>>1332024>This is made more difficult by the fact the material build up is being drained by constantly sending supplies to Ukraine.It actually makes it easier, because Ukraine gets all the old stuff that was made to kill Russians 20-30 years ago, making room for nice new stuff that can kill Russians 20-30 years from now. Even the sunk costs are recouped because the kit's actually doing what it was bought to do, the collateral damage is nowhere near Germany or Poland, and Ukraine doesn't need to worry about maintaining all the old crap because it's just going to get destroyed, captured or worn out/used up.
NLAW is a prime example: rather than having to be carefully collected up, unpacked, serviced, recertified, re-packed and redistributed, all the stuff that was close to its expiry date got sent to Ukraine and fired at T72s.
Bradley is currently subject to the same economics, but not in Ukraine yet: USA has more than five thousand of these things, doesn't need anywhere near that many, and has a new vehicle in the pipeline for a lot of what Bradley does. A huge chunk of the Bradleys haven't been modernised and aren't going to be used in any realistic scenario, and are just sitting in storage, but they have to be guarded so that some guy doesn't just steal a Bradley. They can't even scrap them because if your AFV was easy to disassemble, your enemies would disassemble it. So it's currently costing more to keep these old Bradleys in storage than it would to send them to Ukraine. If they were beamed up by aliens tomorrow, it would *free up* some of the USA's military budget.
