Germany pauses buying Puma tanks after mass breakdown
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
No words on what exactly caused 'the loss', though I suppose it's an engine or transmission problems?
Broken electronics, cable fire, tower failure: According to "Spiegel" information, all 18 "Puma" armored personnel carriers involved in a Bundeswehr exercise failed. This could also have an impact on a NATO mission. During training with 18 combat vehicles, operational readiness dropped to zero within a few days, reports the "Spiegel". According to the report, von Butler wrote that the last two “Pumas” that were still operational failed during the maneuver “after an hour and a half with tower defects”. Above all, the electronics of the high-tech tank are vulnerable, in one tank there was even a serious cable fire in the driver's compartment. The tower of the "Puma" is unmanned. It is operated remotely by the crew.
And yeah it's an IFV. In German it's a "Schuetzenpanzer" and "Panzer" = "Tank". But that's the Guardian's title.
Holy shit.
> to be so modern and high tech
Makes me wonder if the parts were only local or sourced from a ... friendly nations.
> "Panzer" = "Tank"
Panzer! means! armour! But yeah, that's fighting windmills now.
Thanks for the response.
Even in English it's Armoured [Infantry] Fighting Vehicle.
Though it's like Wehrmacht of Luftwaffe, nobody knows, nobody cares.
Panzer can mean just "armor". A turtle has a Panzer, which in English is called a shell.
Funnily enough, a shell in war context (i.e. the ammunition fired by say a tank) would be a "Panzergranate" (word for word: "tank grenade").
But Panzer is also the German word for a specific type of vehicle called "tank" in English. Like a "Leopard 2 Panzer". Definitely a "proper" tank if you ask me ;)
In German the word Panzer is used for more types of armoured vehicles than in English, where we have things like APC (Armoured Personnel Carrier) or IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicle). APCs in German apparently are called "Mannschaftstransportwagen" [0] which in the Bundeswehr are called Transportpanzer. There, that word again: Panzer. Funnily enough according to that Wikipedia link, the Word War II German army ("Wehrmacht") and the East German army ("NVA") called it "Schützenpanzerwagen". Again that word: Panzer. Now go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_fighting_vehicle and switch to German, which links to the article for "Schützenpanzer".
German, the language, likes to reuse words and just combine them. "Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung" is just three words made into one and it's very easy to understand what it is. "Betäubungsmittel": drugs, specifically the kind that we hear about a lot in recent years, opioids and such. "Verschreibung": prescription. "Verordnung": regulation. In English you need a wonderful sentence like "regulation requiring a prescription for an anesthetic." to translate it (yes I just googled that as an example).
I think we can see from that tendency, that in German they'd rather just slap "Panzer" at the end of things.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannschaftstransportwagen_(Mil... [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%BCtzenpanzer