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Ok, but....what if we sent them 4,000,000 javelins? And the idea is, they just fire them at absolutely EVERYTHING.
I'm sure they have to conserve ammo right now, but imagine we got them 2 million rockets for the 400,000 javelins. And told them basically "Yeah man, go nuts."
I thought long and hard about this and I don't see any downsides.
Are there any numbers on how "efficient" those are? That is, how many destroyed Russian tanks will 4000 of them cause in practice?
I've heard a Javelin missile is near 100% efficient if it can get a good lock. Wikipedia says "The Pentagon claimed that of the first 112 Javelins fired by the Ukrainians since the start of the war, 100 missiles had hit their target"
It's good they hit their target.
Did they damage that target? Disable it? Destroy it?
That statistic is only the first element in the chain.
Did they damage that target? Disable it? Destroy it?
I haven't seen any public statistics for this, but based on my understanding, if you hit pretty much any modern tank on top hatch or some other weak spot with a javelin it'll at least disable the tank as it pretty much melts everything inside the crew space/engine bay. Those might be repairable, but most likely not in the location.
And what Ukrainians will most likely encounter is not a modern tank, but a T-62 or some even older soviet relic, which doesn't have active armor and those can be stopped with a good throw of molotov cocktail. So, my somewhat uneducated guess would be that every decent hit is a destroyed tank. Of course there's missed shots, less than optimal impacts and all that, so actual number isn't 100%, but I'd guess that it's not far off.
And for tanks there's also a guestion if Ukraine can even find anything to shoot at. On Ukrainian reports destroyed tanks have been in single digits per day for quite a while, so either Russia has learned on how to defend their gear or (in my opinion more likely) they just don't have that many tanks anymore. Obviously across the whole Russia there's a ton of relics around, starting from T-34's from WW1, but I guess no one knows how many of those are in condition where they could even move on their own and even if they did it's guestionable how effective those would be on todays battle field.
But javelins are still pretty neat hardware and they can easily destroy pretty much anything on the field, the only guestion is if Ukraine can get those close enough to hit anything interesting.
Oh yeah they work. Tbh I'd think you'd need some sort of TRPHY system to not make it a guaranteed kill when it hits. These are also way more valuable than the FSV drones as a lot of times they just disable and the crew has time to escape. Javelins are basically downward firing tank sabbots and when they hit, it melts everything inside. Depleting both material and trained personnel at the same time.
And how many russian tanks are there left?
Do they use javelins on MTBs too?
Last I heard Ukraine had gotten through an estimated 2/3 of Russias entire tank stock, including tanks that could realistically be repaired. Doesn't account for potential purchases or getting really desperate and sending partially non-functional vehicles into combat.
~~Used~~ Certified Pre-owned tanks sound like a horrible idea. Must suck to be the tank crew who gets assigned one of them.
It sucks to be ruzzian in general.
you can use the javelin on anything, it will lock onto a hot exhaust. one was used to take out a low-flying helicopter in occupied Ukraine, they were used regularly to take out vehicle-borne IEDs in Iraq, and those are just pickup trucks with armor welded on. I've been told it won't quite lock onto a person, but in direct fire mode you can use it against infantry
those things are $325k per?
~~yeah but they got a shelf life of 10 years. we were likely paying to replace them already anyway~~
never mind, this is a brand new production run. looks like they're doing 4,000 new missiles for the existing CLUs. the missiles are about 250k a pop
i gotta get me some of this action
Ooh ooh, now do HARMs