Why don't we buy tanks for Ukraine to help them win the war?

Diversity is our strength, obviously we are going to out diversitise Russian into submission.

Done deal surely

So, just letting Russia advance would save their country? But we digress into existing threads.

As for buying them tanks....the OP hasn't thought this through at all.

It might not be so nice when all the help they get now is cut back.

Okay, let's skip past the implications for Ireland's neutrality

First off, if Ukraine won the war tomorrow it wouldn't mean all the Ukrainian refugees suddenly get sent home. Their country has been devastated by war and in many cases they don't have a home to go back to

Ukraine is going to need significant investment the get back on its feet after the war. I just hope Ireland and other EU states are ready to roll out the chequebook to help

Then there's the problem of "ending the war". To some extent, wars almost always end with mutual consent. Ukraine's stated goals are to retake all territory back to the pre 2014 borders (including Crimea and Donetsk/Luhansk), cease Russian aggression, seek war reparations and prosecution of Russian war criminals (including Vladimir Putin)

Even if Ukraine accomplishes the first goal, Russia is unlikely to agree to any of their other war goals. And Russia can still fire into Ukraine from their side of the border with long range artillery and missiles

Ukraine's Western allies have already said one of the conditions of their military support is that it isn't used against Russian territory. So Ukraine will need home grown ability to retaliate against Russian bases where their bomber fleets are based

We've already seen they've developed drones which can attack Russia, but let's be honest, they're a bit **** and their success is probably more due to Russian air defences being spread pretty thin at the moment

My point is that the war can end up in a frozen state and never really end

To go to your point about buying Leopard tanks for Ukraine, there's a lot of problems there. For starters, military procurement is pretty difficult with a lot of legal barriers to get past, both domestically and internationally. As other users implied, you can't simply go onto DoneDeal and buy one

There's also a lot of aspects to "buying" a tank beyond the tank itself. One of the major reasons the price seems to vary between €10 million and €30 million is the extra costs associated

As well as the tank, you need to train personnel, who also would like to be paid something more than minimum wages. They also need fuel, quite a lot of fuel actually, definitely more than a Prius. And then there's the maintenance costs, spare parts, upgrades, life extension programs. And ammo, unless you're only planning to use the tanks for parades

This might come as a surprise but it's generally not a good idea to skip the maintenance on heavy military equipment. Best case scenario the tank runs a bit poorly, worst case scenario the gun explodes when fired and destroys the tank while turning the crew into paste

Oh, you'll also need a base to house all of this stuff, with associated land and construction costs

Believe it or not, most military procurement does factor this stuff in and doesn't just buy things without considering the lifetime costs.

Ireland doesn't really have a huge amount of experience with large military procurement and would likely get caught in multiple legal issues, especially since it's known that we'd be exporting them to Ukraine immediately after purchase.

Little quirk of arms exports, if you own a piece of equipment you can't just sell it to whoever, you need the permission of the country that originally manufactured it. This is why Poland had to wait for the okay from Germany before they could send their Leopard tanks to Ukraine

Okay, no worries, much simpler plan. Just give the Ukrainians the money and let them sort out the details. They know much more about what they need and have the negotiation teams already in place so could probably do a better job

This is actually a good idea and several countries have already done this. They basically underwrote Ukrainian purchases from their domestic arms industry and bypassed their own procurement process

However, you then run into the problems of production timelines.

See, if you order a Leopard tank on Monday, you won't have it by Friday. It'll be more like 2-3 years depending on what exactly you ordered, because there's a whole heap of orders in front of yours

You could try convincing Rheinmetall to give you priority or increase production capacity, but be prepared to bring your chequebook. This isn't command and conquer where you can build 20 tank factories and have them sitting idle 90% of the time, they cost money to run in real life and need to be filled with orders to remain in business

This is partly why the US keeps building Abrams tanks even though the US army doesn't really need or want more. It keeps a lot of people employed, but also keeps a lot of trade knowledge still in the business that might be lost if the factory shut down and then tried to open up again

A lot of the equipment being sent to Ukraine isn't new, it's being pulled from stockpiles that the donor countries already have.

This is generally to circumvent the production backlog, it's generally quicker to refurbish and upgrade existing equipment then wait for new stuff to be built

The donor country then orders new equipment to replace the donated stuff

This has actually created some interesting accounting glitches, because the cost of replacement is often what's used for reporting the size of the arms package being sent

However, what happens to equipment that's old and not planned for replacement? For example, the US sent a load of M113 armoured personnel carriers to Ukraine. They were manufactured initially during the Korean war and have been retired from service decades ago

The cost on the package was essentially the cost of a new M113, but the US will never manufacture them again and doesn't plan to replace them

Similarly, a lot of AMRAPs have been sent to Ukraine. Those vehicles were designed to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq against irregular soldiers. I don't think the US is planning to get into another Afghanistan if they can avoid it, so again they aren't going to replace them

It isn't just equipment, a lot of the munitions being sent are slated for disposal in the near future

This is why recently the Pentagon was told by the US GAO that they had actually underspent on the arms packages sent to Ukraine and they had more money available to send more stuff

There's also a slightly twisted logic going on with several European countries that are sending support. With the exception of probably the UK and French militaries, most European armies are designed to fight off a Russian invasion (or a Turkish invasion in the case of the Greek army, or a Greek invasion in the case of the Turkish army)

So if a tank is sent to Ukraine to blow up Russian tanks, then overall that means the donor country needs fewer tanks since Russia has fewer tanks to invade with

This kind of logic is what underpinned things like Poland donating half their tank fleet to Ukraine, or Latvia donating all of their artillery

The more Russian resources they can tie up in Ukraine, the less likely they are to be invaded in the near future. Remember around the start of the Ukrainian war, there were multiple commentators on Russian news saying Poland was next in line and the Baltic States had always really been part of Russia

Those states can probably handle a temporary decrease in their arsenals if it means the vast majority of the modern Russian tank fleet gets sent for an early and terminal retirement

So, in conclusion, I don't think Ireland can really go and act as a buying agent for Ukraine. There's a lot of other ways we can help, and housing Ukrainian refugees is one of those. It relieves pressure on the Ukrainian economy to support people while they're fighting a war, and I'm sure there's a few Ukrainian men who are happier knowing their families are safe from drone and missile attacks and can focus more on evicting Russian occupiers from their territory

Well it didn't take long for this thread to devolve into xenophobia and trolling

Although I suspect it started out as trolling 🙄

Anyway, I'm done here, enjoy the cesspit the rest of ye!

edited out