I wanted to put this at the East vs West MBT thread but this place seems more fitting...
Ukraine will finally get the ubiquitous Leopard 2 and there is talk/rumor that US will send the infamous/famous M1 Abrams...
https://breakingdefense.com/2023/01/ukr ... g-experts/But if all goes well, and if Berlin then allows its allies to send the German-made MBTs to Ukraine — a decision that Berlin has been waffling on — that means Ukraine theoretically could launch an armored counter-offensive in early March, just before the spring thaw known as the rasputitsa turns the open steppes into tank-bogging mud.
Ukraine needn’t send its new recruits. They have thousands of veteran tankers, hardened by 11 months of the fiercest fighting in Europe since World War II. They have thousands more mechanics and logisticians, honed by the desperate struggle to keep a hodgepodge of Western and Soviet combat vehicles in fighting form. They have commanders and staff officers used to planning and coordinating armored warfare.
they would need to learn the Leopard II, which — like the American M1 Abrams, the British Challenger, and other modern Western tanks — is much bigger, heavier, better-armored, and more high-tech than the Soviet-derived designs they’re used to. That affects everything from crew size (four instead of three) to what bridges can support their weight, from how the gun is loaded (manually instead of automatically) to how supply lines and advances must be planned.
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“Overall, it will take two or three months to train Ukraine personnel,” said Nicholas Drummond, a former British Army tank officer and now a consultant. “I wouldn’t want to do it in any less time.”
“Leopard 2 was designed to be used by conscript soldiers” — the German Bundeswehr retained the draft long after the US — “so it is relatively easy to train crews to use them,” Drummond added. “The more challenging requirement is training support teams to maintain the tanks.”
“You’ve got to train not only the tank crews, you then have to train all of the maintainers,” agreed retired Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe. “Then you’ve got to go in and you’ve got to train their staffs.”
“You can truncate that down [to], say, eight weeks to train an experienced armor crew member…but you can’t train them all at once,” said Donahoe, who once commanded the Fort Benning training center. “You need to establish the school” — presumably at an existing Polish base — “where you could bring Ukrainian tankers from their current units where they’re fighting, train them up, and get them back into Ukraine.”
“Say a month and a half to two months per individual, [but] three or four or five months to build a larger body to train soldiers,” Donahoe concluded.
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Some highly specialized repair technicians, however, might take “a year,” warned Jon Jeckell, a retired Army officer with extensive experience with tank maintenance. “That’s basic proficiency, and not with all of the tacit knowledge of a senior technician that develops an intuitive sense for problems, knows how to troubleshoot, and can improvise.” So for some time, if certain high-tech components break — like the laser rangefinders essential to accurate long-range fire — Ukraine will have to send them back to Poland, Germany, or another country with infrastructure to support the Leopard II.
Fortunately for Ukraine, several European nations have that infrastructure, because the Leopard II is the most widely exported Western main battle tank of modern times. Many countries bought them second-hand from the Bundeswehr during its downsizing in the 1990s.
A bit of a silver lining in all this...
“It can take a week to get [tanks] in relatively good shape out of storage and ‘wake them up,’” Jeckell continued. “Multiply times hundreds of tanks, especially if you lack mechanics and most importantly spare parts, and they could be down for months.”
But Poland, once again, might hold the trump card. “If those [approximately 250] Polish Leopard 2s are in good condition,” Jeckell said, “that would be more than an old-school [US] Army of Excellence armor division-worth of tanks with just the Polish donation alone.”
“Since Poland’s tanks are operational, they should be relatively well maintained and ready,” said Hodges. And since Poland borders Ukraine, he noted, it’s the easiest place on the planet from which to physically deliver the tanks.
“These tanks appear to be well maintained and ready to go,” agreed Dooley. “The Ukrainians have asked for 300 Western MBTs, and Poland would be close to meeting that number by themselves.”
As for the rest of Europe’s roughly 2,000 Leopard 2 tanks? In the worst case, they can be cannibalized for spare parts to keep the Ukrainians’ 300 fighting.
One thing I am not reading or hearing about is which variant Ukraine will get. There are a total of 7 main variants. It seems like the A4 is the most prolific, however which version of the A4 will Ukraine get? Are they going to get a older version or a version with more modern equipment inside it?
Now for all the talk about the M1 Abrams for Ukraine. For the most part I agree with the article but at the end people forget how important geography is...
https://breakingdefense.com/2023/01/pen ... ing-years/But Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder didn’t deny the reports about a potential forthcoming Abrams announcement either.
“I have nothing to announce today in terms of the M1s. As I think we’ve said all along, we continue to have a very robust dialogue with Ukraine and our international allies and partners to focus on what their immediate battlefield needs are now, in the near-term, but we also have discussions about what they may need in the medium- to long-term,” he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, likewise, told Breaking Defense today they “don’t have anything to announce.”
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“The M1 is a complex weapon system that is challenging to maintain. …That was true yesterday. It’s true today. It’ll be true in the future,” Ryder said. “Without getting into hypotheticals, anytime that we provided Ukraine with any type of system we provided the training and sustainment capabilities with that.”
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True, the Abrams does require specially trained maintenance teams because it uses an unusual turbine engine — most other modern tanks are diesels, with the significant exception of the Soviet-era T-80, which happened to be manufactured in Kharkiv and remains a significant part of the Ukrainian tank fleet. The Abrams also guzzles fuel even more than other 60-plus-ton tanks.
Several former armor officers told Breaking Defense that those logistics hurdles do exist but said they are not dramatically greater than for the other Western heavy tanks already offered to Ukraine.
“All [Western tanks] will require repair parts, heavy recovery vehicles, maybe heavy transport trucks to move them quickly from front to front or to evacuate them for repair,” said Jon Jeckell, a retired Army officer with extensive experience with tank maintenance. “The Ukrainians are also going to have to figure out how to get all of these across bridges as all of them are much heavier than any Russian tank and there probably aren’t many bridges in the country that can support these tanks — and reinforcing bridges gives out a signature that would telegraph where you plan to attack.”
This is the part of the article that I tend to take contention with. Remember what I said about how important geography is?
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of all US Army forces in Europe, said much of the current debate seems “more like excuses” being used by the administration to avoid sending M1s and not a sound reason for a major policy decision.
“Other nations much less industrialized than Ukraine use Abrams” like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and Iraq, Hodges added.
I havent been to Eastern Europe but I have been to the sand box. From what I can tell from pictures and video online comparing to my own experience in the Middle East (Kuwait and Iraq)... THERE IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE! For one there are almost zero bridges. Most of the Middle East is still very open and flat with the exception of sand dunes (yes those sand dunes can shift position in under a week if there is enough wind). Its easier for the Abrams to get from A to B in the middle east because there is almost nothing in their way not like what we have seen with footage in Ukraine. Planners need to take into account the geographic challenges/hurdles that the land scape of Ukraine posses.
24 Jan 2023, 19:58
