imagine being an ideologically committed Ukrainian neo-nazi and instead of actually fighting in your own country, you get sent to Africa to do imperialism on behalf of NATO, with your anglo handlers constantly telling you “no you see this is going to hurt Russia, so it’s totally more important than that silly little counter-offensive you have going on back home”

My turret is unmanned, so it can be cut down a lot

the “pretty much just the cannon and the extractor” part made me think of the Stryker MGS:

That might be a similar arrangement to what you’re going for, the turret’s very minimal and primarily there to house the cannon and autoloader, the guys sit right bellow the gun itself. Although apparently one unfortunate side-effect of this is that in the event of jams, the crew being separated from the cannon is actually problematic, since they’ll need to exit the vehicle in order to have access to the cannon and be able to clear the jam.

The T-14 has an unmanned turret, so it can be very small because it doesn’t need to fit any crew. Prior Soviet/Russian tanks’ turrets, while not as compact, were also still smaller compared to Western ones because they used an autoloader for the cannon, so they could have one less crew member and thus keep the turret smaller.

The Germans have the KF51 Panther (Panther? hmm… ), but it’s still under development, and I doubt it will be issued anytime soon. I guess part of the problem is that Western-style MBTs are already so heavy and expensive that adopting a whole new tank that was even more expensive (and had even more features weighing it down) is just not something most militaries are looking forward to - the Americans for example recently adopted the MPF, sort of like a revival of the WW2 assault gun concept, a vehicle meant to support infantry by taking out stuff like fortifications and lighter vehicles, and the whole motivation behind it is that the Abrams is so fucking heavy and burns so much fuel that it really limits where it can be deployed and used, so they needed a lighter and more economical vehicle to support infantry.

Members of the 41st Brigade said that their instructors often used examples of NATO operations in the Middle East

Have Western militaries literally forgotten that forms of warfare other than counter-insurgency exist? I know there’s the saying about armies tending to fight their last war, but fucking hell, forgetting the entire history of warfare just because you spent like two decades doing war crimes in Iraq is on a whole another level.