Military experts have warned that it could take months for Ukraine’s mechanized infantry to use Marder tanks due to the time it takes to retrain soldiers and the need to build effective logistics lines. At the same time, Marder’s speed and agility would potentially give the Ukrainians an advantage on the battlefield over the heaviest lightweight BMP tanks of the Soviet era on which the Russians rely, experts say. Military analysts also questioned the Defense Ministry’s argument that sending 100 obsolete tanks to Ukraine would damage Germany’s own defense capabilities. “If the German national defense could really fail because of some missing Marder tanks, then we could very well close the shops altogether,” Frank Sauer, an expert at the Bundeswehr Academy in Munich, told Spiegel magazine. Germany still has 370 Marder operational tanks. The fighter was first introduced into the Bundeswehr arsenal half a century ago and is set to be largely replaced by the state-of-the-art PUMA tank by 2020. But production delays and technical issues have plagued the new tanks, which means German troops still rely heavily on Marder during training exercises. Berlin is facing growing domestic outrage over its sluggish supply of weapons to Ukraine. The newspaper Die Welt said at the weekend that Berlin’s promise to support Ukraine militarily as part of a “new era” of defense strategy was “a fairy tale”.
