The story behind tanks for Ukraine.

UKRAINE WAR IS CEMENTING U.S. ARMS INDUSTRY MONOPOLY

WILL ALL NATO COUNTRIES NOW BE DEPENDENT ON U.S. ARMS 

While there is much discussion on whether NATO countries are going to send advanced tanks to Ukraine, there is more to this story than just more arms to Ukraine. It seems that Germany is not too excited about either giving their Leopold tanks or allowing the other NATO countries that use these tanks to transfer them to Ukraine. There is a very important reason for this for Germany.

Since the beginning of this conflict, NATO countries, especially former Soviet countries, have been prodded by the U.S. to transfer their Soviet era weapons, including tanks, to Ukraine. This was publicly stated as a good idea, because Ukrainians are familiar with and trained on these weapons. One important part of this equation is that the U.S. has been promising to replace this equipment with modern U.S. made equipment, much of it paid for by U.S. taxpayers. This is a no brainer for these countries with a promise of a free upgrade to their older equipment. If you remember Poland volunteered Russian made MIG jets if the U. S promised to replace them with new U.S. jets. It is expected that all the weapons and supplies donated by these former soviet countries will be replaced by the U.S..

Now the question of German tanks, tanks that are part of Germany's weapons exports. If these NATO countries transfer Leopards to Ukraine, they will be replaced with U.S. tanks and then will have in effect destroyed Germany's business for tanks, parts, technology upgrades and maintenance forever. so this is why Germany is reluctant to go down this road. Germany asks why Washington is not sending U.S.tanks to Ukraine and the answer is they are too complicated and may fall into the hands of the Russians for reverse engineering. This would also be true of German made Leopard tanks.

If Germany agrees to this transfer you can bet it will be part of some large transfer of money from the U.S.

Up to now many NATO countries, and of course, other countries around the world have their own arms industry. There is a strong competition for these sales, not just for the initial sale, but for the years of parts, upgrades and maintenance. In fact, war is a perfect advertisement that these arms are the best in the world. Of course, everyone want the best when it comes to defense. Does anyone doubt that after a war the sales of the new arms used on the latest battlefield suddenly become good sellers or maybe fall out of favor. So there is in fact a strong advertising campaign by governments and their media cohorts. I suspect that Himars are now selling well.

An example was the outrage from Washington when Turkey a NATO country, bought S-400 anti-aircraft missiles from Russia, because at present they are considered by some to be the best. 

So far, Russia has used very little of their advanced weapons, but in the future they may very well be interested in show casing them to the world, I expect they are the number 2 arms seller in the world. A direct competitor of the U.S. in arms sales.

So anyway, this is the story behind the story of  tanks for Ukraine.