British Company to Produce Tracks for Ukrainian Armored Vehicles

26 February, 2024 Flat feet and rollers of the T-80B tank. Illustrative photo The British company Cook Defense Systems (CDS) has mastered the production of Soviet-era tracks to provide Ukrainian armored vehicles with them.

The UK Defence Journal reported on this. On behalf of the UK and the UK-administered International Fund for Ukraine (IFU), Defence Equipment & Support (DE&S) has awarded multiple contracts to Cook Defence Systems (CDS), a world leading designer and manufacturer of tank tracks. The contracts provide for the supply of kits for 500 units of Ukrainian military equipment.

This includes both British vehicles, including Challenger 2 tanks, and Soviet-era armored vehicles.

Track of the Challenger 2 tank

Mastering Soviet technologies

Representatives of Cook Defense Systems told the journalists about the difficulties in mastering Soviet-era products. "We have had to reverse-engineer Soviet-era equipment using limited reference material and a lot of our own know-how, while working with the manufacturing processes and materials available to us rather than the original Russian ones.

One of the biggest challenges has been almost doubling our output. We have reconfigured production lines and recruited new people wherever possible," CDS Managing Director William Cook said. To reverse-engineer new tracks compatible with Soviet-era vehicles, the company's engineers had to rely on museum pieces, Cold War reference documents, and technical experts on armored vehicles.

The models of Soviet-era armored vehicles for which the company localized the production of tracks are not disclosed. However, it is likely that these are unpopular types of equipment that are not present on the global market. For such common armored vehicles as the T-72 tank family or BMP-1/2 IFVs, there are many offers on the market, as they were massively exported and manufactured by Warsaw Pact countries, China, and India.

The situation with spare parts for T-64 and T-80 tanks is quite different. During the Soviet era, they were not supplied abroad, and therefore there are almost no third countries in the world that could sell spare parts for them.

A convoy of T-64BV tanks on the outskirts of Bakhmut, March 20, 2023. Photo credits: Aris Messinis

Most of the parts for the above-mentioned equipment were taken by Ukrainian enterprises from limited stocks or removed from decommissioned equipment that was stored in large quantities in the sumps of armored plants.

As previously reported, Ukrainian state-owned and private companies have repeatedly announced that they will start producing track tapes for military equipment.

The latter's contracts, however, were accompanied by a number of accusations of artificial barriers to procurement and the supply of low-quality products.