Ukrainian troops could fight with Leopard 2s by early spring: Experts

WASHINGTON — New training programs in Poland could get some Ukrainian soldiers ready to operate Leopard 2 Main Battle Tanks in combat in as few as six weeks, experts told Breaking Defense, although officers and maintenance specialists would take longer. The tanks themselves could be another story.

But if all goes well, and if Berlin then allows its allies to send the German-made MBTs to Ukraine — a decision that Berlin has been waffling on — that means Ukraine theoretically could launch an armored counter-offensive in early March, just before the spring thaw known as the rasputitsa turns the open steppes into tank-bogging mud.

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That optimistic timeline is much quicker than the US Army’s 22-week timeline to turn a new recruit into a tanker worthy to graduate the “schoolhouse” Fort Benning, Ga., and join an operational unit, where the recruit would keep training the rest of their career. The “One Station Unit Training” (OSUT) at Benning actually used to be 15 weeks, until the Army decided that was not enough.

But Ukraine needn’t send its new recruits. They have thousands of veteran tankers, hardened by 11 months of the fiercest fighting in Europe since World War II. They have thousands more mechanics and logisticians, honed by the desperate struggle to keep a hodgepodge of Western and Soviet combat vehicles in fighting form. They have commanders and staff officers used to planning and coordinating armored warfare.

These veterans would not need to learn the basics: how a tank needs constant maintenance, how it needs careful driving on bad ground to avoid throwing a track — the armored behemoths can be surprisingly delicate — or how the huge machines can hide behind buildings, woods, or even subtle undulations of the seemingly flat steppes, then lash out in ambush. But they would need to learn the Leopard II, which — like the American M1 Abrams, the British Challenger, and other modern Western tanks — is much bigger, heavier, better-armored, and more high-tech than the Soviet-derived designs they’re used to. That affects everything from crew size (four instead of three) to what bridges can support their weight, from how the gun is loaded (manually instead of automatically) to how supply lines and advances must be planned.

“This is not like simply learning a few new incremental upgrades between similar Russian designs, as when a Ukrainian tanker moves from a T-64 over to a T-80 or captured T-90,”  said Matthew Dooley, a retired Army armor officer now with Robotic Research. “This means learning to operate, drive, shoot, and maintain a tank that comes from a design philosophy in the West that’s wholly different from the old Soviet engineering approach.”

So how long would it take, when the pressure is on, and Russia is racing to mobilize more manpower for its own renewed offensive?

Having adopted a host of Western and captured Russian systems on the fly, “Ukrainians have demonstrated remarkable tech savvy and the ability to learn very quickly,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army Europe. “Given that and… a more compressed training program” – so, no weekends or evenings off – “I’m estimating that experienced Ukrainian tankers will need about one-third to a half of the time that is normally required for a new soldier going through OSUT.” That comes out at about seven to eleven weeks.

“Overall, it will take two or three months to train Ukraine personnel,” said Nicholas Drummond, a former British Army tank officer and now a consultant. “I wouldn’t want to do it in any less time.”

“Leopard 2 was designed to be used by conscript soldiers” — the German Bundeswehr retained the draft long after the US — “so it is relatively easy to train crews to use them,” Drummond added. “The more challenging requirement is training support teams to maintain the tanks.”

“You’ve got to train not only the tank crews, you then have to train all of the maintainers,” agreed retired Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe. “Then you’ve got to go in and you’ve got to train their staffs.”

“You can truncate that down [to], say, eight weeks to train an experienced armor crew member…but you can’t train them all at once,” said Donahoe, who once commanded the Fort Benning training center. “You need to establish the school” — presumably at an existing Polish base — “where you could bring Ukrainian tankers from their current units where they’re fighting, train them up, and get them back into Ukraine.”

“Say a month and a half to two months per individual, [but] three or four or five months to build a larger body to train soldiers,” Donahoe concluded.

Other experts were more optimistic about fast the veteran Ukrainian tankers could make the leap to Leopards. Depending on how quickly the vets caught on, Defense Acquisition University Prof. Marc Meeker, a former Army officer, said “4 to 11 weeks would cover training for those who caught on quickly and those who needed remedial training.”

“One could train new crews up to a basic level of proficiency in about five or six weeks,” said Dooley. Maintainers would take a similar period, he said, “[but] for the Ukrainian junior officers and non-commissioned officers, it may take another two to three weeks of additional time” to learn Western tactics.

“The complexity of Ukrainian military operations is relatively low” compared to high-speed, long-range blitzkriegs the US waged in 1991 and 2003, said retired three-star general Thomas Spoehr, now with the Heritage Foundation. “I think four to six weeks would be fine.”

One current Army officer, who asked to remain anonymous, agreed with that four-to-six week estimate.

Some highly specialized repair technicians, however, might take “a year,” warned Jon Jeckell, a retired Army officer with extensive experience with tank maintenance. “That’s basic proficiency, and not with all of the tacit knowledge of a senior technician that develops an intuitive sense for problems, knows how to troubleshoot, and can improvise.” So for some time, if certain high-tech components break — like the laser rangefinders essential to accurate long-range fire — Ukraine will have to send them back to Poland, Germany, or another country with infrastructure to support the Leopard II.

Fortunately for Ukraine, several European nations have that infrastructure, because the Leopard II is the most widely exported Western main battle tank of modern times. Many countries bought them second-hand from the Bundeswehr during its downsizing in the 1990s.

All told, said Meeker, who worked extensively with the Bundeswehr during his time in the Army, “the Leopard Benutzer (LEOBEN) user community…  consists of 31 countries headed up by the Germany’s BAAINBw,” the office for Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support. After the 1990s sell-off, he said, “Germany has only around 300 Leopards, but there are literally thousands of Leopards around the world, in Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East, North/South America, and Asia.”

On the downside, the Bundeswehr’s own Leopards may be in bad shape, because the German budget has shortchanged the military in general and basic maintenance in particular for over a decade. Other European armies are a mixed bag.

“Austria, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, and Spain… were all reluctant to provide their Leopard tanks,” said Drummond. “In many cases this was because their fleets were old and needed to be upgraded.” To get the 300 tanks Ukraine has asked for into fighting shape, he worried, might take “three to six months.”

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Other experts shared his worry. “The big challenges will be identifying the actual hardware, the tanks themselves, getting a good understanding of their state of readiness,” said Donahoe. “They’re all going to have to go through some sort of refurb[ishment], whether that’s an oil change or a full depot level strip down and rebuild.”

We don’t know how much work that will take. “What condition are the other European Leopard 2s?” asked Jeckell. “Have they been stored in a shed with no maintenance for years? How much time, money, and skilled mechanic time will it take to get them operational? Are there parts shortages that will systemically keep a lot of tanks down? I’m really concerned about that, especially given underinvestment in the German defense industrial base for years and the sudden demand on it for parts.”

“It can take a week to get [tanks] in relatively good shape out of storage and ‘wake them up,’” Jeckell continued. “Multiply times hundreds of tanks, especially if you lack mechanics and most importantly spare parts, and they could be down for months.”

But Poland, once again, might hold the trump card. “If those [approximately 250] Polish Leopard 2s are in good condition,” Jeckell said, “that would be more than an old-school [US] Army of Excellence armor division-worth of tanks with just the Polish donation alone.”

“Since Poland’s tanks are operational, they should be relatively well maintained and ready,” said Hodges. And since Poland borders Ukraine, he noted, it’s the easiest place on the planet from which to physically deliver the tanks.

“These tanks appear to be well maintained and ready to go,” agreed Dooley. “The Ukrainians have asked for 300 Western MBTs, and Poland would be close to meeting that number by themselves.”

As for the rest of Europe’s roughly 2,000 Leopard 2 tanks? In the worst case, they can be cannibalized for spare parts to keep the Ukrainians’ 300 fighting.