Abandoned Military equipment

This an excellent review of the difficulties moving heavy equipment forward with your foot soldiers.

Everywhere in the world, cross country travel is at best difficult even if the ground is hard and dry.  That is why tracked vehicles are the first choice.  Every thing else needs to use roads.  Then add water and interdiction shelling.

Then  of course the average vehicle has around five hundred hours before breakdown at best.  A breakdown is going to be left behind to be policed up by follow up forces.

Still plenty of hardware makes it to the fight and breakdowns act as a natural reserve.

I'm watching the events happening in Ukraine, I notice there Russians have abandoned a lot of equipment that appears undamaged, why do you think that is?

This is yet another example of journalists not understanding the basics of military logistics and readiness rates.

The USAF, while at peace, literally just sitting in the hanger, has a readiness rate of 70%. That means 3 out of every 10 planes in the USAF are not fit to fly. In combat, these rates fall below 30% for most air forces.

Mission-capable rates, the main readiness metric across nearly 40 of the service’s major aircraft, remained essentially stagnant, from 72.7% in 2020 to 71.5% in 2021. It’s a meager bump from 2018, when it sank just below 70% — its lowest point in nearly a decade.

https://news.yahoo.com/us-air-force-fleet-mission-140000035.html

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With armored vehicles, the rates are even worse since breakdowns occur in the field rather than during an inspection in the hanger.

During the height of the Cold War, the readiness rate for British Chieftain tanks fell below 30%. Meaning that, during total peacetime, 7 out of 10 Chieftains were not fit for service.

I have yet to see a single picture or video showing more than 2 Russian vehicles broken down in the same shot. The Russians have deployed over 2000 ground vehicles in Ukraine by some estimates. You’d expect only 1,000 of them to be combat ready given the tempo of operations.

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That’s just counting the mechanical issues. There’s also the bloody weather, the mud, the infamous Russian Rasputitsa:

The German advance on Moscow was delayed for nearly 2 months by the mud season. It is now the start of the mud season in Ukraine.

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This is from before the war even got started: Russian tanks being dug out of the mud by excavators, something you can’t do in a combat zone.

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This is why the vast majority of broken down Russian AFVs are stuck in mud flats. They got stuck and were just left there. The Russians prefer to just move on rather than waste time digging them out.

Some more footage of a Russian tank and self propelled gun stuck in mud

Bottom line: Mother Nature can be a real bitch sometimes.

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ADDENDUM

Some galaxy brain folks have pointed out that it’s incredulous the Russians would just leave perfectly intact AFVs in the middle of the road.

So I ask you, what is the alternative?

Wait for hours as recovery vehicles catch up to the spearhead to dig out the one stuck tank while your column of a dozen tanks waits idle on the road?

Set some explosives off inside the tank so the enemy can’t take it? … and neither can the friendly units following you?

When armored columns advance into enemy territory, the shedding of stalled vehicles is natural. Unless all your vehicles have perfect reliability and hover 10 feet in the air, immune to poor terrain, stall out are bound to happen. You can either sit there and wait for them to be pulled out of the mud, or you can move on and let the folks behind you know in case they can recover the stalled tank.

The last time that any substantial armored advance took place was the march to Bagdad in 2003. That was over a flat desert, no mud, well-paved roads, and with the best logistics support any nation had to offer. Units that reached Bagdad were still at under half strength from maintenance losses (since the Iraqi military barely resisted)