If it comes to that is nuclear anyway so wont make any difference. If they attack a nato state can't see it being anything less than ww3
Our tanks would still be useful to prevent that outcome if they were given to Ukraine because if the Ukrainians kill enough Russian soldiers/sailors/airmen and destroy enough of their military equipment then there will be a stalemate in Ukraine and the Kremlin won't have the appetite/military assets to do the same thing against Moldova and afterwards against a vulnerable NATO state like Lithuania. (The latter is strategically valuable as it's between Russian-ally Belarus and Russian controlled Kaliningrad on the Baltic. Russian control of Lithuania would give them a land connection to their forward military bases in Kaliningrad and simultaneously cut off Latvia and Estonia from NATO land reinforcements from Poland.)
I don't share your confidence that a Russian attack on Lithuania would immediately go nuclear. Do you think any US President is prepared to go toe-to-toe in a nuclear war with Russia just to protect an obscure little country like Lithuania? I doubt Biden has the balls to do it even though he would agree with the principle and Trump definitely would not. That scumbag would probably be congratulating Putin on his killer move!
Surely, World War 3 (in this era) would go nuclear after a significant period of military escalation. Article 5 does not actually compel other NATO members to send military or nuclear forces to help another NATO member who has been attacked. They are allowed to send help in the form of supplies and weapons. I know we would send military forces to help because that is our nature, but the Americans are a different story and they have a long history of isolationism and staying out of European wars for as long as possible.
I would expect a Russian assault on Lithuania by conventional Russian forces to be answered by retaliation by conventional NATO forces against them directly (not even against other unrelated Russian military targets initially). I cannot see NATO immediately escalating to using tactical nuclear weapons in that scenario. (This isn't the 1970s and Russia does not possess the overwhelming conventional forces in comparison to NATO that the Warsaw Pact had.) Only after the Russians have lost that initial conventional forces battle would I expect them to escalate to the use of tactical nuclear weapons. In which case, NATO would respond likewise against an identical number of Russian targets giving the Russians an opportunity to deescalate. Hopefully, even Putin would not be stupid enough to then escalate to the use of strategic nuclear weapons.
The source to this is questionable ("military source") and the story was denied; but the British Army hasn't needed the Challenger 2 so he wasn't wrong. It's useful in Ukraine because they don't have the air power the UK and NATO have. If we were to fight Russia we'd likely have air superiority and would simply destroy a T-72 with a Hellfire missile fired from an Apache 5 miles away. Britain's money is better invested in our Navy and Airforce. Poland and Germany should be the backbone of a European land based Army, but realistically America is always going to do the heavy lifting anyway.
Of course, a senior member of the British Armed Forces would want to remain anonymous when whistleblowing on a sitting PM like that. It would be career suicide if he/she was identified. The story was hardly going to be acknowledged by the Johnson government. He lied his socks off all the time!
We used Challenger 2s in the 2003 Iraq war and we used Challenger 1s in the 1990 Iraq war. If we got dragged into a war against Iran (due to their illegal nuclear weapons development program) by the USA and Israel then we might need MBTs again. How can you be 100% certain we would have air superiority in a European war against Russia? Spending on the British Armed Forces has been slashed over the last 13 years, whereas the Russians are moving to a wartime mindset with much larger expenditure on arms than previously.
Those "MAGA nutters" quite like the UK, I don't think they'd sit back and watch Europe get conquered either.
Really?
...Massie said on Twitter on Monday following the vote that “America can’t afford to subsidize
socialist Europe’s defense, nor should we. Tonight, I voted against the House Resolution urging NATO’s expansion into Sweden and Finland.”
...
Also in April, 10 GOP House members — including Massie, Greene, Biggs, Bishop, Davidson, Gaetz and Norman — voted against the Ukraine lend-lease bill, which sought to make it easier for the U.S. to send military assistance to Ukraine during Russia’s invasion.
These 18 House Republicans have publicly stated that Donald Trump won the 2020 Presidential election and is absolutely not guilty of trying to overturn the peaceful exchange of power on January 6th 2021. Some of them believe in preposterous right-wing conspiracy theories like QAnon (Trump is fighting a ruling class of satanic paedophiles), for example: Marjorie Taylor Greene. They don't want a national gun registration database system in the USA (even if only to stop certified insane people/convicted felons from obtaining weapons).
Furthermore, they only approve of abortion if the pregnancy was the result of a 'genuine rape'. They don't believe that man-made global warming exists. Many of them reject Darwinian Evolution and believe in Creationism or "Intelligent Design" (as they prefer to call it). Most of them want full US military support for Israel, but not out of altruism towards the Jewish people, but ludicrously, because they believe the prophecy that Israel must be fully reestablished and then destroyed in order for the second coming of Jesus Christ to occur (Judgement Day). All that seems pretty nutty to me!
