably a lot of designers are going to think how can we improve top armor? Like, we saw even the Russians before the war they put on the coat cages, which were probably they were designed to stop these kinds of attacks

and it looks like it was in a sense they in theory probably would work against a grenade but then not against all sorts of other weapons. But so they kind of knew it might be a problem and we'll have to think about it too. Maybe the solution might be somewhat Soviet-style to use explosive reactive armor bricks on the top roof, for example.

There's like a video of a Ukrainian tank that got hit in the side by a kamikaze drone, and it looks like the bricks on its armor helped save it. But these things do create new vulnerabilities. They haven't yet reached the point where they've caused obsolescence, is what I'd say. So you'd still see both sides wanting these armored vehicles, even if, yeah, people are always finding new ways to defeat them. But everybody also adjusts to that and changes their tactics. Spassion Roblin, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. Where can people find your work?

Well, I write quite frequently for 1945 these days, as well as Forbes. And I sometimes write op-eds for NBC. I'd sometimes I'd like, oh, I'd rather just sort of analyze this. And they're like, no, take a strong opinion. So they're giving me a good drill on making more assertive arguments. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's been a pleasure talking. Thanks for listening to another episode of Anchorage.

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