A complex process is taking place outside Ukraine.. Does the maintenance of Western weapons require its exclusion from battles for months?

Washington

- Washington and other Western capitals provide Ukraine with a lot of military equipment to counter the Russian attack, but a major problem began to appear nearly 11 months after the start of the fighting, which is the maintenance process required for these weapons.

The total amount of Western weapons that Ukraine has received so far has approached $100 billion, of which more than $50 billion is the value of American weapons alone.

Ukraine lacks the spare parts it needs for advanced equipment and systems of weapons, and it also lacks a wide area of ​​warehouses to store huge weapons.

Ukrainian soldiers fire thousands of shells a day, forcing the United States to replace gun tubes across the border in Poland.

These weapons become damaged after weeks or months of overuse, and dozens are taken from the battlefield for repair.

"With all the weapons that we provide to Ukraine, and those that are provided by allied countries, we provide a lot of maintenance and training programs," Lieutenant Daniel Day, a spokesman for the US European Command, said in a statement.

Ukraine receives armament systems from many countries, such as the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and others, and each of them has different designs, which raised the need to provide spare parts in varying quantities.

US forces are stationed in Poland and provide military support to Ukraine (Getty Images)

maintenance in other countries

A report by the Wall Street Journal indicated that some of the most powerful weapons provided by the West to Ukraine remained far from the battlefield, especially in centers in Poland, Slovenia, and others, for long periods;

due to complex maintenance procedures.

The unavailability of these weapons for long periods poses a major challenge to Ukraine, and heavy artillery pieces are the most affected.

Ukrainian officials say the heavy artillery pieces have proven crucial in their recent successful offensives, but must be serviced more frequently due to heavy use.

In some cases, the complexity of the weapons or the secrecy surrounding them means that this maintenance must take place on the territory of a NATO country, hundreds of miles from the front line.

Ukrainian officers and Western officials said that the maintenance of howitzers, for example, takes place outside Ukraine in about 90% of cases.

A report indicated that less than 50 percent of the PzH2000 howitzers, widely considered to be the best performing weapons, are on the battlefield.

The rest must be taken to Lithuania for repairs, about 1,500 km from the Kherson front in southern Ukraine.

Mark Cancian, an expert in the International Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the Ukrainians have a 3-level maintenance system, in which Ukrainian forces trained abroad first try to repair the weapon before talking to Western experts who guide them through maintenance over the phone or via online visual communication services. .

In the third level, equipment that needs intensive maintenance or special tools is shipped out of the country.

Training and maintenance dilemmas

From his experience, David De Roche, a former military commander and current assistant professor at the Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the Pentagon's National Defense University, says that the maintenance of weapons sent to Ukraine is as important as their operations.

De Roche indicated - in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net - that Washington "worked with the former Warsaw Pact countries to transfer many of its weapons similar to what the Ukrainian side has, so that it can work with systems that do not require maintenance or new spare parts. For example, Slovakia transferred a system" S-300 for air defense to Ukraine, and Poland transferred a number of SA-3 missiles as a short-term solution.

In the long term, Des Roches said, US weapon systems require training and costly maintenance in terms of money and time.

For example, deploying the Patriot air defense system would require training a large number of Ukrainians to operate it, and most importantly and most difficult: maintaining this very complex system, which usually takes years for some maintenance jobs.

For this reason, Des Roches says, "Unless the Ukrainians have been training for it since the war broke out, I think it is unlikely that the Patriot will be deployed in the short term on Ukrainian soil, and at best, it will be a matter of months, not weeks."

In his tweet, Des Roches noted, "When one country transfers major weapons systems to another country, the determining factor is not the number of tanks, missiles, or howitzers, but the ability to maintain the weapon on the battlefield. What matters here is the training of operational personnel." , having spare parts in forward positions, having the ability to put key weapons materials in a position to repair, maintain or supply more, and having support to move weapons on and off the battlefield. It's easy to look at the number of these weapons, but this is just the beginning." .

The Himars artillery system is one of the most important US weapons for Ukraine (Getty Images)

years of compensation

On the other hand, expert Mark Cancian says that the process of supplying Ukraine with a lot of weapons means at the same time a decrease in US stocks, which needs to be compensated for between two to 5 years of production.

According to the American expert, "Congress has already provided ample funding in 4 supplementary programs, totaling $113 billion, to replace US stockpiles of weapons shipped to Ukraine."