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New Stuff for Ukraine

On January 23, 2023

At 10:13 am

In General

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_{By Fric.matej – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124796685}

Deliveries of significant new weapons for Ukraine seem to be on the horizon. First, a good account of the capabilities and caveats on transferring F-16s:

Since the Dutch F-16 announcement has generated more talks on #fighters for #Ukraine; a few thoughts.
1) The Ukrainian Air Force would absolutely benefit greatly from Western fighters in terms of air-to-air and (potentially) air-to-ground lethality. But there are caveats (1/10) pic.twitter.com/a0ARugrpkP— Justin Bronk (@Justin_Br0nk) January 23, 2023

As Tyler Rogoway said way back when, the West should just choose a fighter to transfer to Ukraine and then start working out the logistical and training problems. I’m awfully curious how much of this has already happened, although the effort to get more legacy MiGs into the air has generally been regarded as successful. But as Justin notes it will be difficult even with Western fighters for Ukraine to seize control over its airspace in a way that will be consequential for ground combat. Fortunately, things are also (finally) looking up with respect to the transfer of Leopard IIs:

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Monday that Warsaw would submit a request to Germany to reexport its tanks to Ukraine, after Berlin indicated it would not block such a move.
After the comments Sunday by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Poland sees a “glimmer of hope” that its German-made Leopard 2 tanks could be sent to Ukraine, Morawiecki said, according to the Polish Press Agency.

Poland has been buying a lot of tanks recently and so consequently has a lot of tanks to transfer. But again with the caveats:

I know this is not the space for nuance but believe me you can be both critical of Germany‘s reluctance to supply Leopard II MBTs & still be realistic about their likely impact on the battlefield & e.g. point out that they won’t be “Wunderwaffen” (“miracle weapons”) even if…— Franz-Stefan Gady (@HoansSolo) January 20, 2023

To distill the conversation on both of these… Ukraine absolutely does not need what Michael Kofman has referred to as a “petting zoo” of main battle tanks. On the battlefield it might be nice to have one Challenge, two Leopards, two LeClercs, three Abrams, and 5 T-72s available, but from a training and logistical point of view it’s an utter nightmare. Of all of these the Leopard is regarded as ideal because a) there are a lot of them, b) they are less logistically complex than the Abrams, and c) tank people seem to think that the learning curve on operations and maintenance is a touch shallower than with other tanks. But as Franz points out, we absolutely should not think that Leopards or any other tanks are suddenly going to transform the balance on the battlefield; they’ll help because of both numbers and intrinsic capabilities, but the improvement is marginal rather than revolutionary. Would be nice, tho, if the Ukrainians had more than a handful for a spring or summer offensive.