Several Western nations have pledged to send heavy tanks to Ukraine. They come with several advantages, but also have certain characteristics that could prove challenging in a Ukrainian context.
Within days, the United States announced it was sending 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. Then the United Kingdom promised 10 Challenger 2 main battle tanks. Even Germany finally agreed to send their Marder infantry fighting vehicles.
The decision, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht added, was all up to Warsaw, which she claimed had yet to formally ask Berlin if it could send its company of Leopards. If it is indeed all up to Poland, then Leopards are as good as en route to Ukraine. Supplying Western tanks, most of which use a 120-millimeter smoothbore gun, is a lot easier as these shells are in abundance in most NATO countries. Western tanks also typically have a qualitative advantage over their Eastern Bloc counterparts, and would allow smaller numbers of Ukrainian Western-supplied tanks to hold their own against larger numbers of Russian vehicles.
Western tanks store their ammunition in specially protected compartments equipped with “blow off panels,” designed to channel any ammunition explosion to the outside of the vehicle, expressly to stop this from happening. The doctrine behind the design of most Western tanks — using a fourth crew member to manually load the ammunition rather than the autoloader — makes a catastrophic detonation far less likely.
A former U.S. Marine and Abrams tank commander in Afghanistan, who asked to be quoted anonymously, added that Abrams and Leopards in particular have “a massive logistics effort behind them, and fielding multiple tanks with no parts in common is a huge task. Some will be damaged, destroyed or captured and that represents national security risks to donor nations.”
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