WORLD NEWS | Why Western main battle tanks are taking months to reach Ukraine

washington [US]April 24 (ANI): Six Leopard 2 tanks left Spain and will arrive in Ukraine in less than a week, Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said this weekend.

Meanwhile, the U.S. will begin training Ukrainian troops next month on its Abrams tanks, seeking to have them fielded against Russia by the end of the summer, CNN reported.

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Experts have warned that even if shipments and training are underway, the donation of combat vehicles by the NATO ally to Ukraine will have no direct impact on its war with Russia.

Modern main battle tanks are complex armaments. Imposing and rugged on the outside, they owe much of their effectiveness on the battlefield to the sophisticated electronics and computer systems at their core. According to CNN, the systems would find the target and aim the tank’s main gun on it.

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Maintaining the tanks, repairing them and providing the necessary parts requires detailed training from the crews in the vehicles to the logistical paths that support them, hundreds or thousands of miles from the eastern Ukrainian front.

“I would say the ability to train Ukrainian soldiers to support whatever tank they get is almost more important than the type of tank they use,” Nicholas Drummond, a defense industry analyst specializing in land warfare and a former British Army officer, told CNN net.

In addition to the time needed to train the fighter jets, officials say maintaining the tanks means managing supply chains.

Drew Thompson, a visiting senior fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said that, for example, because the Abrams was made in the United States, it had “a very long logistical tail extending back to the United States,” CNN reported.

Critical components worn or damaged during the battle will need to be replaced with American parts, which must be sent to repair stations in Ukraine or Poland, which is buying its own fleet of Abrams, according to CNN.

Thompson said the Pentagon is good at solving difficult logistical problems, “but the stakes are high for both the U.S. and Ukraine.”

“It would definitely be preferable to be able to support the Panther tank from a European logistics base,” Thompson said, referring to the model of the tank used by 13 European nations.

Drummond, a consultant to German tank manufacturers, said the sheer number of Panther tanks available made the support process easier.

More than 4,000 tanks are in service, which means “spare parts are readily available from multiple sources,” he said. (Arnie)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)