Put in the number of vehicles in your unit and the crew size, and you get how many crews have to be trained, how many hours that is a year, and how many trainer stations it takes. Below, for scale, the same calculation for equipment under contract in fifteen countries of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe. The vehicle figures there come from executive contracts and public announcements; everything else is arithmetic on assumptions you can change and check.
Set the number of vehicles and the crew size to yours, and the rest of the sliders to your conditions. The default is a tank battalion: fifty-eight vehicles with three crew each. Everything here is annual, because that is how a training year works. Below, for comparison, the same assumptions applied to the whole region.
On these assumptions the unit needs five trainer stations.
The tables below run the same calculation across all equipment under contract in fifteen countries, on the same assumptions you set above. Here the vehicle count and crew size come from the contracts, not from the sliders. Dispersion across garrisons is not applied here, because it cannot be estimated honestly for fifteen countries, so the station figures in the tables are a lower bound.
| Equipment category | Vehicles | Crew positions | New crews a year | Hours a year | Stations | Type of trainer |
|---|
Crew size is the average across the entries in that category. The stations column gives the number of trainer stations needed to work through that category's hours in the time set above.
| Country | Vehicles | Crew positions | New crews a year | Hours a year | Stations |
|---|
Ukraine is counted only for equipment covered by contracts and transfers documented in public sources, so the figure understates the real scale.
Conversations about simulation normally revolve around single devices: one full-mission simulator, two stations, maybe four. At thirty-six thousand crew positions and delivery windows closing around 2030 this is a different class of problem. The question is not whether to buy a simulator, but how many stations have to run in parallel for the programme to close at all.
Main battle tanks account for under two thousand vehicles. Wheeled carriers and other wheeled vehicles account for more than five thousand. Battalion support vehicles, command vehicles and medical evacuation vehicles together come to nearly eleven hundred vehicles, which is over three and a half thousand crew positions. That category is almost never part of the conversation about simulation, because they are not combat platforms.
At zero turnover the demand is one-off and drops to nothing once the first cohort is through. At a realistic figure in the low double digits it never goes away. That is the difference between buying a device for one programme and building a standing training capability, and it is a question to settle before the requirement is written rather than after.
The last two assumptions are what separates a paper calculation from planning. Station capacity is sized on the busiest quarter rather than the annual average, because new crews arrive in waves and the schedule cannot be stretched. Stations also cannot be averaged across garrisons, because the equipment sits in one place. Both factors raise the result, and both follow from how a training year works rather than from what I would like to sell you.
Vehicle figures come from executive contracts and public announcements, with framework agreements distinguished from firm orders where that distinction exists. Crew sizes follow the established establishment for each vehicle type. The four slider values are parameters, not data. The model assumes full utilisation of stations, so the real figure will be higher by however much the training schedule is less than perfectly packed.