via War Is Boring
Half of the German army’s armored vehicles in Mali—there as part of a multi-national peacekeeping mission—have broken down because of the West African country’s dust and extreme heat, according to Die Welt.Logistics. Something we never cover on SNAFU is wrecking some of the finest vehicles on the planet. This requires further study. I hope we have an S-4 exchange officer embedded with the Krauts.
By land, the Bundeswehr relies on Wolf and Eagle jeeps, Fennek reconnaissance vehicles and TPz Fuchs armored personnel carriers to move around. But Mali’s heat—the country’s summer season lasts from March to May—has ruptured ties and damaged components, the newspaper reported.
The peacekeeping contingent’s four Eurocopter Tiger helicopters are not rated to fly during the most intense periods of Mali’s summer afternoon heat, so they sit on their pads. Small quadcopter drones, intended to be carried on the Fuchs’ rooftops, have also been rendered unusable because of melted batteries. German army regulations prohibit storing the drones inside the vehicles with soldiers.
The U.N. mission in Mali—or MINUSMA—is the most dangerous peacekeeping mission in the world, with peacekeepers in the middle of conflicts involving Tuareg separatists and Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamist insurgents. Germany has fewer than 400 troops in Mali as of February 2017, but that number could rise to around 1,000.
Heat and dust would be manageable problems, but the German army doesn’t have a reliable enough supply of spare parts.
To compound the problems, the German military’s drone operators are overworked due to ongoing commitments in Afghanistan and the war on the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which involves Germany’s Panavia Tornado reconnaissance planes. The drone operators also analyze the Tornados’ imagery.
Heat making the best of armored vehicles before the enemy does is a long-running trend in Mali.
