Armoured, Artillery and Air Squadron Readiness as a Decisive Variable in High-Intensity War
Aligning heavy combined-arms availability with the tempo of short-warning, multi-domain conflict
High-intensity conflict in Europe is increasingly defined by compressed timelines in which tactical gains can translate into irreversible operational and political outcomes within days. The structural vulnerability arises when heavy combined-arms forces—armoured formations, massed artillery, and tactical air squadrons—exist in nominal inventories but cannot be generated, moved, integrated, and sustained at the speed required to deny an adversary early success. This is not a question of aggregate force size but of time-constrained employability under short warning, contested mobility corridors, degraded logistics, and multinational integration demands. When readiness lags behind decision tempo, forward defence collapses into delay without denial, reinforcement frameworks are outpaced by faits accomplis, and the credibility of regional defence plans is weakened at the decisive moment. Armoured, artillery, and air squadron readiness therefore functions as the operational bridge between defence planning and executable combat power, ensuring that heavy forces are not merely pre-assigned on paper but are verifiably available, interoperable, ammunition-sustained, and command-integrated within the earliest readiness tiers.