Armed Forces Day in the Canary Islands: A logistical exercise for a real-life situation?

This Saturday, Santa Cruz de Tenerife hosted the main events of Spanish Armed Forces Day, with a military parade.

Show of force by the Spanish Navy in the Canary Islands, coveted by Morocco
The Spanish Air Force successfully embarks six helicopters on two A400M Atlas airplanes

It should be noted that this event has not been held in Tenerife for 39 years and in the Canary Islands for 22 years. In 2003, the events were very limited, as they took place shortly after the Yak-42 crash, in which 62 Spanish soldiers died while returning from Afghanistan. Thus, this event has been a historic opportunity to test the capabilities of the Spanish Armed Forces for a large-scale deployment outside of mainland Spain.

The deployment has been significant. According to the Ministry of Defense, this parade was attended by 3,300 soldiers, more than 55 aircraft, and around 100 vehicles and motorcycles, to which must be added the 11 Navy ships from yesterday's naval parade in Las Palmas. A deployment of this magnitude is not routine, and the Armed Forces will surely have taken the opportunity to draw conclusions and even rehearse what a deployment would be like in a war situation.

I already pointed out yesterday that Morocco covets the Canary Islands, as well as Ceuta, Melilla, and the other Spanish strongholds in North Africa. The Canary Islands are the Spanish territory furthest from the Iberian Peninsula: there are more than 1,000 kilometers of water between them, a considerable distance to deploy a military presence in the event of an invasion. Regarding this possibility, @Springbok1973, a great expert on maritime issues, published a judicious reflection on Twitter yesterday that deserves to be read carefully. In it, he considers that this Armed Forces Day in the Canary Islands poses "a clear exercise in Sealift, transporting military logistics by sea and air to a location far from mainland Spain".

The expert points out that the Army's operation to transport material by air and sea for the aforementioned parade "is nothing more than a rehearsal for what a similar scenario would be like in reality." In his message, the expert includes the following observations:

Even a large-scale volcanic eruption in Tenerife, as we saw in La Palma, meant that the merchant navy had to transport the UME to the island. Spanish Sealift capacity is minimal. There are only two vessels, the YSABEL A-06 and the CAMINO ESPAÑOL A-05; both former merchant vessels converted to military transport, which would require resorting to the merchant navy for more capacity. Each year, the navy loses vessels registered in Spain, which are therefore susceptible to requisition, as a result of the country's disastrous maritime policies. This is an issue to keep in mind. Is there time, but above all, are contingency plans already in place?

This expert recalls that it took the British Royal Navy just two days to be ready to begin its deployment to the Falkland Islands in 1982, following the invasion by Argentina. The big difference between the United Kingdom and Spain is that the British Admiralty has at its disposal the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA), a support fleet made up of 11 ships with a total displacement of 278,000 tons. The United States has something similar: the Military Sealift Command, formed by a large fleet of auxiliary ships.

There are many people who don't realize the enormous importance of logistics in an Armed Forces. The United States is, by far, the country with the best developed this capability. On the contrary, and as we saw here three years ago, logistics was one of the causes of the Russian failure in the invasion of Ukraine, as it was unable to sustain the advance of its military columns towards kyiv. It was also one of the causes of the German failure in the invasion of the USSR in 1941.

We must recognize that Spain has considerably improved its air logistics capabilities with the incorporation of the A400M Atlas transport aircraft and the A330 MRTT. However, it is worth asking whether these resources will be sufficient to protect the Canary Islands when the time comes. As for the Navy, as the aforementioned expert points out, it must improve its capabilities.

Obviously, this requires financial resources, and it's difficult to solve this problem if the Spanish government is lazy about even meeting the commitment it made to NATO to invest 2% of GDP in defense, a bar now raised to 5%. We are risking our security and territorial integrity with this issue, but some people don't seem to understand.

P.S.: You can watch the video of the parade here:

The Ministry of Defense has published a series of photos of the event on its Flickr account.

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Photos: Ministerio de Defensa.