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Originally Posted by bash
I'm no expert but it seems like the time and resource investment restoring mothballed vehicles would be better spent upgrading non-combat military vehicles or civilian vehicles for combat use.
If you've got a couple one-off oddball vehicles you're not likely to have any part donors or spare parts in general. When they break down or are damaged all the work you've put in will probably be wasted. The question of ammo is also really important.
Without spare treads your museum tank is just an armored gun emplacement. Without main gun ammo it's just an HMG emplacement. A bunch of sand bags could do the same job with fewer resources.
Turning some 6x6s into gun trucks or welding some pintle mounts to the rollbars on some Hiluxes seems like more bang for the buck. Parts are likely easier to find, the endurance is better, and for the same investment of resources you could get several vehicles outfitted.
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Taking tank from museum and trying use it in battle is not good idea. Tanks and other combat vehicles need a lot of spare parts. Usually, museums don’t have lot of spare parts and they have to hunt parts to get museum tank in order and I don’t mean anything resembling combat use. Museum staff and retired tank mechanics usually need several years to get tank in running order. And in that case, they drive tank couple miles per year in shows.
Finnish armed force doesn’t have mothballed equipment or weapons. All equipment and vehicles are in use, storage for war time use or under repair. In 1990 planned war time strength of Finnish Armed forces was something like 580 000 men in full mobilization. Modern weapons and equipment for everybody? Keep on dreaming…
Only 10 Jaeger brigades and two Armor brigades were using modern weapons and vehicles. Rest of the army should have used artillery, small arms and other equipment from 1930as to 1960s. Infantry brigades, local defense units, air force and navy didn’t even get military trucks, they would have to use civilian trucks and farm tractors.
That all come to end after cold war. Finnish army bought huge amount of former East German equipment from Germany. One former officer told me that if all that equipment was loaded to single train that train would have been 40 kilometers long. All those much loved and hated M-39s, Stens and Suomi-SMGs were finally sold or scrapped, because all troops could be armed with Finnish, Soviet, East-German and Chinese Kalashnikovs.
Anyway, in Twilight 2000 world cold war didn’t end and in 2000 AD men meet their fate in cold dark forests using the same weapons that their grandfathers used nearly 60 years earlier.