So, did the NL actually sell their tanks or did they just decommission them and store them somewhere? I never quite understood why a country would sell perfectly fine military equipment. Wouldn't it make more sense to just store it somewhere, in case you might need it later? It costs more than selling your tanks, but it will still be cheaper and faster than buying it all new.
Sold most of them to Norway I believe. And to some shithole coutries.
It is not cheaper to store them. They still need regular maintenance and the location where they're stored needs to be under constant guard.
Getting rid of tanks doesn't mean you're going to get rid of just vehicles. You are getting rid of maintenance infrastructure, spare parts and storage, ammunition and the whole infrastructure behind that, personnel to operate tanks, training facilities plus staff and logistics, staff capacity.
Just storing tanks wouldn't solve the problem of it being expensive to bring them back. The thing that makes it more expensive than just buying new stuff is that it takes a couple of years to get tanks operational in a unit again. The costs are there.
Also, the time tanks are in storage not being used, they're also not being kept current. If you're storing tanks for 8 years, after you've been using them for ten years already, the second they're going to get out of storage, they will require a midlife-cycle upgrade. That is going to cost a couple of million per tank. No the current construction is much cheaper. We steal everything from the German motorpool and only pay for it if the tanks are deployed.
