from Sputnik News:
2023 will be remembered as the year that the fearsome reputation of NATO’s pricey, high-tech weaponry and military equipment came crashing down after running into the force of Russian arms. Sputnik asked five leading Russian and US military experts for their takes on the top five Russian weapons of the outgoing year.
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The end of the Cold War brought with it the pinnacle of Pentagon hubris, with conflicts in Iraq in 1991, Bosnia and Kosovo in 1995 and 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq again in 2003 and Libya in 2011 seemingly proving the superiority of the weapons designs the United States and its allies developed in the 1980s to fight the Soviets in a World War III scenario that never arrived.
NATO defense analysts chalked down their conventional victories to superior technology and quality of their weapons, figuring that if an Abrams or Challenger 2 tank could single-handedly destroy dozens of Iraq’s Soviet-era T-72 tanks with near-impunity and suffer almost no losses, that meant there was something right about Western tank designs, and something wrong with the Soviet (and by translation Russian) design philosophies. The same logic was applied across the board, from armor to aircraft to air defenses and virtually everything in between.
In 2023, the performance of Ukraine’s Western-armed and trained forces against heavily entrenched Russian positions in Zaporozhye, Kherson and the Donbass shattered the myth of the superiority of NATO arms in high-intensity warfare against an actual peer competitor. Leopards, Challengers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and other Western armored equipment burned just as easily as their Soviet-era Ukrainian counterparts.
