Ukraine: too costly to lose

By Richard North - April 15, 2025

Whenever I read a piece by Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, the Telegraph’s tank warfare guru, I am reminded of the old joke about a senior officer charged with preparing an annual appraisal for one of his subordinates, whence he wrote: “this officer is so stupid that even his brother officers have noticed”.

Certainly, in his latest piece there are plenty of commenters who take him to task on some of his more faulty assertions, the errors of which I could also recognise. But then, critiquing something written by our Hamish is rather like picking wings off flies – entertaining in its own way, but largely unproductive.

However, after a run of laborious blogposts, I felt I deserved a bit of light relief so, despite the tumultuous events dominating the headlines, I’ve allowed myself to be distracted by the report in the Telegraph headed: “German Leopard 2 tanks flop on battlefield in Ukraine”, and Hamish’s response to it in his article entitled, “German tanks are failing in Ukraine for the same reasons they lost World War II”.

The report itself stems from a classified transcript of a meeting between a German defence attaché stationed in Kiev and about 200 Bundeswehr soldiers, in which the diplomat discusses the difficulties Ukrainians are facing in operating these weapons.

It will be recalled that eighteen of these tanks were delivered to the AFU in 2023 after months of foot-dragging by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and a full-on national public debate about whether Berlin should send heavy weapons to an active war zone.

Considerable fanfare attended the arrival of these tanks in March 2023 but, despite the high expectations of the equipment, the transcript attests that the Ukrainians are finding that they have “limited use”.

Immediately, though, we are told that “some of the problems have to do with the way warfare itself is changing”, which is of course self-evidently true, and applies to all of the tanks deployed in theatre, whether by the Ukrainians or the Russians. This conflict has redefined armoured warfare.

According to the Telegraph’s rendition of the transcript (the original not being available), this is manifest in the tank’s vulnerability to drone strikes, this being a feature of the conflict.

An additional problems, we are told, is that Leopard 2’s complicated design makes it difficult to repair on the battlefield. Damaged tanks, therefore, must be sent to specialised repair crews in west Ukraine or even go all the way to Poland to be fixed and maintained – or Moscow if the Russians get there first, which has been the case with at least two of the tanks.

Although the drone problem is well-recorded in multiple battlefield analyses, I am not convinced that drone strikes are as significant a problem as is made out. Although we see endless footage of FPV drones on armoured vehicles, the video transmissions end on impact and we do not always see the outcomes. In many instance, the vehicles survive the attacks.

Where the drones make the difference, though, is in rendering any movement on the battlefield highly visible so that tanks deployed are quickly spotted and a range of counter-measures are brought to bear.

The assets available range from the simple but potent anti-tank mine, to the attack helicopters, standing back with long-range anti-tank missiles. But ambushes by infantry anti-tank teams using guided missiles can also be deadly, as is the ever-present medium artillery which dominates the battlefield, especially when using the Krasnopol laser-guided ordnance, with a circular error probability (CEP) of 1-2 metres.

As this analysis from Rusi points out, because of the unique conditions in this theatre, tanks must be concealed and ideally dug in, usually within 3 km of the frontline if they are assigned to combat roles.

Because of the continuous presence of drones, armoured fighting vehicles tend to sally forwards from these hides to engage in direct-fire missions to break up enemy assault actions. The vehicles then return to their protected hides before they can be targeted. Thus, tank-on-tank engagements have increased in regularity because of these tactics.

It is said in the classified transcript used by the Telegraph that, because of the battlefield conditions, Ukrainian battalions have been forced into using their Leopards “mostly as glorified artillery”. But similar complaints have been voiced about the Challenger 2, with these tanks relegated largely to the “shoot and scoot” direct fire role.

With that, though, the main problem with the Leopard 2s is seen in terms of there simply not being enough of them. The Telegraph cites Sergej Sumlenny, managing director of the Berlin-based European Resilience Initiative Center, who says: “If one or two have to be repaired, that’s a big part of what Ukraine has that’s suddenly out of commission for a while”.

Sumlenny adds that German post-war thinking plays a role too. “They were designed by a generation of German manufacturers that hadn’t seen war and so tended to overcomplicate the system”. He argues that, “Older systems, designed in the 1960s by those who actually saw war, are far more useful on the battlefield but have weaker armour”.

In his own article, Hamish picks up on both these points, but on the numbers issue, he resorts to comparisons with WWII, remarking that the German Tiger was also very few in numbers. The Russians, he says, have lost thousands of T-72s, T-80s and T-90 tanks. Just 18 Leopard 2s have been supplied to Ukraine.

In the Spectator, the WWII theme is developed, historian Nigel Jones noting that the war-winning armoured vehicle of the Second World War was not a German tank, but Russia’s T-34 – a sturdy warhorse with sloping protective armour and a simple design, making it easy to mass-produce in large numbers.

To counter the T-34, Jones says, the Germans introduced the famous Tiger I – a heavy tank that packed a formidable punch with its 88mm cannon. But lurking beneath its superb exterior, the Tiger exhibited all the familiar faults that have bedevilled German tanks throughout their history.

Weighing nearly 60 tons, the Tiger was simply too heavy and tended to bog down when the going was soft. In addition, it was “over-engineered”, with specialised parts not interchangeable with other tanks. This made it expensive to manufacture in sufficient numbers to make a difference, and prone to breaking down on the battlefield.

As a result, he says, fewer than 1,400 of the Tigers were produced in the two years between August 1942 and August 1944, and ultimately it did not fulfil its war-winning promise.

I’m not sure Jones is right about the Tiger I being developed to counter the T-34. After all, the genesis of the Tiger goes back to 1937, before the Russian tank was introduced. The driver of the heavy tank project was the Wehrmacht experience of the French Char B1 heavy tank, and the British Matilda II during the Battle of France in June 1940.

To my knowledge, the German counter to the T-34 was the Mk V Panther, the design of which was directly influenced by encounters with the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 tanks. But that aside, the argument on complexity is sound. The T-34 was quicker and cheaper to build and therefore could be mass produced on a scale that the Germans simply could not match.

And this is perhaps the overarching issue. With the cost of a new Leopard tank set at about $30 million, compared with the cost of the latest Russian T-90 at less than $5 million, the western powers are pricing themselves out of the fight.

Given that, on the Ukrainian battlefield, the average life of an MBT in combat is about 10 minutes, the high price of these weapons is not sustainable. I am thus reminded of the piece I wrote in March 2007.

In this, I cited Ed E. Heinemann, designer of the B-26 Invader, the A-1 SkyRaider and the A-4 SkyHawk, who wrote: “The obstacles to any simplification may seem insurmountable, and the reasons for more complexity are many and powerful. But if we permit this Frankenstein of complexity to continue to work at its current plodding, insidious rate, it will slowly overwhelm us to impotency”.

That said, the numbers game on the battlefield is not as important as either Hamish or the others make out. So transparent is the modern battlefield that the very rules of warfare have changed. The previously vital element of concentration of forces is no longer possible as assembly points are quick detected and punished by long-range artillery and a vast collection of potent stand-off weapons.

Where armour is deployed, it now tends to be in penny packets, numbers being relevant only in terms of keeping up the replacement rate to cover losses. But one of the findings to emerge from the conflict is the value of the modern MICV, in the form of the M-3 Bradley.

This equipment has performed exceptionally well and, in some roles, stands in place of an MBT, and has even demonstrated a tank-killer capability. Perhaps this is the way to go, with also the possibility of exploring whether there is a role for the heavy APC/MICV on the lines of the Israeli Namer or the Russian T-15 Armata.

The overall lesson, though – one which the Russians did learn in WWII and never forgot – is that the tank is a battlefield disposable. And that is the fatal flaw of the Leopard 2 and the entire western tank inventory: they are simply too costly to lose.