Originally posted by SingaporeTyrannosaur:
That's why intelligence is extremely important, you can have the fastest, or most protected tank in the world and they won't be much good if you send them in blind. They very reason why the Ruskies failed miserably seems to be an effect of their poor training, inflexible thinking, lack of respect for the enemy, poor intelligence, and clunkiness in their movements, rather then a fault on their hardware.
Do you think they will fare any better if they had light tanks instead of their T-72s and T-80s? I suspect they'll take heavier losses.
Light tanks are useful as they can be rapidly deployed into global hotspots to provide rapid response or armoured support to light units, however in a protracted FIBUA situtation, they are not a subsitute for heavy armour.
What an MBT provides you however, is tatical options. With good intelligence, you an MBT like the Abrams, with heavy firepower and protection and mobility, you can keep the enemy off balance by literally storming their positions. In Iraqi, most RPG gunners couldn't get off more then one shot before they were overrun or killed, if they fired at all, and most of their shots were wasted anyway.
The Iraqi "ambushes" were knocked out and overrun before they could even be effective. By overrunning the enemy and keeping him off balance, you can effectively spoil all of this efforts to set up an ambush, let alone a defence.
However, if any light tank probe were to try this, they would have almost certainly been knocked out, they have a hard time surviving, let alone do their job.
Your "reliance" on light tanks taking cover and escaping ambushes (which is a marginal advantage over the MBT anyway) seems a shaky and rather narrow view of the true nature of armour in FIBUA, focusing on ambushes rather then the entire spectrum of armour in FIBUA situtations.
At the end of the day, when you do the math, you'll realize that MBTs are far more useful in an heavy FIBUA situtation then a light tank. You don't use a ball pen hammer to do a sledghammer's job.
Useful, nifty and sly tactic is to use heavy armour upfront against expected concentration of threat, i.e. chokepoints for possible ambush. Reading the ground well enough, lighter armour will execute continuous pincer movements on successive objective, in conjuction with heavy armour along it's route of advance, together with IFV/infantry/robot scout support. All elements will be networked on a single coherent threat environment in the same battleshpere. For added firepower, attack choppers with top-attack missiles/missile artillery (with fibre-optic missiles) can be on-station on outskirts of FIBUA area to execute fire missions to demolish entire buildings if required.