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Originally Posted by Raellus
Those are all good points and I don't disagree with you. One slight mitigating factor regarding Soviet deep storage is that, in the T2kU, a lot of those AFVs aren't going to have been in storage quite as long as the Russian tanks that we're talking about now (i.e. 30 years for the older models then, as opposed to 50 now).
A quick note about desert storage (I live near Tucson, AZ)- the dry heat kills plastic and rubber. The former literally crumbles to dust after a few months exposed to sunlight and heat.
@Vespers: Thanks for the stats. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the Russians are going to run out of "meat" nearly as fast as they're running out of armor...
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A lot of the tanks likely won't have been in storage at all in the GDW-era T2K timelines, since the Soviet Union declared 41,580 tanks in the region covered by the CFE Treaty, and the arms ceiling was 16,500 tanks in active service (with that covering the entire Warsaw Pact, and its allocation was divvied up among its members after that group broke up).
The reason so many of those large tank depots are in the Asian part of Russia is because the CFE Treaty didn't cover equipment east of the Urals, so instead of destroying equipment to the extent NATO did, they just shipped it east. I imagine the plan was to get it out there and then figure out what to do with it, but they never really came up with good ideas of how to make use of the tanks, so they mostly just sat there and rusted.
Some of those tanks did end up scrapped later, but moving ~25,000 tanks east to technically comply with the treaty explains a lot of the background to how Russia wound up with ~30,000 tanks in storage.