It’s more like sometimes credible, it’s mostly just a meme community. I don’t think the actual r/credibledefense ever got moved over to lemmy, that was almost like r/askhistorians but for military stuff iirc.
Context: In 1983, the Soviet Union detected incoming missiles. Rather than relaying the information, the officer on duty decided not to take action, thereby preventing a nuclear war.
From my own experience with hardware and real life in general, I imagine they probably had some equipment who they already knew was not working 100% and it was the only one to detect such missiles. I can’t imagine any other reason why they wouldn’t report it without risk of being labeled a traitor afterwards.
This is pretty close to Petrov's account of his reasoning, plus that the early warning system only showed four or five missiles inbound and he expected a hypothetical American first strike to be way bigger
Dude with a 2000 dollar thermal sight is gonna clap the guy with a javelin. Also any tank made by a competent nation (i.e.: not russia) will have thermal sights on their tank specifically to find some fuckboi on the bushes with a vibecheck tube.
This is the advantage of everyone really, really not wanting a nuclear war. We assume its not really until the evidence it is is overwhelming. And maybe even then.
A friend of mine has (had? it was a while ago) an uncle who was one of the key turners in a midwest ICBM silo in the early 1970s. Having turned into a pacifist hippie (while still working for STRATCOM) he admitted during every psychiatric review he totally wasn’t going to turn that key, not now, not ever, even when staring down a Soviet first strike, because he was totally not going to be that guy that killed thirty million people.
And for reasons my buddy nor her uncle can fathom, they kept him at post.
If you have a handful of tanks, your enemy has to spend a lot of effort on getting rocket launchers. Not just buying them, but also the logistics strain to get them to the frontline.
And if you notice the enemy forgot to bring their launchers, you can deploy your tanks, and exploit their mistake.
Mass tank assaults are over. But using them as an integrated part of a force still makes sense to me.
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