As of: March 29, 2024, 4:38 p.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
Comments
Press
Split
Up to its neck in the dirt: A Challenger 2 tank of the Ukrainian army fighting the Russian invasion. Eastern Europe apparently offers the wrong ground for him. The criticism remains loud. © Genja SAWILOW / AFP
Doubts are being raised that the Challenger 2 was just a gesture of goodwill and was intended to encourage the West to help. The criticism doesn't stop.
Kiev – “Behaviour on the battlefield is important in order to increase your own survivability,” says Lukas Reitstetter. He has to know what he's talking about. The Bundeswehr captain is an instructor at the Panzertruppenschule in Munster and raves
about an exercise on
bundeswehr.de
. The heart of the Bundeswehr's armored combat troops beats in the Lüneburg Heath. At the Munster-Nord military training area, which is more than 100 square kilometers in size, the army's tank companies also train in combined-arms combat using live fire. Here the Leopard tanks show their performance. No wonder.
The Lüneburg Heath consists of sandy soil - well ventilated, quickly warmed up and above all: dry. An ideal habitat for a steel colossus weighing more than 60 tons. Ukraine is currently going through its muddy period again - the “Rasputitsa” (in German: “time of pathlessness”) - and one thing is the same for the Western tanks: their combat effectiveness is causing them to sink into the mud. The counteroffensive against Vladimir Putin had already stalled last year. The weather plays a major role in the Ukraine war, and the main sufferer is the heavyweight from the United Kingdom: the Challenger 2, as
Forbes
now writes.
Challenger delivery: Maybe just a gesture to encourage the other NATO partners
According to the British
Sun
, Ukrainian tankers hailed the Challenger as "the world's best tank," a 64-ton "sniper" that could easily take out Russian targets up to 4.5 kilometers away. If only he could get away from the spot, as has now become clear. Reality has caught up with the heavyweight.
Forbes
now speculates that the delivery of the British gem may have been better understood as a gesture of goodwill, or rather as a spark for the accommodation of the other NATO partners.
The British government gave the final impetus to the internationally contentious debate about tank deliveries when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that it would deliver 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks. A number that has now been significantly exceeded by German deliveries, but Great Britain took the political lead early on. In this political and military offensive,
the
Tagesschau
suspects that the British have a deep understanding of a country that is threatened with total subjugation: “Supporting Ukraine, including with weapons, is almost uncontroversial in the United Kingdom. It’s about Ukraine’s fight for freedom – just like the British fight against Nazi Germany.”
“The mud season associated with military vehicles depends not only on the strength of the ground, but also on the types of vehicles intended for an operation.”
Meteorologist David Helms told Deutsche Welle
The initiative of the Western powers was, on the one hand, forced on them by the normative force of the factual, and on the other hand, it was nourished by the arrogance of Western engineering, which had never had to prove its practical suitability and was based on experience from sandbox games: “The ground is shaking in the Lüneburg Heath. 14 main battle tanks and armored personnel carriers cross the line together. This is how the attack on the enemy began. Over a width of just under a kilometer, 60 tons of steel are moving faster and faster. Other armored combat vehicles follow in a long chain. The 3rd company of the 93rd Panzer Training Battalion from the garrison town of Munster advances. 'I'm attacking in a broad wedge,' is the attack order from the company commander" - this euphoric exercise report on
bundeswehr.de
, however, has precious little in common with the real enemy of the tanks in Ukraine: the terrain. The western tanks there are drowning; Spare parts take far too long to get to the front.
My news
F-16 fighter jets shot down: Putin threatens to attack NATO airfields
Cheese recall: Federal Office warns of health risks – according to the RKI, three groups are particularly susceptible to focus reading
Meloni takes action: Italy cancels the “super bonus” read
Quake in the construction industry: Read the bankruptcy of a large German real estate company
After rocket attacks on Ukraine, Poland launches fighter jets in the middle of the night
Silent holiday before Easter – What are you allowed to do on Good Friday in Bavaria? read
Challenger at war: The problem with his weapon category is that it is tied to the terrain
“The problem with his branch of arms is that it is tied to the terrain. She has to find crossings over rivers, must not get into swamps, and mountains don't work at all. “If a bridge is destroyed or no longer load-bearing, or I can’t find the bridge, then that leads to significant problems,” says Brigadier General Björn Schulz in the
Tagesspiegel
. The mud season related to military vehicles does not only depend on the strength of the ground, but also on the types of vehicles intended for an operation, explains David Helms to Deutsche
Welle
. To put it simply: How heavy tanks and armored personnel carriers are and how many people they transport determine whether they might get stuck in the Ukrainian mud. The retired meteorologist analyzes the weather in the midst of war and posts his forecasts on social media under the hashtag “#NAFOWeather.”
Rasputitsa is a weather phenomenon that occurs every spring and autumn and affects the lowlands of Ukraine and Russia. During this time there is often a severe weather situation that lasts for several weeks, sometimes even months, and is associated with a lot of rain in autumn. In spring, however, it is the beginning of melting snow that softens the ground in the southern regions of Ukraine and turns it into veritable mud deserts.
Challenger out of action: Only two tanks disabled by enemy action
Tanks that cannot move forward or back provide an easy and rewarding target. Footage of exploding western and eastern tanks, whose gun turrets whir through the air after being hit or from which flames shoot meters high, prove this. “The world thought it had left such images behind it,” writes the
Tagesspiegel.
Furthermore, Western technology is failing to have any effect on the Russian invading army. Discussions continue to flare up about the Ukrainians using their vehicles in a tactically incorrect manner, for example without infantry protection. Or inadequately equipped. Of the 14 Challengers originally delivered, half are said to be out of action; two due to enemy action, the rest due to material fatigue.
However, the Ukrainians are also increasingly complaining about the incorrect equipment of the vehicles, as David Ax now writes for
Forbes
: “Since its first combat mission in Bosnia in the 1990s, the Challenger 2 in British service has always been equipped with additional armor on the sides fuselage and the lower front panel. These are the places where you are most vulnerable. Ukraine never received these additional armor sets, probably because the additional three tons of weight would make the Ukrainian Challenger 2s even more vulnerable on soft ground. Instead, the Ukrainians have provided the most vulnerable parts of their Challenger with light lamellar armor - too thin for direct fire.
Challenger in Ukraine: Used as a howitzer causes wear and tear
Ax sees another problem in the Challenger's 120-millimeter cannon, which, on the one hand, fires its own ammunition and thus presents its own hurdles for the logisticians, and on the other hand, because Ukraine has now moved on to burying the immobile combat colossus like a howitzer to use and thereby provoke increased wear. According to reports from various media, the failed counter-offensive can also be attributed in no small part to the Ukrainians' tactical mistakes. The combined arms battle propagated by the Bundeswehr, for example, appears to have been a failure, as Panzermann Schulz
explained to the
Tagesspiegel
: the military principle of “establishing superiority in a certain space for a certain time. It begins with superiority in information, continues with superiority in stand-off weapons, and ends with the deployment of superior forces on the ground to achieve a breakthrough.”
Neither the Challenger, nor the Leopard nor the Abrams had the space and the combat situation to even begin to exploit the qualities they had bred on the drawing board, as had been hoped at the beginning of the war. Since 2008, Russia has extensively reformed its military and continues to show videos and images of high-tech military equipment. The battles on the ground are dominated by scrap iron, as
Deutsche Welle
reported: “In Ukraine, to put it bluntly, what can be seen instead is 'a lot of old scrap', said Carlo Masala, political scientist at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, in the Safety
For the sake of security
podcast in March 2022; There seems to be enough of this scrap still usable today.
The tanks remain up-to-date, regardless of their year of manufacture. Whether they bring the decision or how - also and above all - the Western tanks should basically be best used, the
Tagesspiegel
wanted to be explained by the head of the armored troop schools, Brigadier General Björn Schulz - "Schulz's answer to the question of how tanks are used , in summary: it's best not at all."
(kh)