One long night in November of 1977, my tank crew was on our third week of training in the West German countryside near the East-West border. We needed fuel. The 375-gallon fuel tank in our M60A1 Patton tank was at half full. To be combat ready, we needed to refuel. Usually we refueled when the big M559 Goer fuel truck pulled up alongside us. Other nights we would pull out of the line and go to the Goer.
On this night, the Goers were gone. I never learned what happened, but our only option was carrying five-gallon cans of fuel 200 meters up the hill from a five-ton truck with a fuel pod. Two of us had to stay with the tank, while two of us carried the 40-pound jerrycans up and down the hill. We stopped at 100 gallons of fuel, 20 cans. Tanks drink fuel. We needed more fuel the next day; thankfully, the Goers were back.
I was thinking about walking uphill with eighty pounds of fuel when I heard the news about German Leopard 2 tanks going to Ukraine. The BBC news report was talking about NATO training crews for the tank. Ukraine will also be training soldiers to fix, to resupply fuel and ammo and follow close behind the tanks with everything that a 60-ton, 1,500-horsepower tracked vehicle consumes.
A Leopard 2 can fire on the move at up to 50 mph with its advanced electronic sights and gun stabilization computers. It can fire a dozen cannon rounds per minute. But a Leopard only carries 42 120mm cannon rounds. At a dozen rounds per minute, it would be out of ammo in four minutes. To reload, the tank has to leave the battle area and go back a supply depot.
At the supply point, each round is handed from a platform beside the tank or up from the ground. Each round is then handed through the loader's hatch and stowed in racks in the turret and hull of the tank. Even the fastest crew will take ten minutes or more to stow 42 rounds inside the tank.
In a battle, a single tank can burn more than one hundred gallons of fuel, more than one hundred rounds of cannon ammunition and upwards of 5,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition.
A battalion of 50 tanks and fifty more support vehicles burns more than 100 gallons per mile of fuel. In a sustained attack it will fire 5,000 rounds of cannon ammo and a half-million rounds of machine gun ammo. If the attack covers 20 miles, the battalion will consume upwards of 100 tons of ammo and fuel in a day. All that fuel and ammo has to follow the tanks to the edge of the battle.
Logistics win wars, said every general from Napoleon to now. The Russians have shown themselves to be terrible at logistical support. With these new tanks, Ukraine will get another chance to show how much better they are than the Russians, both fighting with the tanks and keeping the hungry beasts supplied.
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