[Panther Al]

Actually, with mechanised forces is rather easy to spot - provided the force in question has someone in charge that has a working brain. Fuel trucks you might think, but no, for tanks use craptastic amounts of fuel, even if they sit in the motor pool 3 days out of 4. Services? Nope, tanks by their very nature are maintenance hogs: the good ones are simply well stressed, the bad ones over-stressed, but they are all stressed to the point where maintenance has to be done all the time. Nope, the number one reason why its easy to spot a armoured unit getting ready to roll someplace, with little to no down time expected is tracks.

Tracks.

They don't last that long, even the all steel ones (usually no more than 1000 to 1500 miles in peacetime, half that at best in war - with the soviet style ones being even less durable), and they are a bitch to swap out. When you are getting ready to pick a fight, the last thing you want your tanks to do is throw track, so you pull the old ones, use them as spares, armour, what have you, and put new ones on - even if they are expensive. So, if you are some photo guy, and you see 90% of the tanks in the bad guys motor pool lining up to swap track, you know they are getting ready to go someplace where they don't expect to have the time nor freedom to do when, not if, they break unexpectedly. Even when we went to Iraq for the invasion, almost all our tanks, even the ones that had less than a 150km on them, got new track for that very reason.

Its always the little things that really tell the tale if a threat is real or not.

Its one of the reasons I always had a separate wear value for track in the games I run. The PC's spend almost as much time looking for track as they do for ammo for the Beast.