After almost a year of dithering, Germany has finally relented and is sending Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.
After weeks of reluctance, Germany has agreed to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, in what Kyiv hopes will be a game-changer on the battlefield.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the decision to send 14 tanks – and allow other countries to send theirs too – at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
But that’s not the only big tank news.
US President Joe Biden’s administration is also expected to announce plans to send at least 30 M1 Abrams tanks.
Biden just announced while I was writing this that the U.S. will provide 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine.
It could take months to deliver the tanks because the U.S. has to purchase them through a procurement process.
The move marks a reversal for the Biden administration, which had resisted sending the tanks, and comes as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced his country would provide 14 Leopard 2 A6 tanks for Ukraine’s military. Britain said earlier this month it will provide 14 of its Challenger 2 tanks. France plans to contribute 10 armed fighting vehicles.
They’re also sending parts and equipment and eight recovery vehicles.
The Pentagon has long shown a reluctance to send their best miltech abroad for fear of it falling into enemy hands. However, for both the Leopard 2 and the Abrams, the question is which version of the tank are they sending to Ukraine? Any version of either is going to have more sophisticated and modern fire control systems than the majority of Russian tanks currently in theater. And any version of the Leopard 2 is going to feature a Rheinmetall 120mm smooth-bore gun, either the L/44 or the more powerful L/55. The L/44 should punch through the front armor of most Soviet/Russian tanks, and the L/55 should theoretically punch through all of them.
For the Abrams, the M1A1 and M1A2 are both armed with the L/44, and National Review is reporting that the Biden administration is sending M1A1s. (The original M1 uses the older 105mm rifled M68 gun. That’s thought to be able to penetrate any Soviet armor up to and including the early T-72 models, and possibly some later export models, but not later T-72s and more modern domestic Soviet/Russian tanks. In Desert Storm, even M60 Patton tanks with the 105mm gun were regularly reporting kills on T72s.) Thus Abrams and Leopard 2 120mm rounds of various sorts are fully interchangeable.
The Challenger 2 uses the Royal Ordnance L30 rifled 120mm gun, which uses different ammo.
Back to the BBC: “Germany also permitted other countries to send their Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine – which was restricted until now under export regulations.”
Poland has been itching to send Leopard 2s to Ukraine since very early on in the conflict, but Germany had been dragging its feet until now. Previous German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht was reportedly the clog in the process, and given this came down a week after her departure suggests that was in fact the case.
They’re getting enough Abrams for two plus tank companies (three tank platoons of four tanks each, plus two command tanks), but not enough for a full armor brigade. But add the 14 German Leopard 2s, and presumably you have a force that can rip a hole in any Russian line. Add the already announced Bradleys and other IFVs, and you have a mobile infantry force behind them that can then exploit those holes.
Ukrainian military blogger Denys Davydov seems pretty ecstatic at the news:
So too Peter Zeihan (him again) is on the tank news as well:
Some takeaways:
As to why the Germans have been so hesitant, I don’t know if you know your history…
…but the last couple hundred years of history [doesn’t] necessarily put the Germans in the best light. And so the idea that the Germans would ever, in a peaceful environment, decide that they should take a leadership position on military affairs is something that is antithetical, not just to the German population in general, but the government of Scholz specifically. His party is the Social Democrats, and they have basically made their bones in geopolitics about making sure that Germany is never an offensive power at all.
As always, tank crew effectiveness comes down to training. A good tank crew takes a minimum of six months to become proficient enough to be effective in combat (and most would argue it takes longer). Even if you assume you can shave some time off for Ukrainian tanks crews experienced on Soviet equipment, it still takes a good deal of time to become proficient on either an Abrams or a Leopard 2; two to three months would seem to be the absolute minimum. So unless Ukrainians were already training on Leopard 2s and/or Abrams in secret, I wouldn’t expect to see in the field any until (at the earliest) late April.
Tags: Denys Davydov, Foreign Policy, Germany, Leopard 2, M1A1, Military, Norway, Olaf Scholz, Peter Zeihan, Poland, Rheinmetall, Russo-Ukrainian War, Social Democratic Party, tanks, Ukraine, video, Vladimir Putin
Last time I went up on the tank ski have loads of M-1s of various configurations in storage. I believe the Abrams program is one of those programs that Congress kept buying more tanks than the Army wanted, just to keep the jobs and dollars flowing. The paperwork may take months but the tanks should be almost immediately available. May have to replace batteries and such.
The Abrams does in fact run on “jet fuel,” JP-8 specifically, but so does every other vehicle in the department of defense, including helicopters, fighters, Humvees, trucks, mobile artillery, IFVs, and all the rest. This has been true since the 90s when the DoD simplified logistics by going to a single fuel.
Except, of course, the Navy, which is always different, but they use JP-5 Which is very similar with a higher flashpoint, providing more fire protection..
And yes the Abrams turbine can burn all kinds of fuel. I read an account by a US tanker in Iraq, whose company outran their fuel trucks and scrounged gasoline from Iraqi cars, giving them enough fuel to get to an Iraqi gas station, where they raided the station tanks and abandoned gasoline tanker trucks for the more fuel
NATO has initiatives to limit the number of different kinds of fuels required. JP-8 is also one of the NATO standard fuels known as F-34. JP-5 is NATO standard F-44. There are a couple more standard fuels which include diesel formulated for use in very cold weather. Which the Abrams could also use.
I have no idea what Russian-made tanks use but I’m going to assume it’s built for very crappy diesel. At this stage in the war, I don’t know fuel source for Ukraine, whether they sneak it in from the west or what, but I’ll bet there is a quiet deal to able to support Leopard and Abrams from the west.
That first line should say “we”, not “ski”.
It will be interesting to watch.
I don’t know that the Leopard is all that, to be honest. The Turkish ones haven’t had a good track record in Syria, but then those aren’t the latest models, and they were handled really badly. Most of the kills were in static positions where they’d sat for days.
The M1 is a great tank, when it has the full backing of the US logistics system behind it. That’s kinda-sorta questionable when you go looking at the whole question of “How successful will it be in Ukrainian hands?”
I wish I could answer the question of how easily you can train someone on either tank. A significant difference for the Ukrainians will be that the NATO tanks all have 4-man crews with manual loading of the rounds. Granted, the loader is usually the least-trained newest guy on the crew, but, still… It’s a mindset thing. The tanks are all a lot more survivable, that’s for sure; the M1 has much safer ammo storage in the turret bustle than the Soviet/Russian tanks have going with their autoloader cassettes.
The biggest “training issue” is probably going to be for the gunners and the maintainers. The drivers might find it all easier; the commanders should have an easy time once they’ve mastered the switchology. The maintainers? LOL… Dear God, I would love to see what they make of all the “black box” maintenance crap we’ve put into those things. GDLS is going to play merry f*cking hell to find forward-deployable contract maintainers for those systems, ‘cos I guaran-damn-tee you that the Russians are going to make a point of going after those guys and killing them in as messy a fashion as they can improvise. If they capture any? Cue the atrocity music; it’s going to be a strategic imperative to discourage those contract maintainers from wanting to go into Ukraine. The Ukrainians had better be damn sure about protecting them, ‘cos without those guys, the whole thing is untenable.
The M1 is more like a fighter aircraft than it is a truck. You absolutely need ground crew and maintenance backing that sophisticated bastard up. Soviet/Russian stuff? More like a heavy truck, or something. Once you subtract all the add-on electronics that they can’t source anymore…
I have to admit it: I’m sitting here kinda bemused. We’re actually fighting WWIII out, but not between the Soviets and NATO. It’s between former Soviet prison states, and we’re sending NATO stuff further to the East than any of my generation ever thought of going. If you’d told me that US tanks and German tanks would be fighting Soviet armor in Ukraine when I was a young soldier, I’d have laughed in your face. If you’d have presented that to anyone in authority as a legit projection, you’d have been buried not in the padded rubber room, but under it.
The whole thing is insane, when you look at it from the perspective of the 1980s world situation. How much has changed in forty years? Crazy.
The other thing is, looking at the numbers? Max number of Leopard 2 tanks involved is around 95. That’s six companies worth; add in another company of Challenger 2 tanks and whatever else they can scrape up. That will give the Ukrainians the leading edge of an offensive strike force, and that’s about it; there will have to be significant backup coming from the former Soviet/Russian armor they already have, plus whatever else they can scrape up.
I’m trying to work out in my head just how much difference this could actually make, and the math isn’t quite gelling. They need brigade-size forces to make a major difference; these NATO tanks are just enough to field two or three “NATO-ized” combat brigades, and that’s it. Would three make a difference for them?
What is a minor interesting deal, here? I remember saying awhile back that I didn’t think the RKG grenade was actually in that much use, because I hadn’t seen much traffic in the video realm using them with drones. Now? All of a sudden, in the last few weeks? The ‘effing things are everywhere, which makes me wonder where the hell they’re coming from: Captured stocks? Manufacture? Someone sending them into Ukraine from elsewhere?
Interesting detail, though. The damn things are nearly perfect for deployment via drone, which is really bizarre when you think about them having been designed and built for WWII and post-WWII.
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Anyone care to bet that American contractors will handle the M! maintenance, at least early on while training the Ukrainians?
That’s a sucker’s bet. GDLS has always had an intimate role with keeping the M1 fleet up and running, even here in the US. There’s a whole ecosystem of contractors working on that tank, and they’re all necessary.
There’s a comparison out there, between the Leopard 2 and the M1; one of the things that Krauss-Maffei has used in marketing shows the level of post-sale engagement that the M1 requires vice the Leopard 2. The way they tell it, the two tanks are very different; the Leopard 2 supposedly can be and is maintainable by local resources organic to the army that buys it. The M1, on the other hand, means selling your soul to GDLS.
That’s sales literature, however. As we can see from the last several months of this war, buying Leopard 2 is at least as entangling as the M1, only you’re engaging somewhat differently.
The point is all moot, anyway. German arms industry has just been taken out and shot in the back of the head by German politicians. Ain’t nobody going to be buying from them or the Swiss, moving forward, not unless its low-level kit that any half-ass factory can churn out. Nobody is going to be taking the risk that they’re going to get hung up on by the politicians, if the fit hits the shan, so to speak. “Oh, you’re being invaded? Well, we don’t like you, and we like your invaders, who’re blackmailing us… Too bad, so sad about your spare parts and support…” Germany is going to pay a huge price for their politicians doing what they’ve done, long term. Trust is a fragile thing; lose it, and you’re done. The only way the US gets away with what it’s done to countries like South Vietnam and Afghanistan is that a.) there’s nobody else to turn to, and b.) the rest of the world thought we were nuts for trying with them, in the first place. Germany isn’t in that position, and with its de-industrialization well on its way, they’re going to have jack and sh*t to trade on, going forward. Most of their manufacturing will, of necessity, be leaving the high-energy cost zone they’ve created. Wonder why BMW is opening up plants in the Deep South? It ain’t because of the heritage of mechanical craftsmanship they have down there…
Going forward, Germany has screwed itself in so many ways. Eurozone right along with them, because the entire proposition of the EU was always as Germany being the manufacturing powerhouse while the rest of the EU served as market. That’s going away after this episode, mostly due to German fecklessness and the green fraud they fell for. In a generation or two, they’re going to be a huge ‘effing mess. Probably by no later than 2050, most German industry is going to be located somewhere else, where the energy is affordable and the Germans are going to be a net drain on the EU, instead of its economic powerhouse.
They could change all that, but there are limited signs that they even understand what the hell they’ve done with this whole Energiewende line of BS. At some point before 2030, the death spiral is going to be irreversible, and coupled with all the low-skill high-social cost migrants they let in? It won’t be pretty; the Germany of our youth is a dead entity walking.
Which, when you think of it, is a pretty slick bit of legerdemain pulled off by the Russians, because most of this is a direct product and result of their efforts to suborn German politicians and take over their energy supply sector.
It’s ironic as hell how often the Russians efforts in these things often recoil on them in entirely unexpected ways. It’s like they play at the game of espionage and keep burning themselves doing it, but can’t stop. They’re addicted; look at WWI, which began because Russian Imperial intelligence types wanted to stir up trouble in the (for them…) Austrian hinterlands; WWII started largely because Stalin wanted to weaken Western Europe, so he supported and encouraged Hitler. With the US, the Soviets churned up the international “Revolutionary War” schemes, which got the US engaged on the international scene in a way I seriously doubt would have happened had they not (the US is a naturally isolationist nation, left to its own devices), and with everything else they do, the strategy is cunning short-term and utterly self-destructive over the long haul. They’re not as smart and cunning as they think they are; the end state for their long-term subornation and support for China is likely going to be a strong China taking back their Siberian provinces from a Russia weakened by incessant conflict and sanctions due to those conflicts. Right now, if China were to invade Siberia, nobody would care and nobody would come to Russia’s aid.
That’s the long-term legacy of Russian espionage machinations. They’re addicted to the ploy, the stratagem, the subversion… And, it always blows up in their faces, long-term. They still do it.
“the Abrams should be more accurately thought of as the pinnacle of armored equipment development….
This is nonsense on stilts. Some of the later Leopards have slightly BETTER thermal imaging systems, and a fire control and “blue force” tracker and integrated battlefield management that is just as good. The gun is the same, or as mentioned the newer longer barrel is already widely used in the leopard. The armor is similar (The “sandwich” of ceramic and various steels used was originally a British invention), the difference is the M1 has more of it. The leopard is just as strong frontally, but sacrifices overall armor protection for weight and mobility, whereas the Americans just put a bigger turbine engine in.
The leopard is actually better for non-American armies as it is cheaper and simpler to operate. The powerpack uses a lot of C.O.T.S and commercial parts for example. It requires a lot more sophisticated and specialized maintenance to deal with a turbine than a normal diesel engine as found in most construction equipment.
I suspect part of the reluctance on the part of Germany is that if they start delivering leopards and allow others to do so, Rheinmetal of whoever owns the German tank factories won’t be able to replace them very quickly, production having fallen off over the last decades. I think part of the reason for the demand that the US send M1s besides the political cover, is economic. If third countries send their leopards to Ukraine and the Americans promise to back-fill the shortages with donated or cheap M1s, (of which there are thousands in storage), the Germans lose market share, especially if they can’t produce them quickly enough.
They also face the issue of not having very many of them, having sold off most of them as part of the conventional arms limitation treaties and their own inclination to downsize. I suspect a large part of the fleet has not been upgraded and only a handful are up to the very latest standard. Most of the countries operating leopards are in a similar situation, either having a mix. There are original leopards, upgraded (A2 etc), or a mix of both, depending on what a particular country wants or can afford. (I think we are up to A7+ now).
As to quality, the Turks lost a bunch of theirs for the same reason the Russians do, namely, not following proper combined arms doctrine and tactics. Amazingly, antitank weapons actually can destroy tanks…who knew! (sarc).
…”I’m trying to work out in my head just how much difference this could actually make, and the math isn’t quite gelling. They need brigade-size forces to make a major difference; these NATO tanks are just enough to field two or three “NATO-ized” combat brigades, and that’s it. Would three make a difference for them?”….
I recently saw a short segment where Bernard from MHV is talking to The Chieftain (Nick Moran), about tanks in Ukraine, lessons learned etc.
He referenced conversations he had with the youtuber Perun on the subject of old vs. new tanks, and the conclusion he came to was that the key thing is thermal imaging and current fire-control systems. He broke it down into three, low (original T-64/-55 etc), mid (original T-72/M-60 Leopard 1), and hi (M2/Leopard 2AX).
The conclusion was that ideally, you wanted hi, with the latest and greatest. Med was pretty much useless, as an old low tank could be just about as effective as the med. The med was just as vulnerable armor wise as the low. Med DID get useful IF it had upgraded sensors and fire control/battlefield management. The key is the sensors. Modern thermal imaging is great, and the Chieftain pointed out another thing about them. If they are sensitive enough to see a human head through a bush, they are sensitive enough to detect a drone.
While I think the Ukrainians would love enough tanks for many brigades, the Chieftain did speak about the utility of a mix, leveraging your hi and the sensors and battlefield management to make up for lower numbers.
I doubt that a typical T-72 can be quickly upgraded to take a modern western thermal imaging system and fire control system, but a blue-force and other battlefield management systems certainly can be. After all, we can put one in a HUMMV, or just about anything that will take a full sized vehicle radio.
I can totally see the value of a current western tank company leading a battalion of (newish) T-72/T-90s,or a platoon of modern western tanks per company. especially if the enemy is mostly of the same vintage. Even more especially if battlefield management system is installed. Your Ukrainian T-72/90 won’t have the latest and greatest fire control, but the Leopard/M1, but if the Leopard is finding the location and range of the enemy target with its superior sensors and passing the exact location on a moving map display to the T-72 crew, you have a superior situational awareness, and are leveraging the maximum value from both tanks.
Combat with tanks is easy. Anyone can do it.
Winning, on the other hand? Whole other issue.
I’ve been that guy sitting in the Central Corridor at the National Training Center while a novice brigade commander crawled down it at 5-10 miles an hour with task force elements equipped with arguably the fastest tank in the world. Even the lowest-ranking private in that clusterf*ck knew we were “doing it wrong”.
I’d say that even the US has its issues doing modern combined arms warfare. It’s a highly complex task that requires a lot of moving pieces to be moving in exactly the right ways at the right times, and it requires a metric butt-load of highly trained and experienced people at all levels. Getting and maintaining proficiency at it is expensive and damned hard; before we did Iraq, for example? We’d all seen 3rd ID, the lead Army element for Iraq, at the NTC. They were sh*t. Unmotivated, uncoordinated, going through the motions and completely… Oh, what’s the word? Apathetic? Yeah; apathetic. Every single Observer/Controller who’d seen those brigades in action at the NTC over the preceding years before OIF kicked off was predicting utter disaster for them. They were that bad. Abysmal, even.
I don’t know what the hell happened over in Kuwait in the months before they went north, but they somehow pulled their collective heads out of their asses far enough that they put in a credible performance that shocked the ever-loving snot out of all of us. I was sitting in Kuwait on my own deployment when they brought those guys out of Iraq to go home, and it was an eye-opener to see some of the people I’d last seen at the NTC being apathetic buttheads return as veterans of actual combat that they’d managed to not only survive, but prevail in. Couple of conversations were eye-openers; the thing I picked up on was that while some of those guys had indeed been apathetic in training, they’d managed to pick up enough in the way of actual “how to do it right” that when push came to shove, they remembered it all.
Also learned that peacetime training performance is oftentimes not what you get out of the same outfit under fire. Some of those guys I railed against for apathy pointed out to me that they’d been on back-to-back rotations to the NTC, moved from brigade to brigade as they came up in the rota for an NTC rotation. You go to the NTC every six to nine months, it ceases being a capstone event for your tour, it’s a goddamn nightmare that won’t end. Coupled with the constant churn of turbulence in the ranks, it’s no wonder a lot of those guys were jaded and no longer gave much of a f*ck about training.
Which has little to do with Ukraine, at the moment, but it does illustrate that getting and keeping ready for combat is a bit of a dark art, practiced by many but perfected by few.
@ Paul,
I think the one thing that’s going to come out of the Ukraine war is this concept of “Dragon’s Teeth”, the one we first saw playing out in the opening “shock” phase of the war.
In the past, the average citizen of an invaded country is a useless asset, so far as defense goes. They’re actually a bit of a detractor, because you have to protect them and worry about them being in the way and abused by the invaders. They’re also militarily useless, doing absolutely nothing to aid or assist your defense efforts.
Now, consider those same citizens handed an app on their ubiquitous smart phones. Now, they’re calling in spot reports on the enemy; they have access to information telling them where to go, where it is safe, where the friendly fire is about to come in. There’s weapons data on there, telling them how to use captured battlefield pickup weapons, how to drive abandoned vehicles. There are even things like “how to soldier” in terms of constructing defensive positions and all those other handy tasks you have to know how to do, like put on protective gear.
Think about the sea-change that represents in terms of what’s going on; you’ve now effectively converted a military burden over into a military asset.
Similarly, if you have those same pre-programmed cell phones hooked up with comms assets like Blue Force Tracker, you can put them into your rickety old-tech weapons like the T-62 you pulled off of gate guard duty, and you’re half-way to having the same benefits of a fully kitted-out modern MBT, at least so far as everything command and control goes.
This is a huge advantage for a modern, flexible society like Ukraine, and a huge threat to authoritarian cultures like Russia’s: When you can do a “just add water” sort of thing to your citizenry, and they’re nearly instant effective soldiers, what have you got in terms of actual increased defense capability?
The old-school “levee en masse” relied on central control, large armories, and a lot of reaction time. Today, you can get a certain percentage of effectiveness simply by getting people to download an app onto their phones, and do what they want to do. Just having ubiquitous reporting is enough of a game-changer; factor in “just add water” instant pop-up soldiers who can look at instructionals for how to drive the enemy’s tanks?
This is a field we ought to be working, right now. Package up a set of YouTube-style instructibles for all aspects of citizen-soldiering, and be ready to support them as needed when the crisis arises.
If I were setting up defenses in Central European countries, right now? I’d be caching things like sight systems and improvised rocket launchers out in the forest, with encrypted locations embedded in apps I could unlock for the citizenry in wartime; same with small arms arsenals and the like. You’d have to trust the citizens, and have some pretty healthy safeguards embedded, but… Can you imagine the chaos if those Russian tank columns back in February and March had been driving through countrysides filled with pissed-off locals who’d had their “Dragon’s Teeth” apps enabled, leading them to cached AT weapons and the like…? With apps feeding in real-time intelligence to your defense planners in the capital?
Some of that happened; we need to enable rather more of it, going forward. Particularly for countries like Taiwan. Imagine the Chinese trying to pry their way into all those mountains, with the citizenry aroused and enabled by access to weapons and knowledge we typically only think of as belonging to trained soldiers?
I think the “levee en masse” is going to come back. Some of these ideas are laid out in a fairly prescient little book by a Brit, entitled “New Model Army”, by Adam Roberts. The stuff he has in there is a little woo-woo, but there’s a solid underpinning of actual insight in there that we see the very beginnings of “real-world working out” in Ukraine.
Does anyone believe fifty or even a few hundred tanks will impact the war in a significant way. If you do I have a time share opportunity for you in glorious Malabo.
Interesting that the Poles are purchasing 1000 South Korean K2 tanks for their army. https://www.military-today.com/tanks/k2_black_panther_mbt.htm
Wonder how these would stack up against Russian armor.
The K1 that the K2 is based on is a pretty solid tank. The main reasons that the Poles are choosing that tank revolve around co-production and rapid availability. Also, the technology base they’re getting from it all, along with the synergy going on with relation to the K9 155mm SP artillery buy.
The Germans did this to themselves, honestly. Poland was a natural fit for German systems, but they didn’t want to play ball and wanted to keep production in Germany with full control over it all. The Poles wanted something they built themselves and had control over. GDLS, much the same story… The M1 purchase they’re doing I see as an insurance buy to get more on board with the US, along with the fact that the M1 is an interim purchase between the “now” and when K2 production comes fully on-line.
What you need to watch out for? Korea marketing to the other Eastern European and Scandinavian countries. Also, the UK… I could easily see Krauss-Maffei losing a metric sh*t-ton of sales due to this whole thing. Gonna be interesting… When it’s all over, I bet money that Leopard 2 tanks are going to be going at cost, and they’ll sell you everything you need to build ’em for yourself. ‘Cos, that’s about what the Koreans are doing.
@Tom,
Wait and see. I have similar doubts, but when/if you consider that they’ll put the NATO tanks in as spearpoint formations with the captured Russian stuff and their own older models as exploitation/consolidation formations…?
Whole thing may well work out for them. I don’t know… I’ve been pretty positively impressed by the Ukrainian capacity for military adaptation and execution of fairly advanced tactics. The operations around Kherson and elsewhere looked a lot like the set-piece battles we used to use as training events at the NTC, and I suspect that that was just what they were.
I’ve said from the beginning that the Russians screwed up massively by taking this to full-scale war the way they did last February. Where it ends, I have no idea, but it ain’t going to be “good for Mother Russia”.
South Korean will get a cut of any K2-P made in Poland and even bigger slice for those that’s sold to former Leopard 2 customers once those countries realized just what an headache dealing with KraussMaffei. View in that light, the Korean pulled off a masterstroke with their deal with Poland. They sold a boat load of tanks, they’ll get a steady stream of future support contract and co-development for K2-P. And Poland is likely to look for customers in their neighborhood for anyone that wants to ditch their Leopard 2 for K2-P.
We live in interesting times.
Experienced tank crews should be able to transition to Leopards fairly quickly. Maybe the same, but a bit longer lead time for the M1. Logistics support, repair, etc seems to be the fly-in-the-buttermilk to this former S4.
I’ll be buying additional popcorn and 12-year-old single malt to watch.
You would almost suspect that this whole thing represents a massive marketing scheme wherein the Russians are working with the various Western arms manufacturers to get them to clean out all the old stocks, forcing their clients to buy new stuff…
What I find really incredible about it is that if Putin was the goddamn genius he supposedly is, the dumb bastard would have waited a few more years and then all of his goals would have fallen into his lap. “Softly, softly, catchee monkee…”
Much like his adulated predecessors in the God-Emperor game, Stalin and Hitler, the impatient little boy had to try to do it all, and instantly. Delayed gratification is a big deal, not just for little kids, but adult statesmen.
Now he’s got NATO on more of his borders, the Swedes and the Finns are in NATO, the rest of NATO is arming up, and the alliance is revitalized. And, ohbytheway, that nice deal where he had the German energy market all sewed up? That went to shit, along with all the money and effort he spent on suborning SPD politicians, who’re going to wind up being unable to do squat for him…
If Putin is some kind of strategic genius, I don’t want to see what a strategic moron would be on that spectrum.
I am unaware of many great powers that have saintly records for the past few centuries. Perhaps the author can enlighten us which nation is less guilty of having a stained reputation like those evil Germans? The French, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, British, of course he couldn’t mean the USA?
As to armor, a tank is as good as its crew. With the US Army concentrating on pronouns, high heels, and cocktail dresses, I’m sure a British crewed Chieftan will do better, as would any Swiss manned Lep. Our military is so brilliant that the USMC has renounced armor and we are reduced to accepting critters that used to be considered 4T.
Technology never replaces training, spirit, and motivation. Our military has done everything to reduce our standards to those of the Congo.
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