towed anti-tank gun? romania, pls. WW2 was QUITE some time ago
@pony you are probably not following the RU-UK Donbas conflict too much, do you? It was back to WW2: two parties throwing tons of steel to each other. No air force involved, suddenly high quality anti-tank tech is **the** major tech advantage.
We always thought the next big war will be all air force, satellites, etc. Maybe not. Maybe it will be a throwback to WW2 again for some important reasons.
@pony I am not a weaponry expert (and hope never will have to become one). What I find remarkable are the analysis of role of modern anti-tank weapons in Ukrainian conflict. On the one hand, US [Javelins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin) are seen as a significant advantage there and apparently also feared by the Russian side. From what I read about it, it's a fire & forget, so probably an intelligent self-guiding weapon. Probably unlike those Romanian things...
@pony Next time I speak to a land army officer I need to ask them about this. Some interesting and non-obvious developments are happening where I have a chance to look at. For instance the Dutch army by the end of 2010-ish abandoned all tanks. So there are none left. The idea back then was that 1) there is no immediate threat of a conventional war; 2) it's an outdated concept; and 3) there's a need for a more flexible special-ops force mix. Then 2014 and Donbas conflict came and the NLD land army woke up to a new reality and started to consider reintroducing tanks back - at a great cost as the knowledge and skills are being lost. Mind you, those tanks are not getting back yet, some smarter ideas came along, but the dynamics is in itself quite interesting.
USMC armour serves the same purpose as US Army Armour, so it is a redundant corp as long as the Army continues their armour corp.
also the US army’s towed Howitzers are not for anti armour, the US Army uses Self propelled artillery vehicles for anti-tank as well as just using Abrams and Bradleys for anti-tank
anti tank gun is fire and forget by definition and there is some renewed interest in them as all modern tanks now have some form of active protection that can defeat missiles, while good luck doing anything about a lump of metal you will never hear coming (because it's coming at you at a supersonic speed), problem is that a javelin team can fire the missile and run to cover or another hiding spot (or can be firing them from a technical or whatever), this AT gun is just 3 tons of metal sitting there, waiting to be killed...
@pony On Wikipedia I read this thing has an extended effective firing range: anti-tank 3km, as a mortar 20km and anti-personnel 4km. If we focus on anti-tank operation, you said the disadvantage is that the thing is a hot sitting duck after the first shot. I don't know what is the range of IR homing systems, but 3+km seems rather far. As this can fire 7-15 rounds per minute, despite being an outdated design, I'd guess it can still inflict considerable damage at a relatively low cost before being shot down, so maybe it's not such a throwaway piece for Romanians. Think about it as operating your home server NAS on a 7-years old discarded laptop 😄 . But what do I know...
