"Team Yankee: Bannon's 1st Battle" Topic

From the Team Yankee novel, Captain Bannon's unit is victorious in its first battle:

The devastation in the valley was awesome. Over twenty armored vehicles lay strewn there, dismembered, twisted, burning hulks. Folk had nothing left to engage. The lead echelon of the motorized battalion had been annihilated. Six T-72 tanks, sixteen BMPS, a BTR-60, a ZSU-23-4, and an MTU bridge launcher, along with almost two hundred Russian soldiers, were gone. The engagement had last less than four minutes. Team Yankee had won its first battle.

In your opinion, would this be an expected result, or was Bannon's team just lucky?

You forget, his unit took a chem strike at the beginning of the battle which destroyed an ITV and IIRC killed Bannon's XO along with a few others. Could that have been the result of a company team engagement, yes. But it might have taken a little bit longer. Just 2.5 vehicles to kill for ever tank Bannon had and at that time, with the 105mm gun, we were trained to engage and hit 3 targets in less than 20 seconds.

Bannon's XO is wounded in the chem strike. His name was Ulewski. It is his driver that does not get his mask on in time.

Modern warfare is very deadly, and things happen very, very quickly.

I thought it was lucky and TY is a bit too optimistic from the American POV. In Coyle's next two novels, 'Sword Point' and 'Bright Star,' things are not as one-sided.

Team Yankee was just a fluff job propaganda piece. Military capabilities of both militaries, West and Warsaw Pact were exaggerated in ability, just the Americans were the "heroes" and could not lose.

Even were it a serious what if book of speculative fiction it would be off as much as Douro was about long range bombers before ww2.

Douhet.

Thanks for the correction. Off the cuff.

Well, speaking as a tanker I would say that it was pretty accurate. While I wonder how effective the 105mm would have been against the T72 I do have to say that the team would have butchered the other vehicles as charged. 10 M1s can really kick out the firepower by engaging 2-3 vehicles very easily in a minute, each. The Russians didn't know the US position and were fighting blind while the US had smoke and thermals. Ask the Iraqis about being on that side of a tank duel…

So yeah, it was a turkey shoot because the Russians botched up the job by going "hey diddle, diddle right up the middle" into a place where they didn't know enemy dispositions. This was compounded by the fact that MRBs don't last long against proper MBT companies. That's an easy enough SNAFU to find yourself in when you're trying to hit the Rhine in just a couple of days.