Hello everyone,
this text was linked to be by Dr_Wycior – thank you for that mate. It is about the state and development of Soviet heavy tanks after the war. It was written by Stephen L. “Cookie” Sewell, US Army intelligence officer and translator. It’s interesting, because unlike some other American authors, he draws from Soviet (Russian) sources.
The article came out originally in July 2002 in the ARMOR magazine and I think it’s well worth reading. Soviet post-war heavies were not the monsters many think they were.
http://ciar.org/ttk/mbt/armor/armor-magazine/armor-mag.2002.ja/4RedStar02.pdf
As someone who had chance, to have discussions and opinion exchange with Sewell – he should not be used as very reliable source (nothing against him, but he is like Belton J. Cooper), and have tendencies to write and claim some of old myths, and even in few cases, invent own data, to back up his claims, or pulling out the worst possible data from something, just to make it look even worst than it actually is (similar to Pashalok’s bashing of German engineering).
In my opinion, it is better to read Zaloga, if you don’t have knowledge of Russian language, and acsess to books written by their own authors.
I was wondering, how much reliable this guy is….
Is there any way that I can contact you via private message? I can point you out on places, where he usually “hangs out” and have discussions.
Yes, fortherecordwot@gmail.com
Thank you.
First thing about this article is that most of the reference material is from nearly 20-25 years ago if you look at the References at the end of the article and more data has come out over the years regarding Soviet Tank Design.
As for how reliable Cookie is, I know him personally and with Zaloga, and guess what? They both work collaboratively with providing information to each other on writing books. Zaloga is working on a T-64 book for Osprey at the moment and Cookie help provide some info for it and is actually backdating the Trumpeter T-64 kit into an Object 432 with the information they’ve collected together.
Overall I’d say he’s pretty reliable, but not without putting his own spin on things (for better or worse)…but hey is not any different then those guys (whose names escape me at the moment) that have blogs on Russian/Soviet tank development and have a def nationalistic side to their articles…with the Ukrainian guy pulling the T-64/T-80 line and the other guy pulling the T-72/T-90/Armata line from Russia.
Just don’t take EVERYTHING for face value.
He claimed how NATO got T-80BV data, via tank “secretly bought via Arab state in middle of the 80′s”, what ended up to be T-80U sold to Morocco in 1992, and few times, set data as he wanted, not to mention repeating some old things, what can’t be confirmed.
Overall, I agree with you, he is not better than Fofanov or others. None of them is completely unbiased, and everyone have own agenda, and it will always be like that.
Truth is always somewhere between two sides.. problem is that people will always take what they want as face value. Expect this article to be quoted as holy truth by anyone who wants to bash IS series, in near future.
All intelligence analysts have to be careful not to let personal biases impact their assessments. Additionally, their products are only as good as their sources. That said, while I don’t know “Cookie” personally like you guys do, the fact at the time of the article he was working at the National Ground Intelligence Center (not Agency), not to mention his Army career, gives credence to his sources and to me at least, implies he had access to classified information on the topic. I’ve dealt directly with NGIC and would have no reason to doubt their assessments on any topic. Not that any of this means squat for WoT, which is mostly fantasy tanks with perfect battlefield performance.
I wanna see Pasholok’s face as hea reads this.
He will probably agree with the large part of this article.
Somthing like this.
Ad a rusky tanker hat and a bottle of vodka and it will be like a mirror image of him.
http://valleyparent.com/thissouthernblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/angry-kid.jpg
Highly interesting article, if it’s all true.
“Militarily the IS-3 offered little more
than propaganda value, as it was an
embarrassment and seldom offered to
Soviet allies. Poland held trials with
two tanks and rejected them; ”
I guess Yuri Pasholok was wrong, this was more of a “pride of polish tank engineering ;)
Many of the technical problems were common to tank designs of other nations too.
The history of the German, US and British tanks is full of similar failures.
The difference is that the Soviets produced thousands of tanks before realizing that they didn’t work while for example the US only produced a few hundred M103.
This brings me back to the heated discussion a few weeks ago when I said the IS3 was bad tank and everyone got butt hurt over it because I offend the great lord Stalin’s legacy. heres a video of a discussion on the IS3 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXH02YX7gxY starts at 5.00 videos from operation think tank with the chieftain and so on.
You criticize the tank, you criticize those who designed and built the tank. You criticize those who designed and built the tank, you criticize the Bolshevik state. And you know what criticizing the Bolshevik state gets you.
LOL OH NO !!!
Skimmed through it a little, have to read it thoroughly later. I will say this though, post-war heavy tanks were all universally iffy at best. Even during the war, the Soviets had the best heavies….but that’s because they didn’t really have any competition in that regard.
Article is horribly dated. He also uses translated sources (since he does not speak Russian), which are even more dated.
He also misses all the contribution from heavies that came to mediums.
If Yuri Pasholok actually was to read this he would be accusing Americans of.. “russophobics”, but then, this is a reliable source if taken directly form the authors, since this article have a few contribution rpoblems
well, thake that, Pasholok, what are you gonna say now? that american tank designs where made by kindergarden kids? how about by cats? or even better, conspiracy germans in america?
i hope he shats bricks
The main problem with the heavy tanks is simply that they somewhat became obsolete with the deployment of HEAT and APDS shells which could easily penetrate them, combined with the fact that they were too expensive for their performance.
That doesn’t change that they sometimes had their tasks fulfilled. There are several sources stating that the Israelis struggled with destroying IS-3M in the 6-day-war. Then again, the IS-3M could of course not really stand against the opponents due to its mechanical inreliabilty, undermotorisation and lack of competitive fire control/optics etc.