August 21, 2024: Hungary is replacing its Cold War era force of 164 T-72 tanks with 38 Leopard 2 tanks. NATO has no guidelines for how many tanks each member must maintain but the total number of tanks maintained by all member nations is 4.600. Most of these are the 2,500 U.S. M1A1 tanks. The only other NATO nation to use M1A1s is Poland. The second most used tank is the 1,500 German Leopard 2A4. These are used by Germany and most other NATO members. There are also about 200 each of British Challenger 2s, French Leclerc’s and Italian Ariete tanks.

Hungary is the latest NATO member to adopt the Leopard 2 and is receiving a small number of them because other nation members already maintain large tank forces. The only potential foe is Russia and the Russians have lost over 7,000 tanks since invading Ukraine in early 2022. That number includes all their most modern models. Currently Russia is bringing 60 year old T-64 tanks out of storage to replace all the modern tanks lost. Russia can only produce 200 new T-90 tanks a year, while also delivering four times as many refurbished older tanks. These include T-80s, T-72s, T-64s, T-62s and T-55s.

Hungary has noted that none of these Russian tanks have lasted long in combat because the Ukrainians have developed, or received from NATO, a large number of modern anti-tank weapons. These systems, many operated by civilian volunteers in early 2022, destroyed or disabled thousands of Russian tanks. The Ukrainians captured some intact, repaired those with slight damage, and added several hundred additional tanks to their military. As a result of all these losses and constantly revolving Ukrainian anti-tank weapons, Russia rarely uses more than a few tanks in each attack and keeps the rest of their tanks hidden from Ukrainian drones that are seeking out Russian tanks and destroying or disabling any they find.

There is still a need for tanks but, as the small size of the Hungarian Leopard 2 tanks on order shows, tanks in combat are less common than in the past.