I had always thought it a military requirement that before any weapons system gets sold, scrapped or removed from service the following must happen:
1. They need to be completely rebuilt, refitted, repaired and fully be operational before they can be disposed of;
2. They need new paint done by private contractors. This paint must have been specifically bought for the system and can be used on no other;
3. Their replacements are at least five years away if all goes as planned. The new system must be more limited in capability and more expensive since there will always be fewer of them bought;
4. They must have considerable service life left. Huge quantities of spare parts that were unavailable to your forces will be discovered in depots and sold by weight;
5. Doctrine for their employment must have been recently updated at great cost. All training manuals must have just been re-written or updated at great expense in money, training and logistics. In multilingual countries, brand new translations of all reference material must have been completed and issued within the previous six-months;
6. Supporting infrastructure must be retained in service at great cost but without function until replaced by the new system (see item 3 above); and
7. Any specialized munitions usable only by the system being superseded must remain in national stocks for at least five-years after it becomes useless.
Once all of the above are satisfied, the system may be discarded.
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