Applying all these filters, Jompy arrives at a final usable reserve estimate of approximately 851 tanks. “So yeah, not a lot,” he writes at the conclusion of his thread, a characteristically understated summary given what the numbers actually mean. Those 851 tanks are, in his assessment, predominantly the most obsolete and worst-preserved examples remaining after years of extraction, specifically large numbers of T-62s, roughly 100 T-54/55s, and approximately 150 T-72As. The T-62 served in Soviet and Russian armies from the 1960s and was considered obsolete well before the Soviet Union collapsed. Its reappearance on the Ukrainian battlefield in 2022 was itself a signal of how badly Russia had burned through its more capable types.

The separate observation on T-80 production at Omsktransmash, the Russian tank manufacturing and overhaul facility in Omsk, adds a time dimension to the storage analysis. At current stable production rates, Russia will exhaust its T-80 stocks available for upgrade within approximately 12 months, assuming no dramatic extraction from remaining storage and no new production beginning from scratch. This suggests that Omsktransmash could face a situation in the early part of next year where there is nothing left in storage to upgrade, forcing a choice between halting T-80 output or committing to genuinely new production, which carries significantly higher cost and time requirements than overhaul of existing hulls.

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 12 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

look at the Ukrainian battlefield

I am sorry do you see any russian armor out there?

Very occasionally you do, but at this point russian armored manuever is functionally extinct and russian armored vehicles are like rare endangered whale sightings.

What you perceive as people changing their story about when russia will run out of tanks is actually russia continually revising what constitutes a "main battle tank" to lower and lower standards to the point of horrific comedy with russia last summer and fall employing turtle tanks desperately improvised out of main battle tanks that were obsolete along every metric.

That strategy failed spectacularly, you can see that right now because if russia still had a significant amount of armor it knew how to effectively use there would be a significant meaningful russian offensives like there were in past summers. The difference is that russia's back has been broken now and the limited amount of modern semi-effective armored vehicles russia still possesses are too small in number to risk getting chewed up in large numbers on the Ukrainian frontlines. Further complicating problems is that russia has struggled to address critical issues in their armored vehicle designs so even a high rate of production doesn't necessarily gurantee russia can replenish a genuine armored maneuver capacity.