ou are asking for impossible, and if you succeed, you will get an expensive yet inferior product. The state of art of MBTs has taken them in such a technologically complex state that only the biggest military budgets of technological superpowers can keep up. The rest struggle and either accept subpar results or give up and go into joint projects with others.
In terms of relying on K2 licensing, we would be paying ridiculous money for the licenses to get a K2 10 years late and at 2x the usual, already high unit price, just so we can check the box that it is "domestically produced".
I can see that the sydrome of a Polish complainer has been fired. Okay, let me explain as simply as possible why you made a mistake in everything you said.
Answer #1: Because we have that ambition? And do we want to? Hell, if someone normal had ruled the Ministry of Defense for these 30 years we would be assembling this tank ourselves today, or just because we have these skills and competencies we would 100% be invited to this Franco-German new generation tank project being able to add something realistically from ourselves!
And most importantly, industry is very good for the economy, and your de facto idea is that we keep making money flow overseas. Investing in your own industry is the best investment, because it will always return many times over. This is how every normal country of our size works. Much smaller Czechs are able to do something like this, Slovaks are also able to do it, but we fucking can't? Even though we are three times bigger than them at least!
It's not to have a Made in Poland label. It's about taking care of your own fucking business, and the fact that it's a compilation? Fuck it! You have to start again because some dumbasses plowed down the industry hard built over 50 years of communism, and 20 years of the IIRP because they thought like you! They fucked up everything we had! All that's left are the sad remains, because it's hard, because it's expensive. Fuck, how skimp like the Scots and only now do you see that there is a threat. So why are we surprised that we are trying to make up for this backwardness and rebuild what we had?
Anyway, what can we say, the Germans can give their industry Puma so that it can maintain its skills and finances, even though it's expensive as fuck and not really useful for them now. The French made the ARL44, a complete obsolete pile of junk as a tank for the same reason. But we have to be "smarter" and not fucking do it and then be surprised that we have to license after license because we copy our own engineers?
They will not sit there forever for Poland, you know that they will be fired when they are useless.
That is why it is so important to make sure that the Ministry of Defense does not do anything stupid like the Borsuk and IFV from Korea. Only recently it has been suspected that the idea was to replace Rośków with something else, because something got into the Finns' heads.
But no, it is better to keep buying or wait for the best equipment in the world whose price, as befits the Germans, will be so high that we will have too little of it
Why be the idiots who will buy a decent current gen tanks 10-20 years from now when everyone will be buying next gen tanks, for the price of a next gen tank?
My whole point is that if we start working on K2PL now, it may well arrive 5-10 years before K3. That's why it's ridiculous, and it's too late. May aswell go with an intermediate off the shelf Abrams that won't be too late and plan straight for K3 which will actually last. By the time we will get K2PL it will be almost obsolete, which will mean a lot of money spent to let us be in the same situation as we are now, 20 years later - our tanks are getting obsolete again. Or alternatively chat up Rheinmetall about cooperating in building their new Panthers. That way we may get an almost next gen tank in the same timeframe as current gen K2PL, except we will be left with a tank that's not about to need a replacement, we will be finally up to date with MBTs for a time.
You know what, there's a great historical analogy and that's Poland.
Namely, around 1934 we developed our own 4TP tank, but we didn't put it into production to replace the completely obsolete TKS because the Army decided (rightly so) that it was obsolete and focused on the much more expensive 7TP. But we did not produce enough of these 7TPs and the TKSs proved to be too weak against their enemy, the Panzer I and Panzer II, and these tanks were equivalent to the 4TPs. And as we know, it was the Germans who won on these crappy tanks against much more advanced opponents, because war is a team effort. A tank is only an element of it, and in our doctrine it is not the most important one, because we follow NATO, which means we want to destroy enemy tanks with artillery and aviation.
Coming back, we would have fared much better in WWII if we had replaced TKS with 4TP, which would have performed much better in battles, and being cheaper, there would have been much more of them than 7TP. But we didn't, because our army followed the path of having the most modern equipment the day after tomorrow instead of having good equipment tomorrow.
It is better to have worse equipment but the one we have today, not the best one we have tomorrow. Another thing that's interesting is that you know that even the most modern version of Leopards is still weaker than the original prototype? And the same with Abrams which still do not have everything that the Americans had intended? And the same will happen with this new generation of super-tank before they will seriously become something decent, it will take some time. And we need our own tanks earlier, we took Abrams in order to withdraw T-72s which we could not withdraw all the time.
Rheimetall... you're talking about a company whose grace we've come to know? And what's more, the Germans clearly don't want our help to them? And what's more, I'll say it again, see the prototype Leopard 2 and what it had and what the serial copies don't have. This Panther is going to go down at least a decade before it enters the prototype. And we don't want a shitty prototype of a next generation tank! We want a new uniform tank already in production by the end of this decade! The Russians will take a decade to rebuild their losses to a normal level!
Besides, the Americans are not going anywhere with their Abrams, in fact, we will see new tanks of the new generation at the earliest in 2050 in a reasonable number.
And K2PL will be constantly modernized and it will turn out that such an obsolete piece of junk can, in your opinion, by some fucking miracle, defeat better machines in theory.
After all, Abrams M1A1 and today's Abrams M1A2 sepv4 are completely different machines! Despite the fact that in theory they are the same.
What good is production capacity for things we won't buy because we skimp on the numbers already, even without investing our limited funding into production capacity?
Great, so your solution is to not try to change it but to continue to buy abroad because
it's easier?
Or hulls. Or cannons. Again, what is the point of spending money on having production capacity for things we nor anyone else want to buy because they are 2-3 generations behind the state of art?
Even Ukraine, which has the technology and production capacity for T-80, a generation higher than T-72M, is still just stuck upgrading them for export and domestic use, and didn't have anything next gen in the works, meaning they will be in the same position in the future, despite starting in the better one tech wise.
And the same with the Russians, when we will introduce the K2PL, they will continue to drive on the T-90 and it is our Wolves that will face them. T-14 Armata will still be an impossibility for the Russians, instead they will make a very poor version of it and put it into T-90.
The success is because we are partially assembling other's designs mostly, skipping the things our industry is not suited to handle. And there was plenty enough of problems to illustrate the issues i'm describing with attempts to do that, eventually solved by... imports. And that's when there is an actual point to bothering with our own assembly (UK has a nice NATO standard turret, but the chassis wasn't good, and we had our own decent fire control system, so the point is that we can put these exotic components together).
And then this had to be done:
Well, is it time to start changing that? Forgive me, but some Poles have such a thing as ambition and want something of their own and not forever buying from others and thus rely on their mercy and disfavor.
