"Fall of the BMP3" Topic

Interesting fact Russia has lost at least 12.5% of its entire production run of BMP3'3 Wikipedia (Below)indicates a production run of 720 for russia.

Russia – 720.[103] Russia's Defense Ministry has[when?] ordered and received 200 new BMP-3s.[104][105] Many under modernization.[106][107][108] 200 more in production[needs update] with Sodema sight and 168 with enhanced protection.[109][110]

ISW indicates current losses as 90. Not these are just ones that have photoes that they belive are genuine and not duplicates so is likely to be resonably accurate and an under estimate. That is a lot of losses of Russias best.

Playing Russia in a modern game is going to be no fun. Full on Nato vs Russia in a ground war is a none starter for ultra modern.

We had a go for intrest and had to improvise a spec. for NLAW but it was not a big issue using our rules. The extra range of the NLAW 600m vs more typicaly 200-300m for older wepons is massive, its anothet 300m the enemy foot have to walk under fire, not easy. Artillery has a harder time too as the other option is for the defenders to spread out more and still get the vehicels. Proably twice as many shells to put down. That is a lot for old Russian guns. Rockets proably not accurate enough close in.

Interesting. I wouldn't say unequal conflicts can't make for interesting games. One of favourite all time favourite wargame magazine articles was one written by Andy Callum about the naval side of the Spanish-American war which was about as one sided as you can get.

As for the demise of the BMP-3 and Russian AFV's in general I think they are clearly at risk on the modern battlefield, but how much does shoddy deployment and poor troop quality play into this? If you insist on doing company-scale thunder-runs into the teeth of light infantry in prepared positions with ATGWs of various generations I think the outcome is a matter of how bad your defeat is not if you win or loose!

I sat down a few days and sketched out a set of 'back of the post card' rules with the tentative name of Javelin's along the Odessa.

Personally I'd say that the invasion of Ukraine can't be taken as an exemplar it has a lot of potentially unique characteristics. And there a lot of stuff we don't know yet.

Time to take another look at the empty battlefield theory?

As for the demise of the BMP-3 and Russian AFV's in general I think they are clearly at risk on the modern battlefield, but how much does shoddy deployment and poor troop quality play into this? If you insist on doing company-scale thunder-runs into the teeth of light infantry in prepared positions with ATGWs of various generations I think the outcome is a matter of how bad your defeat is not if you win or loose!

Many of the Russian AFVs have proven to be poorly employed, used by poorly trained and poorly motivated troops, plus poorly lead, from the NCO on up. We really can't take way too many things from them save for how Not to do things. Many things we already know how to do. And much better than the Russian it appears.

With all the man packed Infantry AT weapons on the battlefield today. Dismounted AT ambushes with well trained, motivated, lead small units can be very effective. As we see. Even back when I was on active duty in the Infantry. Dismounted ambushes, including AT missions. Was one of the things we trained and practiced often. And we only had M72 LAWs & M47 Dragons(!!!!!). Well AT & AP mines, demo and IEDs as well. But we did like the "long range" shots … of course. Even if the M72s' & M47s' ranges were not that long.

I.e. the M72's range was rated at 250m, IIRC. But in reality vs AFVs would be closer to 100ms(+ or -). The M47's range was 1000ms. After I ETS'd there was a "Dragon II" with 1500m range I had heard. Still nothing like the Javelin's fire & forget 2 1/2 mile range.

We did have AT Cos. and Sections with TOWs of course. We liked having those covering our s … TOW's rg. = 3750m … IIRC.

The NLAW is also particularly nasty because it has some image recognition abilities which allow the effective targeting of vehicles in heavy cover!

These modern Infantry AT weapons, e.g. Javelin, NLAW, etc. Would be like sci-fi for us back during the Cold War.