Suppose Sweden suddenly randomly gifted France a fleet of JAS-39 Gripens out of the blue (a warplane that France doesn’t own) but said “Figure it out, we aren’t providing operating manuals or training,” how long would it take for the French to be up and flying the airplanes?
Or any other situation - Ukraine suddenly gets some C-17s, or Australia some B-2s - how long to get flying without training assistance?
Also, what if it’s a similar but slightly different aircraft (i.e, Canadian CF-18 pilots trying to fly American F/A-18E/Fs?)
It’s “materiel.” I don’t know how well this can be answered to GQ standards. You talk about planes, but materiel could be a handgun or an ICBM.
I think a nation would be justifiably suspicious of such a gift. Why would an ally refuse to supply training or documentation?
So, forget flying. France would need to reverse engineer and inspect every plane. Then France would need to figure out repairs and maintenance, and design and manufacture any proprietary tools and parts.
I don’t think France would use these planes in your hypothetical, unless they were in a desperate situation. It seems like high risk and minimal reward given France’s pre-existing military capacity.
Israel captured several hundred T-55 and T-54 tanks in 1967 and adopted them into service. They first saw action two years later, in Operation Raviv.
In WWII both the Soviets and Germans used captured tanks and equipment. In particular the Germans would overrun manufacturering plants and keep them churning out tanks with no change in design.
Not really a GQ answer, but I’d imagine some systems are sorta-kinda integrated across the West - communication protocols and the like - but parts, particularly electronics, would be a nightmare logistically.
The T-55 was still pretty low tech. As were the weapons used in WWII. It would not be hard to manufacture your own replacement parts. Or even cobble something together in a decently equipped machine shop. For a captured Abrams you would need several layers of maintenance, A full logistics train reaching back to the factory, and a large group of civilian contractors not too far away. Not to mention that if you didn’t capture a large amount of ammo or if you’re not in the NATO country That uses the same gun system, You won’t be able to shoot the main gun anyway. Modern weapons systems are way too dependent on logistics support to just be handed over to anyone without that support in place.
When it comes to contractors the only ones that get press are the security companies. I don’t think most people realize how much the military relies on civilian contractors for upper level maintenance in the field.
That’s pretty much what I was thinking, but you expressed it better.
In fact, one of the first things the Israeli army did with the captured T-55s was replace their guns with the same 105mm barrels they had in all their other tanks.
I think that in general, so long as you don’t insist that all of your equipment look the same, you can get pretty far with captured systems, even something as complex as an Abrams. Replace the gun; rewrite the software. If the engine breaks down, replace it with an engine from one of your own tanks. If the armor is damaged, replace the piece with something home-made. After a while, what you have won’t look much like the original Abrams, but it’ll still work, and it’ll still be cheaper than building one from scratch. Think of it as the Mad Max approach to logistics.
Soldiers using captured materiel has been a thing for the entire history of warfare, and usually the only training the enemy provides is which end to not be on.
I remember reading Martin Caiden describing lend-lease B-17s landing in the Soviet Union. The Russian crew would climb aboard and peruse the manuals but for one guy who would go around the plane rubbing a compound on the blue stars to turn them red. Fifteen minutes later, they’d take off. They may well have been boning up before the plane arrived but it was certainly the first time they’s gotten their hands on one.
15 minutes too download the manuals online, or two weeks to buy em from an international arms dealer.
In complex modern weapons like planes, the supply of repair parts & consumables is pretty critical to keeping them operational.
I remember reading about the US having supplied planes to a Middle East country (Iran?), but after a regime change, they were no longer our ally. So we restricted their supply of parts, knowing that within a few years (or first use) the planes would be less and less a threat. I believe the Soviet Union has had similar cases, where a former ally, with supplied weapons, was no longer allied. Maybe Syria currently?
Why couldn’t they just pop open the glove box and check the owners manual?
The Iranian air force still flies the F14, and has managed to even upgrade it.
Not a direct answer, but this does happen pretty often. Others have already mentioned instances in which countries made use of captured equipment or vehicles. There are many photos of German T-34s from WW2, a practice that didn’t last long because of the danger of fratricide. There are plenty of other examples of people purchasing or receiving equipment with no real idea how to operate it.
The best example I can think of is when the Soviets ‘acquired’ a B29 that landed in their territory. This was 1944, when we were technically ‘frenemies’ pending the outcome of WW2. Stalin refused to return the aircraft and ordered his engineers to dismantle and reproduce it. The Soviets dismantled it into 105,000 component parts and within two years they managed to produce a fully-functional duplicate. The engineers were so afraid of displeasing Stalin that they took his instructions to “copy it” very literally. One account I read claimed they even gouged holes in the plane and attached patches so that it would match the original in every way. Anyway, in 1947 Stalin showed off his brand-new TU-4 strategic bomber to the British and Americans. One can assume they immediately shat some bricks.
I read a comment by a historian who claimed that the Soviets capturing the B29 was similar to if Americans captured an alien space-ship. That’s the kind of technological leap it represented.
Where do they obtain spares?
Some parts are cannibalized from other aircraft. Some parts they’ve managed to reproduce domestically, or they can swap out for a part more easily acquired. But the interesting story is that Iran often turned to espionage. Many people in America have been arrested for trying to acquire F14 parts from aircraft factories, and the Pentagon has even closed or removed aircraft in museum displays for fear that they would be pilfered.
With complex modern systems like combat a/c it’s going to be spares as much as manuals. If you suddenly get 100 of them, it will be at best equivalent to a fully supported owner having some fairly limited fraction of that many, because a large % will have to be cannibalized for spares to keep the other ones operational, even once figuring out how to do that.
The Iranian F-14 example doesn’t fully fit this hypothetical because the a/c were delivered with spares and support starting 3 yrs before the Iranian revolution. And their ability to keep around 10% of the original force in operation by the 2000’s while a testament to their persistence doesn’t contradict the point about the difficultly of keeping a high % of a/c operational in such a case.
Likewise even for relatively simpler weapons in WWII, the Germans in many cases overran supply depots, or whole countries. So incorporating some of those countries’ weapons in the German order of battle wasn’t exactly a case of receiving them with no other support.
Still, use of actually captured tanks was a relative curiosity more than a major feature of WWII tank combat. The widespread German use of Czech tanks in the early part of the Russo-German war is an exception but again in that case they had access to the country’s industrial infrastructure, not just the tanks.
A much more significant portion of the outfit of small arms and machine guns of the German forces in WWII, including occupation and rear echelon ground forces, the small arms in the air and naval components etc., was captured. But also often from ‘captured’ countries, sometimes firing the standard German ammo, sometimes pretty much the same guns as German ones (Polish wz.29 and Czech vz.24 rifles for example were close relatives of the German standard Kar98k). Besides being a whole lot simpler than modern combat a/c.
I wonder what was necessary for the British to install Rolls-Royce merlin engines in P-51 Mustangs.