[Skybird]

Ukraine is running out of spare parts for certain Russian-made equipmentm Dargo. Same for ammo. THAT is a problem for sure. And that is why they want to accelerate the transition to Western-made weapons and platforms. They need to.



Anyway: why tnaks are sitll relevant in modern warfare is described by Die Welt. Myself, I too said before the war that tanks may be obsolete in the wake of drones and ATGMs - but who am I to question the Ukrainians' experience. I stand corrected.
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Some experts believe that tanks are too vulnerable for today's wars. But there is much to suggest that the German Leopard 2 in particular could be used to recapture Ukrainian territory. Kiev's troops know exactly why they continue to ask Berlin for supplies.

In recent days, the SPD's foreign policy spokesman has caused some astonishment among experts. For example, Nils Schmid had told the BBC that the German government's refusal to supply Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine was because they could "change the dynamics on the battlefield." Ukraine expert Franziska Davies commented on the statement on Twitter with a visibly unnerved, "That's what the hell it's all about!"

Others wondered, for the umpteenth time, whether Germany is really serious about Ukraine winning this battle for its own territory against the aggressor Russia. Thus, the strange distinctions between offensive and defensive weapons keep popping up in the German debate, just as if Ukraine did not need offensive weapons to regain lost territory.
And that is ultimately what the Leopard 2 debate is about. Ukraine has been very good at defensive combat, which usually demands more casualties from the attackers than from the defenders when they operate out of well-fortified positions. Now, however, the goal is to retake territory occupied by Russia, and to do so, the Ukrainians will also need heavy battle tanks to penetrate the now well-fortified Russian positions.

In the Kharkiv area, they still managed to break through with mechanized units (equipped with military vehicles, note) in early September because they took the thinned-out Russian units there by surprise, so that they managed to make significant gains in terrain even with their limited offensive assets.

However, the Russians will not be so easily overwhelmed in the future. For example, the Russian withdrawal from Kherson from the west bank of the Dnipro has led to a frontline straightening that has allowed Russia to better fortify the front - often with multiple defensive lines in succession - and to occupy it with the help of newly mobilized recruits.

To break through these without suffering catastrophic losses themselves, the Ukrainians need, among other things, more Western-made heavy battle tanks. Because they are clearly superior in armor and firing precision to the Soviet- and Russian-produced models that both sides have been using so far. And because the Ukrainians are also slowly running out of spare parts for their old tanks after more than ten months of extreme use.

The Leopard is the most suitable replacement because it is available in Europe in considerable numbers, because it consumes less fuel than the American Abrams and because it is also considered to be less maintenance-intensive, especially since the supply and spare parts logistics from Europe would be relatively easy to organize. With its 120-millimeter gun, the current version of the Leopard 2 has considerable penetrating power and is capable of reliably destroying intended targets, even when traveling at high speed in a bumpy environment.

But in light of modern, digitized drone warfare, are heavy battle tanks even relevant today? In the West, heavy battle tanks have long been out of fashion because they seemed too cumbersome for the era of counterterrorism that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

And the early experience of Russia's war against Ukraine also led to a fierce debate among experts about whether tanks had not now become too vulnerable to, say, small, shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons, with which the Ukrainians inflicted heavy losses on Russian formations.

"Russia's bungled invasion and the remarkable strength of the Ukrainian defensive struggle have highlighted the diminishing penetrating power of heavy and expensive military units challenged by more agile, easier-to-operate and crucially cheaper systems," wrote military thinker Phillips O'Brien of Scotland's University of St. Andrews in The Atlantic, for example. "Tanks, warplanes and warships will be relegated to irrelevance and replaced by new tools of conflict."

At first glance, the numbers seem to bear that out. According to Ukrainian figures, Russia has lost 3100 tanks in this war - significantly more than the larger European NATO countries of Poland, Germany, France, Britain, Spain and Italy combined even have in service.

Researchers from the open-source platform Oryx were able to verify at least more than 1,600 Russian tanks destroyed, abandoned or captured by Ukraine when evaluating images from social media, for example, while 450 tanks lost on the Ukrainian side could be identified.

However, many military experts vehemently disagree with the impression that battle tanks are therefore obsolete in modern land warfare. Robert Lee, for example, who has intensively observed and documented the Ukraine war from the beginning, attributes the high Russian tank losses - especially in the early stages of the war - to several factors.

"Three key factors explain Russian tank losses: a lack of advance warning and preparation, poor strategy that exacerbated supply problems, and too little infantry to protect the tanks," Lee writes in a study on the security website War on the Rocks. Often, for example, it was problems with supplies of spare parts, fuel or ammunition that led to an unusually high number of tanks abandoned by their Russian crews and only then destroyed by Ukrainian units, he said.

"If you're going to conduct offensive operations against fortified defenses, you have to mass a lot of combat power, and tanks are still the most likely to survive that," Lee says. "Without tanks, a military fighting a major land war would have to rely on armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles to fill the same role, resulting in a greater number of catastrophic failures and higher loss of life."

Lee also points out that the Ukrainians are now preeminent experts in what is actually needed for modern land warfare. "The Ukrainians have more experience with conventional warfare than any of our countries, and they continue to deploy tanks and ask for more," Lee said. "That's a pretty good indicator that main battle tanks are still relevant."
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