NATO return to Cold War force structure

[Martineleca]

10 hours ago, Laser Shark said:

It will be a difficult growing process, and likely requires that conscription is reintroduced too. 

 

So will the extra 2500 Boxers over the previously announced 2500 come at the expense of fewer Patrias and Piranhas ordered, or is it a further expansion of the total projected force?

[Ssnake]

Let's try a plausibility check for the numbers thrown around:

They want 60,000 additional soldiers. That's four divisions, which would require about 2,000 frontline combat vehicles in total. Okay, I suppose you can sink 2,500 Boxers in four DIVs while also boosting existing DIVs with addtl SHORAD like Skyranger, and expand artillery w/ RCH155.

 

Where do the Patrias fit, on top of that?

I suppose they have to throw out all Dingos and replace them with Patrias (and all the Fuchs APCs who need replacement, anyway). But then, also, several hundred Leopard 2.

It kinda checks out, so far.

[seahawk]

Or these orders are not for Germany alone. I heard the Netherlands and Belgium could take some vehicles. 

[Stuart Galbraith]

There was discussion  of the UK getting some, because our production was dragging its heels. Don't know if it's happening or not.

[Martineleca]

2 hours ago, Ssnake said:

I suppose they have to throw out all Dingos and replace them with Patrias (and all the Fuchs APCs who need replacement, anyway). But then, also, several hundred Leopard 2.

I haven't heard of a significant number of Leopard 2s actually scrapped anywhere, I know there were a few Spanish ones ruined by salt and moisture, but that was mostly due inadequate storage. There must be quite a few even A1s still in service around the world, aren't the ones in the German inventory relatively new?

[Laser Shark]

5 minutes ago, Martineleca said:

There must be quite a few even A1s still in service around the world

Not a single one. All older models have been brought up to minimum A4 standards. Well, sans the armour, which is still worse than the true A4s.

[Martineleca]

9 minutes ago, Laser Shark said:

Not a single one. All older models have been brought up to minimum A4 standards. Well, sans the armour, which is still worse than the true A4s.

I meant that are of the initial production batch, so a minimum of 45 years old and still operating more or less adequately.

[Laser Shark]

The oldest ones, like the Norwegian 2A4NOs, are increasingly difficult to maintain due to the wear and tear on the old hulls, and also because there are certain parts that are hard and/or costly to obtain since they aren't used in later models. Yes, it would be possible to fix all of this with an extensive upgrade, but as Norway discovered, it’s not going to be much cheaper than completely new tanks, hence the acquisition of the 2A8 NOR. Unfortunately, we've also bought too few of those*, so the old A4NOs might have to soldier on for longer still...

* The requirement was for at least 72 tanks, or 18 per mechanized infantry battalion, and we ended up with 54 to save some money for other projects...

[Martineleca]

On 7/31/2025 at 11:39 PM, Laser Shark said:

The oldest ones, like the Norwegian 2A4NOs, are increasingly difficult to maintain due to the wear and tear on the old hulls, and also because there are certain parts that are hard and/or costly to obtain since they aren't used in later models. Yes, it would be possible to fix all of this with an extensive upgrade, but as Norway discovered, it’s not going to be much cheaper than completely new tanks, hence the acquisition of the 2A8 NOR. Unfortunately, we've also bought too few of those*, so the old A4NOs might have to soldier on for longer still...

I suppose the far north is more hostile for longevity of AFVs compared to continental Europe and still the Leo 1s served for 42 years there, oldest Leo 2 in the Bundeswehr must be around 30 years old which is far too soon to even consider putting into storage let alone scrap. One of the most important lessons from the Ukraine conflict and inability of a dozen nations to spare enough equipment for a division in a timely manner is that you never really know what threats may develop in the future, so it would be prudent to not get rid of difficult to replace military equipment prematurely. In the same way seeing how unstable the security environment in the Eastern Mediterranean is becoming I think Israel must be regretting its decision to melt down thousands of functioning Magach and Merkava tanks right about now...

[Laser Shark]

2 hours ago, Martineleca said:

I suppose the far north is more hostile for longevity of AFVs compared to continental Europe and still the Leo 1s served for 42 years there, oldest Leo 2 in the Bundeswehr must be around 30 years old which is far too soon to even consider putting into storage let alone scrap. One of the most important lessons from the Ukraine conflict and inability of a dozen nations to spare enough equipment for a division in a timely manner is that you never really know what threats may develop in the future, so it would be prudent to not get rid of difficult to replace military equipment prematurely.

The Leo 1s had the benefit of being part a larger fleet where only a minority of them were in active service, which meant that they could be rotated out more frequently between active units, heavy maintenance and mobilization storage. This helped with reducing the wear and tear on the fleet, thus extending their service life.

The Leo 2s* on the hand entered service just as those hefty cuts were being made to the Norwegian Army, and the focus had started to shift to out-of-area operations where tanks weren’t sexy for the most parts. So, there was little willingness to properly fund the fleet, resulting in silly ‘losses’, like tanks being cannibalized for spares and/or left in disrepair after certain accidents. Then add in some more ‘losses’ due to hulls being given up for conversions into support variants (ARVs etc.), as well as donations to Ukraine, and we get to the present-day situation where pretty much every remaining tank is in active service. Old tank + heavy usage = more work keeping them operational.

As for what will happen to the 2A4NOs after they've been officially replaced, my guess would be that they're either handed over to Ukraine like the earlier ones, and/or to another NATO ally as an interim solution of sorts. Otherwise, they should be going into long-term storage, I agree.

* Ex-Dutch vehicles that were already close to 20 years old at the time.

2 hours ago, Martineleca said:

In the same way seeing how unstable the security environment in the Eastern Mediterranean is becoming I think Israel must be regretting its decision to melt down thousands of functioning Magach and Merkava tanks right about now...

Well, I'm certainly regretting that we scrapped our 111 Leo 1A5NO/NO2, instead of keeping them in storage...

[Martineleca]

On 8/2/2025 at 9:27 PM, Laser Shark said:

Well, I'm certainly regretting that we scrapped our 111 Leo 1A5NO/NO2, instead of keeping them in storage...

Most countries that operated them aimed to put at least some in long-term storage due to their design being very conductive to modernisation as the Leo 1-120 showed, was the matter researched enough in Norway to reach an informed decision whether to keep them or not, how many of them could have realistically been preserved?

[Laser Shark]

1 hour ago, Martineleca said:

Most countries that operated them aimed to put at least some in long-term storage due to their design being very conductive to modernisation as the Leo 1-120 showed, was the matter researched enough in Norway to reach an informed decision whether to keep them or not, how many of them could have realistically been preserved?

IMO the majority of them, but it would have cost money, and that’s where the knife was twisting. For a military that wasn’t even getting the funding it needed to properly maintain its active components, it’s easy to come up with "reasons" to cut such expenses, like “It’s no longer adequate for the modern battlefield”, “there will never be another land war in Europe” etc.

Now we’re seeing that these were always just BS excuses, as uparmoured Leo 1A5s and other “Cold War relics” continue to prove their usefulness in the Russia-Ukraine War.

Edited August 3 by Laser Shark
Damn auto correct

[Ssnake]

The root cause is the mentality that made the CFE treaty possible. It always was a complete BS "compromise" where Europe would put all old tanks into the smelter while Russia could keep its - on the other side of the Urals, from where they could never ever be brought back into Europe, obviously.

As a minimum, NATO should have negotiated a pan-European tankyard in Spain or something. I acknowledge that it had to be tried and a gesture of goodwill may have been necessary, but as a minimum some additional steps on the Russian side would have had to be negotiated that would have resulted in reciprocal actual decommissioning, or else the destruction of equipment on our end should have been stopped.

 

Well, I hope that at least most politicians of the current generation have learned the lesson that Russian political culture simply isn't trustworthy, ever. How can we inoculate against stupidity in the future? I guess that's mankind's unanswered historical question.

[Laser Shark]

Hear, hear!

[Stuart Galbraith]

2 hours ago, Ssnake said:

The root cause is the mentality that made the CFE treaty possible. It always was a complete BS "compromise" where Europe would put all old tanks into the smelter while Russia could keep its - on the other side of the Urals, from where they could never ever be brought back into Europe, obviously.

As a minimum, NATO should have negotiated a pan-European tankyard in Spain or something. I acknowledge that it had to be tried and a gesture of goodwill may have been necessary, but as a minimum some additional steps on the Russian side would have had to be negotiated that would have resulted in reciprocal actual decommissioning, or else the destruction of equipment on our end should have been stopped.

 

Well, I hope that at least most politicians of the current generation have learned the lesson that Russian political culture simply isn't trustworthy, ever. How can we inoculate against stupidity in the future? I guess that's mankind's unanswered historical question.

It was much the same thinking where the Soviets promised to put all their SS20s the other side of the Urals, as long as Europe didnt field Euromissile. Of course the SS20's could still land in Europe from the other side of the Urals. The difference was in the early 1980's we were cynical enough to see we were being had, and in the late 1980's far too damn optimistic to believe it.

The problem was 'The death of history.'   We did not seem to recognise that whilst circumstances might have changed, the Soviet and latterly Russian worldview  had not. We should have realised this as early as 1999, but we went on for another 15   years whistling in the dark, because we didnt want to acknowledge it. Then went another 10 before we really started to do anything about it.

No, they wont have learned, anymore than when they were listing for the last 10 plus years when I was pointing out that Russia was acting very similarly to Nazi Germany before WW2. Because people are too damn accomplished at sticking their heads in the sand when they are 5 minute soundbites of 'logic' dripped like poison in their heads. Information age reasoning.

[bojan]

8 hours ago, Ssnake said:

...As a minimum, NATO should have negotiated a pan-European tankyard in Spain or something....

Real issue is that Europe went way, way, way below CFE limits in practice.

[Stuart Galbraith]

In some cases that was inevitable. With Britain, we had just signed an expensive contract to upgrade Chieftain. With the end of the cold war, they were no longer needed, and it cost more money to get out the contract to upgrade than it did to accept. So they accepted the newly upgraded and never used tanks, took them out ont he range, and blew them in half.

Logic would dictate that it would perhaps make sense to buy more Challenger 2 to replace the tanks you just destroyed. But its the end of the cold war, the Government of the day promised a peace dividend (which never really seemed to arrive), but they did buy more C2 than they needed (but not as many as they should) and told Vickers good luck. The  thing should have been to  been  to buy small amounts for the next 10 years, and put them in war stocks. But the cold war is over, nobody expected to need them again, so they didnt.

Im sure all the European nations have their own reasons for what they did, but probably no less avoidable than it was for us, dumb though it clearly was. Try being the man calling caution with the entirity of Whitehall bureaucracy facing you down.

Edited August 4 by Stuart Galbraith

[TrustMe]

24 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

In some case that was inevitable. With Britain, we had just signed an expensive contract to upgrade Chieftain. With the end of the cold war, they were no longer needed, and it cost more money to get out the contract to upgrade than it did to accept. So they accepted the newly upgraded and never used tanks, took them out ont he range, and blew them in half.

Logic would dictate that it would perhaps make sense to buy more Challenger 2 to replace the tanks you just destroyed. But its the end of the cold war, the Government of the day promised a peace dividend (which never really seemed to arrive), but they did buy more C2 than they needed (but not as many as they should) and told Vickers good luck. The logical thing to buy would have been  to buy small amounts for the next 10 years, and put them in war stocks. But the cold war is over, nobody expected to need them again, so they didnt.

Im sure all the European nations have their own reasons for what they did, but probably no less avoidable than it was for us, dumb though it clearly was. Try being the man calling caution with the entirity of Whitehall bureaucracy facing you down.

I don't think the peace dividend was a bad thing. That the government then sent the army in lots of wars without increasing the defence budget again was were they went wrong.

But look at Spain for example. They only spend £10 billion on defence, we spend 7 times that amount. At least were doing something.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Yes, but,

1 Spain wasnt a nuclear power, which has to be recapitalized every 25 years or so. Particularly when you use a very expensive gold plated delivery system, which we do.

2 Wasnt a UN security council member, which meant it was expected that every major war the US was involved in, we would to.

3 Wasnt a leading and founder member of NATO. So it was expected we would always put our chestnuts in the fire.

4 Did not have an aging population to the degree we have, which is only sustained by 10 percent spent on the NHS.

 

With all that, why did we expect we would not end up in anything but a glorious mess by trimming the shilling? Now we have to spend far more than we would have  if some smart alec didnt think we could get away with not fighting tank battles in central Europe,as a supposedly well educated British prime minister once did.

Potty, the lot of them.

[Laser Shark]

2 hours ago, bojan said:

Real issue is that Europe went way, way, way below CFE limits in practice.

Ultimately, they were both grave mistakes caused by an overwhelming desire to cut defence spending among European NATO-members.

In the 90s, they needed an excuse, and the CFE-treaty provided that, even if it favoured Russia.

In the 2000s, the new excuse was that we needed to convert the “large and cumbersome" territorial defence forces into "leaner, meaner and more deployable" response units. Funnily enough, as it turned out, the new INTOPS focused organization was actually much worse at maintaining larger deployments overseas than the old one had been in places like Lebanon…

[seahawk]

In the end the important factor were US interests. Imagine it is 2003, your defence minister goes to the next NATO meeting and declares that you army of 300.000 can sadly not help in the sandbox because you have to keep 3 armoured divisions and are preparing for Russia to re-emerge as hostile. If you think that would work, I have some freedom fires to sell you.  

[Laser Shark]

54 minutes ago, seahawk said:

In the end the important factor were US interests. Imagine it is 2003, your defence minister goes to the next NATO meeting and declares that you army of 300.000 can sadly not help in the sandbox because you have to keep 3 armoured divisions and are preparing for Russia to re-emerge as hostile. If you think that would work, I have some freedom fires to sell you.  

If you think “U.S. interests” is the main reason why Norway and others cut their armed forces to the bone and beyond, then you can keep your fries, whatever you call them. We were well on the way of butchering our armed forces before the GWOT kicked off, and it's because the people in power were no longer interested in  funding the forces that were needed, be it at home or abroad.

[Martineleca]

4 hours ago, seahawk said:

In the end the important factor were US interests.

All American administrations in the last three decades have consistently called on European NATO members to increase defence spending regardless of how useful they could be in an expeditionary scenario, for instance as several divisions worth of US troops semi-permanently exited the old continent for operations in the Gulf it was these countries that were expected to take on an extra load to sustain the agreed force structure, it happened to some extent post-1991 and not at all after 2003...

[kokovi]

If European NATO countries would have kept CFE ceiling levels of equipment, they could have easily supplied Ukraine with equipment for something like ten armored divisions back in 2022 and still have kept an incredibly large force. CFE treaty levels would allow Germany alone enough equipment to field about ten armored/mechanized divisions. CFE wasn’t about disarming yourself but keeping Cold War level forces with somewhat limited offensive capabilities.

[Martineleca]

On 8/4/2025 at 8:24 PM, Laser Shark said:

If you think “U.S. interests” is the main reason why Norway and others cut their armed forces to the bone and beyond, then you can keep your fries, whatever you call them. We were well on the way of butchering our armed forces before the GWOT kicked off, and it's because the people in power were no longer interested in  funding the forces that were needed, be it at home or abroad.

Norway was in a somewhat unique situation during the Cold War, being one of the few NATO nations to actually border the USSR it had to deal with a fair amount of provocations yet it wasn't really projected to become a sight of major armoured warfare unlike other regions. Did plans for a situation where solely Norway is attacked while Sweden and Finland remain unscathed even exist, do they now?