This series is just so frustrating. To a certain extent it seems like they cherry picked, and also went far beyond what a documentary on tanks should contain. You cannot compare Chechnya to Hungary or Czechoslovakia. If you look up the history of Chechnya there is a long history of conflict. Seems like the Chechnya has a lot in common with the Afghanistan, both having a long history of resistance. There were the ethnic clashes from 1958-1965 and the fighting has pretty much been continuous since 1991. These people are hardened to resistance, not like the Hungarians or Slovakians, who have very little conflict in their history.
And showing a Chinese man holding up the tanks. The other tanks could have gone around, and this, unlike all the other coverage is Chinese vs Chinese. During the end of the Czars the Russian cavalry refused to advance on the Russian people. What is the point.
While providing a lot of coverage of the Russian failure of the tank to put down the people, it covers very little of the American attempts. How the Iraqis managed to use IEDs with which they even able to destroy tanks. The US failed in the Middle East just like the Russians did despite the tanks.
And the destruction of the Russian unit is Chechnya is repeated in war where tanks are ineffective without infantry support. Nothing new there, and the Russian officers should have known better. Early tank units were very heavily tanks with little infantry support, and that was found to be not that effective. That is why combined arms was created (and it is interesting how little about combined arms was covered in the series).
That they come up with the idea that the tank is dead shows how little they understand. The tank was originally created to provide fire support for infantry. In fact having even a T-55 when the enemy has no tanks is a major advantage. Even in WW2, tanks were used mostly for direct fire support and not for tank engagements. But tanks have evolved the deal with the greatest risk to tanks, which is another tank. And that has lead to compromises that reduce its effectiveness for direct fire support, which is actually what tanks are mostly used for. In built up or restricted environments a long gun is bad, flat trajectory is bad, and not having good elevation is bad in mountainous or urban environments. But the large caliber rounds that a tank can provide in fire support can be so very effective. All that has been proven by recent events is that the tank just was not well designed for those environments, not that it is obsolescent. It just that there has seldom many opportunities for tanks to be used for what they were optimized to handle, and so they perform badly.
