Reply To: Russian dragon’s teeth

[Brian Handley]

Guy,

please don’t think I take my self to seriously ;-).

This was a very interesting reply and as you say no waffle.

 

My take is this.  The trench diggres the Russians use are quite astonding in performance .

https://www.militarytoday.com/engineering/btm_3.htm

In and in terms of costy that will be dominated by the initial price and maintainance and capital cost.   At a rate between 250m and 1000m /hr it’s propably the fastest and in Ukraine on arrable land it may be in its element.  However this makes it in greatest demand.

As such a valuable asset it will not want to be anywhare near the front which adds to the issue of where it can be used.   Plus it would be interesting to know which machine dug the front line infantry trencehs, their positions indicate machine dug.

My guess is that the ditch is the “best” defence as it takes stores or most time to breach.

The dragons teeth have I suspect, two main advantages, cheap and plentiful supply of manpower to produce and lay.  There is an excelent video of them being laid by a civilian crane truck and they are after all just a concrete pyramid.   I was supprised to see that they were not dug in.  Even walking the beaches of the UK such defences are dug in and some in Europs are locked into concrete rafts.    However the video does indicate that a basic tank, no dozer blade can get grounded on them in the same way vehicles can be stuck on the stump of a tree.

However indications are thart they may be pushed asside by a sutable vehicle, a Challenger with blade can push them asside,

Hedgehogs, while effective, industrial grade steel is proably not as easy to get in the moderen world quickly and localy.  Every contry had their own steel works but even now in the industrial UK we only really produce high quality steel, importing the more basic versions.  This may be the case for russian and you need welding gear proably on site, which reqires specialist workers and gear.  Proabaly why they are not that popular and the steel will have to come a long way, say from india and that is a logistics  nightmare given Russian logistics for the last 100 to 200km to the front line.

I do like the idea that perhaps with two types of obsticle you need to swap round.  However IMR2’s and Buffles could proably do both jobs slowly,  particularly the anti tank ditch.

To do that fast you would ned Fachines the UK now used platic pipes not logs so you get long life and drainage  or a bridge layer.

It becoms moot if you can cover the hundreds of km of defences in Ukrain with the limited forces available to either side,  Hence either you hope to get a particular section covered before the enemy arrives else its usefullness is limited, but not perhaps totally useless.

Thanks for an interesting reply.

What is interesting as a side bar is how few of the newer minefileld are burried, this may indicate that both sides are short of specialist minelaying gear.    In addition the Russian were supposed to have sufficent mine roillers to equip 1 in 3 tanks, either thay have been rusted away, scapped or sold for scarp on the black market as they are losing far to many vehicles to mines.