The 1% strike again. Poor Sarkozy keeps uncovering Le Worm's legacy doesn't he?

 

Herald

 

 

It says alot about the state of the French military and political structure.  No spare parts = no tanks available.

 

"Amateurs talk tactics...  Professionals talk logistics."

Napoleon

Is it the fact that sufficient spares were never purchased to begin with,

or is the Leclerc that unreliable, that it eats up maintenance and parts too quickly?

 

Do the French even have any of their MBTs deployed anywhere outside of France?

Because if not, and these things are maintenance whores with just peacetime training ops leaving them without adequate spares support,

god forbid they ever have to actually deploy and fight a real war with them.

 

(Didn't the Saudis buy some?

Are they having as bad a go at reliability and lack of spares?)

France is listed as having 406 with 20 recovery variants.  The United Arab Emirates has 388 with 46 recovery variants.

 

15 are listed in Kosovo and 13 in Lebanon for the UN peacekeeping ops.

 

Don't know if the UAE has had any problems.... yet.

There are three factors that may contribute to this mishap:

 

1. Wrongful planning on prediction of required parts led to less-than-expected spare parts, or wrongful planning of replacements due to overstock of expired parts,

 

2. Lower standard, unqualified, or wrongfully installed parts got dumped, or higher worn-out rate due to original design fault,

 

3. Higher-than-expect OP-tempo due to increase exercise, training and deployment.

4.  They knew they hadn't bought enough, but didn't think they could ask for any more $ at that time, and didn't want to lose tanks over it.

This could be the result of implementing management techniques that are not fully understood.

There is this management technique where you keep the amount of stores as low as possible. If this is not done exactly right, you get effects like this.

 

Given the generally poor real market, technological comprehension, and logistics skills shown by the French governmental management class as a whole, my guess is that (b.) is the major culprit with (a.) being a contributing factor.

 

This type of bungling is not confined to France. The Clinton Administration never undersatood why you needed a large spare parts budget for your armed forces, either.

 

Incompetence: logistic, technological, and managerial, is a mindset that affects academics who never had to run a business successfully.  

 

The current Bush Admionistration also shows signs of this disease.

 

Herald

 

 

It is very easy to mess up if you get the quantities or re-order system wrong.

The important thing to remember is the "possible" in "as low as possible". It isn't an arbitrarily low amount, and in some cases can be very large.

Certainly when I worked with a just-in-time system, there were 'boxes' of parts. Stock was sufficient to last until the next delivery was made. Taking one off the shelf sent the signal to order another one, and the quantity in each box was agreed with the supplier to be a suitable size for a production run or shipment.

Bluewings, here is something I've always wanted to ask you. Why do you talk like a brit? No offense meant by this, just an honest question.