Russia, Russia, you better beware.
The US Army is coming there.
We're going to take your tanks and melt them down.
Then sell them back to you for a dollar a pound.
That was 21 years ago.
This is today:
Russia is cutting its tank force again, from 22,000 to about 6,000. Sixty percent of these 6,000 will be in storage. The remaining 16,000 tanks will be scrapped. Twenty years ago, the situation was quite different. At the end of the Cold War in 1991, Russia had about 53,000 tanks in service (about 40 percent of them relics from the 1950s, or earlier). Over the last two decades, some 30,000 tanks were scrapped.
Who'd have guessed back then that we could skip the step of sending the US Army in?
