TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
Ukraine has become a graveyard for Russians — and for modern weapons systems

Lucian K. Truscott IV,

 Salon
April 02, 2022

Ukraine Defense Ministry handout

The word "miscalculation" has been thrown around a lot to describe Vladimir Putin's attempt to annex Ukraine, but perhaps his biggest miscalculation lay in thinking he could do it using tanks as his primary weapon. It's clear as the sixth week of the war begins that his apparent plan was to send a column of tanks rumbling into Kyiv, blow up a few things, send Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government scampering away in fear, declare victory, install a puppet president and go home. Evidence that his plan was a strategic, tactical and political failure is showing on your television screens around the clock. If there is one image that will symbolize forever this war, it will be a blown-up Russian tank, its treads sagging and its turret tilted, rusting by the side of the road in Ukraine.

Thirty years ago, this country used two armored cavalry regiments, a mechanized infantry division and a 400 helicopter-strong air assault to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces. Huge formations of tanks crossed the border from Saudi Arabia following massive airstrikes on Iraqi positions. During the assault, three epic tank battles were fought in the desert of Kuwait, one of which is thought to have been the largest tank battle in American history. In less than 100 hours of fighting, U.S. forces destroyed 1,350 Iraqi tanks and 1,224 armored personnel carriers (APCs). In all, some 5,000 Iraqi armored combat vehicles were destroyed, damaged or captured. The U.S. military lost a single Bradley fighting vehicle. What is now known as the first Gulf War was the most celebrated and successful use of armored weaponry in modern history. It seemed as Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles rolled to victory in Kuwait City that powerful armored vehicles had proved their worth as weapons of modern war.

RELATED: Putin's massive miscalculation: Echoes of George W. Bush — and a lesson for America's elites

Putin's attempt to take that lesson and apply it to Ukraine has failed abjectly, and it's not just because the deserts of a Kuwait winter are more amenable to tank battles than the muddy flatlands of an Eastern European spring. Yes, 30 years have passed, and Russia has not kept up with modern technology and tactics, but it's more than that. The fierce determination of Ukraine's fighters has played an outsized role throwing Russian forces into disarray, but size and money and ease of use have played large roles, too.

Russian tanks have met their match because of two Western-made rockets, the U.S. Javelin and the British Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapon (NLAW). Both are lightweight, easily portable, deadly accurate, relatively inexpensive and designed to get around every attempt of modern armor design to defeat them. Lightly armored Russian personnel carriers, constructed mostly of aluminum, can be destroyed using Russia's own RPG-7 rocket launcher, which was designed and deployed more than 60 years ago.

Ukrainian forces have expertly used the Javelin and the NLAW to destroy Russian tanks as they have moved in convoys and deployed in combat to assault Ukrainian cities and towns. The weapons are carried by infantry soldiers on foot and can be fired from positions of cover and concealment. Both are "fire and forget" weapons, meaning that once they have been aimed at a target and tracked for a short period, they can be fired by the user, who is then able to drop the weapon and move away to safety. The NLAW is disposable. The weapon is meant to fire a single missile and then be discarded. The American Javelin can be reloaded and used to fire multiple missiles, but in an emergency can be discarded if the soldier using it has come under fire and must retreat from his or her position. Both weapons are designed to use high-tech location systems to hit the tops of tank turrets where they are lightly armored and highly vulnerable.

But here is the real deal: The NLAW disposable missile costs around $25,000, and the Javelin rocket launcher system costs about $180,000 and fires a missile that costs around $75,000. Both rocket launchers are being used in Ukraine to destroy tanks that cost upwards of $2 million each. The cost differential is obvious. It's even better when you consider the RPG-7, which costs around $1,000 and fires missiles that can cost as little as $100 each. (Costs can go up to as much as $500 for RPG warheads when they use armor piercing or air-burst technology.) Their cost-effectiveness is amazing when you consider that they're being used to knock out Russian APCs costing more than $1 million each. In Iraq, the same RPGs were used by insurgents to bring down American Apache and Blackhawk helicopters that cost between $6 million and $13 million each, depending on the model and year of manufacture.

Ukraine has also made use of armed drones against Russia's heavy armor, such as the T-72 tank. The drones were acquired from Turkey and fire "smart" bombs that are much more expensive than Javelin rounds but have been extremely effective, especially when used to destroy tanks in convoys, where even one disabled tank becomes an obstacle to every vehicle behind it. The infamous 40-mile Russian convoy that moved slowly from the Belarus border to positions around Kyiv was stalled repeatedly by Ukrainian drones and anti-tank weapons fired by infantry. RPGs were also used to take out Russian ammunition and fuel trucks, making the units they were meant to serve less combat-effective.

In fact, Russia's use of armored weapons like tanks and APCs has been a bust. The only thing the Russian military has been effective at doing is standing back from Ukrainian cities and shelling civilian areas with artillery and rocket launchers, which is to say the one thing they've been really good at is committing war crimes. Russia has also been very reluctant to employ its helicopters for both air-mobile infantry and gunship use because the Ukrainian military has been supplied with Stinger and other anti-aircraft missiles, which have been used to take down Russian helicopters as well as fighter-bomber jet aircraft. The cost differential between the ground-based Stingers and expensive Russian air force jets is enormous, which is why Russia has failed to achieve air superiority despite its far better equipped air force and army helicopter units. They have been reluctant to put them in the air, knowing Ukrainians with Stingers are waiting for them on the ground.

The Pentagon has for several decades had a team of military officers from the three major services, along with civilian defense experts and scientists, whose task is to look 25 years ahead, constantly trying to predict what the warfare of the future will look like and prepare for it. Thirty years ago, when the U.S. drove Saddam's army out of Kuwait, we didn't face anti-tank weapons like the Javelin and NLAW. The technology of that time was the plain and simple LAW, a disposable anti-tank weapon that fired an inaccurate unguided warhead that wasn't capable of penetrating American armor, much less the enemy armor of that time.

The Pentagon doesn't talk much about what its seers into warfare's future are up to, but they must be studying what has happened to Russian armor faced with the much smaller and less well-equipped Ukrainian army. Russia has had major problems moving its armored units from their positions across the border before the war into Ukraine, even more problems supplying their tanks and APCs with fuel once they were underway, and problems after that resupplying and refueling tanks once they reached positions where they could be used in combat to invade Ukrainian cities and take territory. Tanks have historically been one of an army's weapons of terror. Their fearsome appearance and firepower has had an understandably intimidating effect on both infantry soldiers and defenses in place.

But tanks sitting still on a road, packed closely together, like those we saw in the infamous 40-mile convoy at the beginning of the war aren't intimidating at all. They are targets, and now many of them are scrap heaps of twisted steel and limp tracks and crooked turrets, all because a foot soldier carrying a 25-pound missile launcher was able to sneak up close enough to fire a warhead that cost less than one percent of the cost of the tank. Those kinds of figures, as they say, are not sustainable. Nor is the tank as a weapon of modern war.

Tainted Trial

These guys were not just acquitted they were declared innocent. Something the court did not do for Stephen Truscott.

Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto ruled yesterday that New Jersey-based Armour Pharmaceutical Co. and the four doctors, including a former top Canadian Red Cross official, behaved responsibly in distributing HT Factorate.

"There was no conduct that showed wanton and reckless disregard. There was no marked departure from the standard of a reasonable person," she told a packed University Ave. courtroom. "On the contrary, the conduct examined in detail for over 1 1/2years confirms reasonable, responsible and professional actions and responses during a difficult time.

"The allegations of criminal conduct on the part of these men and this corporation were not only unsupported by the evidence, they were disproved," she said. "The events here were tragic. However, to assign blame where none exists is to compound the tragedy."

While in other countries corporate officers and politicians went to jail over the tainted blood scandal in Canada the government passed legislation to forgive government ministers and politicians and bureacurats responsible for the tainted blood scandal. So the Judge ruled accordingly. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. And the rest of us be damned.

In his 1997 report on the country's tainted blood scandal, Justice Horace Krever strongly criticized Canada's reaction to the AIDS crisis. Krever said the decision by Red Cross officials to exhaust their supply of untreated blood products before switching fully to safe heat-treated concentrates in 1985 was especially careless.

Victims of tainted blood reacted with seething disbelief. "People were infected and people died," John Plater of the Canadian Hemophilia Society said outside the courthouse, his voice rising in anger.

"How that could possibly be considered reasonable behaviour is beyond us."

Mike McCarthy, who contracted hepatitis C from tainted blood, went further, saying the judgment was a "miscarriage of justice." He called on the Crown attorney to appeal the acquittals.

But David Scott, a lawyer for a senior Health Canada official who was acquitted, said "these charges should never have been laid. It was a mistake from the beginning and people's lives have been brutally affected by them."

Eddie Greenspan, lawyer for the former head of the Red Cross blood program, described the ruling as "absolute vindication and complete exoneration" on a scale that is rarely seen.

"The bottom line is that there was no criminal conduct by anyone who was in charge. The bottom line is that Canada was well served by people who made these decisions."

Defence lawyers said that, given the exoneration, they will seek to have the legal fees of the accused reimbursed and may even launch lawsuits for malicious prosecution.

Proving once again that the courts in Canada uphold the state and business interests against the public interest.

In our free enterprise system, there is no legislation to oblige an employer to remain in business and to regulate his subjective reasons in this respect . . . . If an employer, for whatever reason, decides as a result to actually close up shop, the dismissals which follow are the result of ceasing operations, which is a valid economic reason not to hire personnel, even if the cessation is based on socially reprehensible considerations.

If Conrad Black had been put on trial in Canada he would have been acquitted.



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American apartheid: This country still treats too many of its black citizens like slaves
Published on June 13, 2020 By Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon- Commentary


Imagine that you are a black citizen of this country. Every day, you wake up in your house or your apartment, and you must wonder, is this the day? Is this the day I’m going to be jogging down a neighborhood street, like Ahmaud Arbery, and be killed by armed civilians? Is this the day I’m going to be arrested outside a convenience store, like George Floyd, and be strangled to death? Is this the day I’m going to be stopped in my car by a policeman for failure to signal a lane change, like Sandra Bland, and be arrested and jailed and end up dead? Is this the day I’m going to be birdwatching in the park, like Christian Cooper, and have a passerby call the police and report me? Is this the day I’m going to be stopped for a broken brake light, like Walter Scott, and shot five times in the back and killed? Is this the day I’m going to walk up to the door of my apartment building and be confronted by four policemen and when I reach for my wallet, be shot 19 times, like Amadou Diallo? Is this the day I will be snatched off the street by three white supremacists and dragged with a chain behind a truck for three miles until I die, like James Byrd Jr. in Texas?

How would you like to be afraid every single day of your life that something terrible will happen to you, just because you are black?

We white citizens are treating our fellow black citizens like they are slaves. They experience the same kind of violence and inhumanity that was visited upon slaves. If they were walking normally down a road, they could be suspected of having escaped their slave bonds and be arrested and taken into custody. They could be accused of misbehavior or a crime and be killed with impunity. They could be hanged from the neck until dead. They could be beaten with hands or clubs or whips in punishment for crimes they were arbitrarily accused of, without trial or conviction.

All of this could be done to them because they were not fully human beings. No laws protected them. They were not citizens. They were property. They were owned. Nothing prevented their punishment or death. Their owners could do with them what they pleased. They could rape them. They could beat them. They could sell them. They could kill them. Nothing would happen to the people who did those things, because they were white. They were protected by their skin color, and that was enough.

So many attitudes and laws are passed down to us from slavery, and we inherit them without thinking about it. Doesn’t all of this sound like what has been done to black citizens over and over and over again? Sure, sometimes a perpetrator is caught and tried and punished. But many times — way, way too many times — when the perpetrators are police officers, they get away with it. The police have been like overseers, working for slave owners to control and discipline and punish slaves. The police are our hired agents just as much as overseers were the agents of slave owners. It’s awful to confront, isn’t it? Ugly. Terrible to think about.

But it’s been happening right in front of our eyes. It’s beyond racism. It’s a system of apartheid that has been with us since slavery: two worlds, one white, one black, kept separate by culture and custom and law enforcement. Two systems of justice, two ways of punishment, two ways of living, two ways of dying.

If you are white, you don’t have to wake up in the morning in fear of what will happen to you that day at the hands of the police or your fellow citizens. You don’t have to worry that you will be pursued and shot to death because you are jogging through a neighborhood. You don’t have to worry that men will seize you and tie you with a chain behind a truck and drag you until you are dead. You don’t have to worry about a policeman pulling you over in your car because your taillight is out, and you will end up handcuffed and beaten and even shot. You do not have to worry about any of this because you are white, not black.

We white people, we have sat back and thought to ourselves, it’s all good now. In my lifetime, we’ve had Brown v. Board of Education, ordering the integration of schools. We have passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, conveying the right to free access to public accommodations, and outlawing discrimination in hiring because of race. We’ve passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. We’ve passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting racial discrimination in rentals and sales of housing. We have passed dozens of lesser federal and state laws dealing with racial discrimination of various kinds. We have even elected a black president.

And yet here we are. Black people are still being beaten and killed all across this country, not just in the South, but in the Midwest and the West and the North. When it’s done by cops, they generally get away with it because the system of apartheid allows it, two legal systems, one for white people and one for black people. Black people are arrested and jailed far more than white people. They are given stiffer sentences. And yes, they are beaten and killed by policemen for infractions that white people can usually get away with.

You want to know why this is happening? It’s because we have never lived up to the promise in the Declaration of Independence that everyone is created equal, and we have never lived up to the guarantees in the Constitution enforcing that ideal.

It’s happening because we have never dealt, as a nation, with our legacy of slavery. Look at what’s happening right now. Donald Trump just announced that he will oppose the renaming of Army posts named for Confederate generals. He wanted to put armed active duty soldiers on the streets to suppress the protests against the killing of George Floyd. Why is he doing this? Because he wants to send a signal to the base of his supporters that he is in favor of our system of apartheid, and wants to keep it going.

His audience gets the message when its subject is honoring Confederate generals who fought on the side of slavery. By honoring these dishonorable traitors to the ideals of our Constitution, Trump is keeping alive the laws of slavery. Did you see the story about a dozen Republican county chairmen in Texas sending out racist and anti-Semitic posts last week? You know why they did it? Because they can read Trump’s signals that it’s OK to discriminate against black people and Jewish people. They know he’s on their side.

Slavery isn’t some ancient custom you find in history books. In terms of the history of this country, it’s yesterday, staring us in the face. You want to know how close we are to slavery? My grandmother’s grandfather owned slaves. When I was growing up and visited my grandparents, their maid lived in a log cabin without running water or electricity that had been built by her great-grandparents when they were freed from slavery. Her grandmother, who still lived with her, was born a slave. All her ancestors she knew of, past her grandparents, had been slaves. All of my ancestors on my grandmother’s side, past her grandmother and grandfather, had been slave owners. All the schools in the state of Virginia, where my grandparents lived, were segregated. So were public accommodations. If you were black and you wanted to buy a Coke in Loudoun County where my grandparents lived, you had to go to a black-owned store. If you wanted to buy a dress or a shirt, you had to go to a black-owned store. If you wanted to use the restroom, you had to go to a restroom marked for “Coloreds.”

I saw it all. This apartheid happened during my lifetime.

My sixth great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote the words in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” also infamously owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime. He wrote in a letter in 1820 to a friend, discussing the issue of slavery in the territory of Missouri, “But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

The “wolf” to which he referred was the evil of slavery.

I called my old friend Frank Serpico on Thursday night to discuss the issues of racism and police brutality that have filled the news for weeks. He was a famous New York cop who fought corruption in the NYPD more than 50 years ago, and I knew he would have something to say.

“It’s the same shit, Lucian,” Serpico said. “It doesn’t go anywhere. They always pick on the guy who has no ability to defend himself. It’s not just the cops. It’s the judges, it’s the district attorneys, it’s the mayors. The cops, they come from society, and the society is us. Watching this cold-blooded killer taking the life out of a human being was like a perfect storm. When you give somebody power, they’re never going to give it up. Look at Trump. He’s in there egging it on. There’s no stopping him. It’s been there all along. It’s all been said before. Nothing ever changes.”

I interviewed Serpico at his home in the Netherlands in 1975 for a story in the Village Voice. He told me back then, “People have got to understand that it’s just as patriotic to try to keep your country from dying, as it is to die for your country.”

Serpico is right. We will continue to have “justice on one scale, and self-preservation in the other” until we confront the wolf of slavery, and if we don’t, our country will die.