Estimates indicate that by 2030 the country will have 366 U.S. Abrams, 360 K2s, 235 Leopards, and 150 PT-91 Twardys, while it is also working with the U.S. to establish production capabilities for Abrams spare parts.
This force could smash russia to pieces, especially given how degraded the russian military is at this point. Russia can produce 1000 tanks fairly quickly but their tanks are critically flawed and there is no cohesive institutional attempt to actually keep tank crews alive and upskill them continually in the russian military… whereas for Poland each of those ~1000 tank crews are and will be highly trained and treated as valuable, skilled professionals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtkg2DEpalg
A good rundown of the Sepv3 Abrams, it is definitely a biased perspective but it is very thorough and conveys well why russian design lineage tanks are categorically outclassed by these in technology, doctrine and crew protection.
I agree with most of what you’re saying, except for the whole Afghanistan kicking the ass of invaders, given that Afghanistan has been successfully conquered so many times throughout history, going further back than Alexander the Great (look at the genetic markup of the people living in the area to see that legacy still remaining, by the way).
Yes, occupying a country this underdeveloped and tribal is difficult, but that’s mostly because it’s difficult to administer a country (that isn’t really a nation state in the modern sense) this decentralized. Hell, even the Taliban (which aren’t even from Afghanistan) that “won” the war (because Trump handed the place to them to stick it to Biden) are finding out the hard way right now just how annoying it is to keep this mess together.
occupied not conquered.
Afghanistan has never been as powerful or expansive as the empires that have invaded it, and as such resisting the initial invasion has never been how Afghanistan has resisted occupation.
It has been successfully occupied by countless empires though. Just scroll through the Wikipedia page on Afghanistan’s history and you see empire after empire conquering and then occupying it for time periods ranging from decades to centuries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan
Clean distinctions like these never work for a place such as Afghanistan, it is a place that has been invaded and occupied countless times but I hesitate to say it has ever been conquered. You see a list of successful invasions and occupations I see a list of proof that no matter how powerful the empire is, it can never truly determine the will of the people living in Afghanistan no matter what the maps and borders say.