This is some interesting stuff. It shows the hubris that went along with the hype of the idea of the super western heavy tanks. When up against a nation with similar resources they don’t do as well as compared to fighting in the middle east against old soviet tanks outdated by 30 years. Of course its more than just a slug fest, the ability to maintain and repair and just plain service them comes in to play. But, that’s all part of it isn’t it? Its not just the firepower, its the logistics. As comforting as that might be to think they are all just broke down over the lack of training by slavic mechanics, the truth is, a lot of them are burned out hulks on the fields now. I wish Hognose was still around to give us some commentary. Maybe Kirk will pop back in the comments.
Authored by Denes Albert via ReMix News,
Of the 18 German-made Leopard 2AG main battle tanks sent to Ukraine, only a few are still in operation, with the rest either destroyed or broken, according to German Green MP Sebastian Schäfer, who serves as the defense expert for the party.
“The situation in Ukraine is very difficult at the moment. We need to do more at all levels; the government and industry are called upon to do more,” he wrote on the X social network.
He also underlined his position in letters to Rheinmetall and the French armaments company Nexter.
Footage of the destroyed Leopard tanks littering the battlefields in Ukraine has been widely broadcast by pro-Russian accounts on social media.
However, other countries have also sent their Leopard 2s into action, and it was unclear how many of the tanks provided directly by Germany had even seen action.
So far, the weapon has not had the effect on the battlefield that the Ukrainians were hoping for.
Meanwhile, not only has the Ukrainian counteroffensive failed, but Russia is even making gains along the front.
Schäfer had visited a repair workshop in Lithuania together with Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) before Christmas to get an idea of the situation, following which the Green Party member stated: “Unfortunately, it is clear that only a very small number of the battle tanks supplied can still be used by Ukraine.”
He said they were no longer combat-ready due to battle damage, wear and tear, and shoddy repair attempts by the Ukrainians.
“There is also obviously a problem in that the Ukrainian army sometimes attempts to repair the tanks, which then leads to further damage,” Schäfer said, adding that there is a shortage of the required spare parts from Germany.
He suggested that the Ukrainians implement better training for the mechanics on site or provide better instructions. The costly transportation of damaged tanks is also sometimes not the best solution.
Schäfer insisted that more aid and weapons should flow to Ukraine to help it win the war effort.
Scattered Shots 
These fucking Green imbeciles know as little about war as they do about the environment. “Industry needs to do more!”. Like fucking what? Make more tanks? It probably takes about 5 years from date of order to date of delivery to make something as complex as an MBT and this is being optimistic.
And now, because they gave their tanks to the idiotic Ukes, Germany is short of tanks. The stupidity of these fucking morons makes me grind my teeth to a powder.
Good men die because of the arrogance, hubris and incompetence of these goddamned imbeciles
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I was thinking the same thing. World’s shortest book: Green Party military experts.
Time will tell, but my money is still on a limited Russian win as the likeliest outcome here, with a draw in second place and a Russian blowout in third. I don’t see many paths to anything that the Ukrainian side would call a meaningful win at this point, though no doubt the GAE propaganda will call any outcome a win. “See? The Russians didn’t invade Poland and Romania, so destroying the future of the Ukrainian nation-state and people was totally worth it!”
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The German Green Party is mostly childless females with advanced degrees in… whatever useless nonsense women pursue to pad their resume’s. The Green Party’s claim to fame is the female hysterical fear of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, which is very much a problem of over-educated white women in the west.
The trouble for them is, once you get outside the narrow confines of the faculty lounge at a university, their core demographic has no expertise in… anything. Their prattle on the subject of home heating recently showed this – arguing for a policy that all new home heating plants had to be able to show that they used two-thirds renewable energy to heat homes. WTF? How are you supposed to do that?
So when they say “Industry needs to do more!” what you should hear is a cat lady nagging a man “When are you going to fix this?!” because that is the demographics of the Green Party.
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One of the worse features of the West is AWFLs – Affluent White Female Leftists
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It isn’t just “leftist” females. There are “conservative” females who are almost as bad.
I live in Wyoming, and we had to boot Liz Cheney out of office. Cheney was rated at a 90%+ “conservative” by the Beltway Bozos like the ACU. She voted for the DNC’s gun control plan in June of 2022.
Today, we can look at Nikki Haley and see another female just like Liz Cheney – claims to be conservative, but has a thoroughly elitist, “Big Mommy” attitude.
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the 19th amendment and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
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Definitely. An awful lot of trend lines started heading in the wrong direction shortly after the 19th was ratified.
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I notice a mindset similar to the “gear geek” shooter in all this. If I just get a better gun, better scope, etc, I’ll finally be the shooter I’ve always dreamed of….
If we just give Ukraine F-16s or Leopards or ATACMs, etc they’ll finally be victorious agains those mean Russians…
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We should NB that the US/Russians tanks beat the Germans’ tanks in WWII, even though the Germans had the better tanks on paper (and I don’t mean just the Tigers). The Germany tanks took more logistics to support in the field, broke down more frequently. Gudererian himself attributed over 60% of tank losses on the Eastern Front to mechanical breakdowns, and complained to Hitler that what the German Army really needed was more tank recovery vehicles to pull tanks that had mechanical failures back to repair depots to get them back in service.
The old saying in wars “amateurs argue tactics and strategy, professionals argue about logistics” is proven yet again.
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I’ve been reading some sort of revisionist history that’s saying the Sherman wasn’t the terrible death trap it’s portrayed as in the movies. The vast majority of the time, tanks weren’t fighting tanks – they were mobile artillery and pillboxes supporting infantry. It needed to be reliable and available so the huge quantities of relatively reliable (and apparently serviceable at a low level) tanks with not the best armor, not the best gun, etc were a winning factor. Sure, if they encountered a Tiger or Panther that was actually functional, things went poorly but that was rare.
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Among other issues, the Tigers and Panthers had to contend with the Maybach HL 230 engine, which had been bored out and upsized from the HL 210 engine. The HL 230 had, let us say, “issues,” including catching on fire from overheating, blowing head gaskets, etc.
The M4 Sherman’s most successful engine was the Ford GAA, a monster V8 that was vastly over-built for the application. I’ve seen the GAA in tractor-pulling applications, and it is a beast of an engine. It was rated at about 500 HP in the M4 application – I’ve seen the very same engine tuned and run at over 1200 HP in civilian competitions. Ford had designed the GAA to be a V-12 aviation engine, with aviation engine engineering. The US needed a better tank engine, and being rejected from aviation contracts, Ford took four cylinders off the GAA, made it a V8, cast it in aluminum, and produced the heck out of it. Ford, of course, knew how to make 10’s of thousands of anything, and Ford did just that: make ’em by the thousands.
Ford could (and did) supply lots of spare parts and engines, which Maybach didn’t do during the war; they emphasized completed engines over spares, and the completed engines were scarce enough themselves that they were immediately put into tank hulls. The Germans repeatedly failed to understand the importance of the spare parts/engine issue, and Maybach engine production proved to be the chokepoint in the Germany army’s logistics chain clear through the war.
The specific issue of the Maybach tank engine unreliability also received direct commentary from Guderian, to the effect that he opined that the German tankers would gladly would have given up some speed to obtain “automotive-like reliability” out of their tanks. To this day, I cannot quite understand why Speer gave such a monopoly on engine production to Maybach.
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