Maybe it's that these tanks are older than I am and still going. Maybe because if they can do it, so can I, dammit.
Just a reminder that this year I'll be working on a series of posts covering the Chaco War of the Thirties between Paraguay and Bolivia, one of perhaps the bloodiest, most pointless wars every fought, and that's saying a hell of a lot...
5 comments:
Many decades ago when I was an Officer Cadet, I went to a firepower demonstration where the announcer proudly proclaimed that they had, for the first time in a long time, a full squadron of Centurion tanks doing a battle run. As I recall, only two of the eighteen completed the run without breaking down, throwing a track, or both. As a gunner, I thought it hilarious, especially as the black hat Colonel a few rungs down on the stands seemed quite annoyed. Although, it may have been a ruse. A couple years later the Black Hats had shiny Leopard's.
I suspect the Shermans won't actually be used all that much, except perhaps as semi-static displays. Unless it too is a ruse.
According to Joseph Tainter, a common mode of societal collapse is complexity pushed to the point of diminishing returns. Acquisition and maintenance costs become excessive and people revert to simpler arrangements. The same might be said of technology. A tank is, at its most elemental, nothing more than an armored artillery tractor, so why spend $8.5 million each for MIA2 SEP’s or $8.6 million for Challenger 2’s when you have a collection of ancient Stuarts that can be made serviceable for a few hundred thousand dollars? The marginal advantages of modern tanks come at too high a price for a country like Paraguay.
Something of the same happened in my life. I grew up crazy about cars, rebuilt them, modified them, wrote books about them. Now in old age, I find that a bicycle solves 90% of urban transportation needs and costs thousands of dollars a year less to operate than an automobile. When you come down to it, wheels are wheels.
My guess is that these vehicles are likely still fairly functional, Ael, assuming that 1) they were purchased new by Brazil in the post-WW2 period and 2) decently garaged and maintained since then by the Brazilian and Paraguayan armies. Given that they are unlikely to have been run much I'm guessing that there aren't a lot of hours on the engines and running gear which are the wear points for a tank. As your Canadian tankies discovered, having new/in good condition treads and engines is critical. But the Sherman in the picture in the Jane's article looks like it has been kept up pretty well.
I think that the thing here, Paul, is that Paraguay is looking at two competing pressures and the one overcomes the other. The first is the one you mention; that these vehicles are relatively inexpensive and easier to maintain and operate than a high-tech modern tank. As such they make sense for a smallish country with a limited military budget.
The second pressure, though, is actual operational capability. These WW2 vehicles are beyond obsolete; they'd be bonfires within seconds if matched against a modern tank. As training vehicles they're relatively worthless for training tankers to operate those modern tanks, given that the cannon and sight systems are about as close to a modern AFV's main gun system as a trebuchet is to the Sherman's 76mm cannon...
But the pressure from the second imperative is relatively tiny. Paraguay has no real disputes with its neighbors, having settled the lingering Chaco tensions with Bolivia in the last decade. There's no real reason for the Paraguayan Army to need tanks, other than the whole "We're an army and armies have tanks!" thing. So, since all this really is about is "national pride", why NOT feed that fire with a cool old antique tank?
There's the internal security angle too... armor, even obsolete armor, is very threatening and invulnerable to riotous assemblies, unless they are trained to use Molotovs or someone has an RPG-7 stashed somewhere.
Looking forward to your posts on the Chaco War very much.
Thinking about a new game design on this one!
Really looking forward to your posts on the Chaco war chief - keep us posted.
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