Is There Any Value in War Reserves? The Russian T62 Saga

 

The Russian Army has taken such significant losses of materiel that it has been forced to pull vintage T62 tanks from reserve, and commit them to front line operations. This statement makes plain just how costly the Russian advances have been in the Donbas area, and raises questions about what, if any, value, there is from retaining a war reserve of vehicles and equipment.

It is difficult to get an accurate picture on just how disastrous the Russian losses have been so far in the war, but most estimates suggest that at least 700 tanks have been destroyed, with many more damaged or captured. Each loss represents not only a small reduction in combat capability to Russia, but usually a far more valuable, and irreplaceable crew.

Russia is not a nation that likes to throw military equipment away, far from it. Their equipment is designed to be simple, reliable and last a very long time. As the outstandingly good website WW2 after WW2, which keeps track of what happened to military equipment after the war, lovingly documents, Soviet era equipment from WW2 just kept going (note, do not click on the link unless you wish to be sucked into a very big time sink!).

With huge reserves of people, no constraints on space or spending, and a mentality of ‘stores are for storing, not scrapping’, Russia has long kept ancient and utterly obsolete equipment in storage depots long past the point of being of any meaningful value. It is almost certain that there are still Russian Army depots out there with WW2 era equipment waiting for a recall to the colours if required.

The challenge facing Russia though is that due to the rampant corruption, the inability to hold units to account and ensure that readiness is tested, and just the sheer scale of the stockpile, most of the vehicles in their arsenal are probably not combat ready, and have probably been cannibalized beyond repair. Despite having thousands of T72 and T80 in service and storage, it seems that they are not deployable.

This poses a real challenge for Russia on two fronts – firstly, to bring the T62 out of retirement and into front line service as attrition reserves poses a significant support challenge. The vehicle is not compatible with later models of Russian tanks, so will require bespoke logistics support – placing further pressure on the already creaking supply chain.

Additionally, although simple to operate, it still requires crew to use it – with four, instead of three crew needed, this poses an additional headache for the Russian Army, which will have to find 25% uplift in tank crews to operate them properly. At a time when the Russians are low on people, and have churned through a significant proportion of their main army, it will require extraordinary efforts to find bodies to crew these tanks.

Bodies is perhaps the operative word here, for this is likely to be the fate of the crew in these vehicles. The T62 is utterly outclassed and completely obsolete for the environment in which it is operating. It may be good for gunning down demonstrators or strangling democratic protests in third world nations (the joy of socialist dictatorships), but against a highly experienced army, fighting with advanced equipment to defend its homeland, it is utterly hopeless. While it can still have some effect, the T62 units going into action  are certain to be outclassed, outgunned and out of time when they face the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Given this outcome, it is worth asking ‘is there any value at all in maintaining stocks of obsolete vehicles or military equipment as attrition reserves’? From a British perspective, the stockpiles of older equipment held back for war have long since been disposed of. Even as late as the 1990s there was a lot of vintage equipment to be found in stores and depots around the country, particularly with older variants of tanks, or aircraft held in some kind of preservation as a contingency.

In a war, these assets would form either units for reservists recalled to the colours, or a reserve of vehicles to refit and requip units damaged in combat. In reality given the titanic scale of battle expected on the Central Front in WW3, and the speed by which it would rapidly escalate into the nuclear threshold being crossed, it is hard to envisage these units having a major role to play in the conflict.

Today there is no reserve to speak of, perhaps because it is arguably a waste of money and resources to sustain one. Modern military equipment is complex, expensive and requires regular refitting and updates to keep relevant and able to carry out its roles. For the British Army, having a force able to operate as an integrated partner with international allies, particularly the US Army calls for advanced vehicles equipped with up to date communications and ISTAR packages to ensure they can work as a unified force.

There is little value in (hypothetically) retaining a force of 30yr old vehicles that have been worked hard for decades, not had any recent updates and which would be unable to work with allies in a meaningful sense. At best they’d require so long to be brought up to spec that the conflict would be over, at worst they’d deploy unable to properly work with partners or protect their crews against peer threats, and would, literally, be a death-trap.

This is before considering the challenge of keeping skills and knowledge on these vehicles alive. A benefit of the Russian system is that most of their vehicles are both simple and easy to maintain and train on – they are designed to be operated by conscript soldiers with limited training or experience. By contrast, British (and other NATO) vehicles are far more complex and cannot easily be picked up in a day or two.

To keep a war reserve force credible, you’d need to have dedicated troops running it, supply contracts in place for spare parts and technical support, and regular use to ensure there was no skills fade. In other words, you’d need to operate this equipment almost as if it was in regular front-line service to make sure it was usable as a last resort – this is not sustainable in a time of reduced headcounts and tight budgets.

For aircraft the problem gets even worse. During the 2010s, there were regular suggestions that the UK should have kept the Harrier force in reserve ‘just in case’, without really thinking through just how complex this undertaking was. Keeping a modern fast jet force operational is an extremely expensive and resource intensive business.

It requires long supply chains covering thousands upon thousands of spare parts (many of which may be perishable). It requires ground crew to maintain it, support it and ensure that it is fit to fly wherever required, and that it is able to do so safely with a training pipeline producing pilots when required who are current on the aircraft type, and that the appropriate aviation safety signoffs are in place. This is even before you consider what weapons it will deliver (legacy or new) and how either older stockpiles will be maintained, communications kept up to date, and software supported. It is an exceptionally complex process.

The idea of keeping an airframe in reserve, which is several years past the point when it was last in operational use and with all the associated support long switched off is not a great idea. The military value it adds is minimal, and the likely cost that would be incurred to keep the force usable and supported so significant it would be insurmountable.

A similar case applies to that of reserve fleets (a subject this blog has written an article on called ‘The Utter Pointlessness of Reserve Fleets’). Although much has been said in that article that still applies, a good example of just how difficult it is to keep Reserve fleets going is the example of 40 years ago and the Falklands War.

Then the Royal Navy cruiser HMS BLAKE, paid off in 1979 and subjected to refit prior to going into reserve in 1980 to be held as contingency until the arrival of another INVINCIBLE later in the 1980s, was dry docked for mobilisation. It turned out that she was beyond economical repair in time for use in the war, barely two years after a major refit – a good reminder of how quickly ships material state can deteriorate without regular attention.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

With that in mind though, is there a case for attrition reserves to be held as a ‘just in case’ contingency? Certainly the Ukraine war reminds us that in a peer war, attrition levels will be high. The British Army, as currently configured, would struggle to retain fighting power for long without reinforcement and resupply in a similar combat situation. With only 150 odd tanks featuring in future planning, it is hard to see how any UK armoured force could feasibly take the sort of casualties the Russians are and yet still remain operational.

In these specific circumstances, there is without doubt value in having a second tier force that could be drawn out of reserve to reinforce as required. But we need to ask ‘to what end’ is this worth doing?  If the British Army has taken significant casualties on this scale, sending older less capable vehicles out will not materially alter the outcome, and may only make things worse with more casualties occurring as a result.

Without the pool of trained personnel to draw on to operate and fight as a formed force, any reinforcements may struggle to have a meaningful impact – even more so than the lack of reserves in depth, the relatively thin level of trained soldiers (an inevitability of a smaller Army) would make regeneration of the force almost impossible.

It is difficult to imagine what operation would be undertaken though that would see this set of circumstances arising. British troops are exceptionally unlikely to be going to war with Russia, unless Putin attacks the Baltics, or another NATO ally. Any operation outside of this sphere will be an operation of choice, not a war of national survival. In the former case, a shooting war with NATO will see Russia pitted against dozens of nations, while in the latter, the UK is still likely to be acting in a coalition of likeminded partners.

Given this, trying to spot the requirement for a large war reserve stockpile is difficult. The war is either going hot so quickly that it will turn nuclear, or such a disaster has occurred that the British Army has been functionally knocked out of the operation anyway, and will need some years to regenerate.

While it is understandable to want to look back on the days of 1(BR) Corps and BAOR  as an example of what could be done when the willpower, resources and headcount permitted, taking a force at full mobilisation up to roughly 150,000 strong, this is perhaps a bad example to use. That BAOR could do this level of wartime mobilisation was beyond doubt, but the fact is that all it would do would be to hold a fairly small area of central European countryside and towns until nuked into oblivion within 5-7 days of the war starting. This is not the world we find ourselves in now.

The future world we face is one where operations will likely occur far from home, and sending reinforcements out by ship (the only sure-fire way to move large numbers of armoured vehicles) will take weeks – the operation will likely be done by then. The people too are limited, there is no large pool of TA volunteers or Regular Reservists ready to deploy at short notice. Operations involving attrition will almost certainly not be ones where replacements and reinforcements are easily available or quick to come by.

The key lesson of the T62 saga is that it is easy to say you have a meaningful reserve of equipment right up until the point that you actually need to draw on it for real. That Russian forces have found themselves with large parts of their ostensible reserve forces unavailable, and been forced to rely on a 60yr old tank design to see front line combat against Ukraine speaks to just how difficult it really is to count on a war reserve when you need one.

This is before we consider the huge personnel problems facing Russia, where to help solve the looming shortage of troops, the Russian Armed Forces have lifted the age bar for joining, in order to attract 40 somethings into the military. It would be hard to imagine many people in their 40s, who would have been children when the Soviet Union collapsed, willingly volunteering to join the Russian Army and crew a 60yr old deathtrap of a tank, but these are strange times…