The transition from a logistical pause to a combat manoeuvre represents one of the most underexamined inflection points in armoured-mechanised operations. During a pause, vehicles are dispersed in an assembly area with heterogeneous fuel states shaped by patrol activity, engine idling, environmental conditioning and unequal previous consumption; when the orderto-move arrives, the battalion must refuel and move out within a fixed window that is typically 90 to 180 minutes. This article develops an original formal model of fuel redistribution for a reinforced armoured-mechanised battalion of ninety vehicles across three consumption classes, and compares four redistribution policies (proportional, priority-based, greedy shortest-processing-time, and an optimised lexicographic weighted schedule) under three tanker-fleet configurations (three, five, and eight 15,000-litre tankers). The study introduces the Battalion Refueling Readiness Index (BRRI), a novel composite metric that integrates the share of vehicles meeting their class-specific fuel threshold, the dispersion of the post-refuelling fuel distribution, and the makespan of the refuelling operation. Two hundred Monte Carlo realisations of pre-manoeuvre fuel states yield three principal findings. First, policy choice is decisive in the knife-edge fleet regime: in the small-fleet configuration the priority-based policy outperforms the proportional baseline by 8.7 percentage points of BRRI, whereas in the large-fleet configuration all four policies converge within 0.5 points. Second, the greedy shortest-processing-time rule maximises the headcount readiness rate in constrained fleets (59.4% vs. 50.0% under priority), but does so at the price of elevated dispersion (22.3% vs. 17.3%), which is operationally costly because it leaves heavy vehicles of the main effort below the combat threshold. Third, sensitivity analysis shows that reducing the order-to-move window from 120 to 60 minutes collapses BRRI by roughly half in the small-fleet configuration while leaving the large-fleet configuration essentially unaffected, which identifies tanker-to-vehicle ratio rather than scheduling sophistication as the dominant lever. The original contribution of this article is threefold: the BRRI metric, a transition-specific mixed-integer scheduling formulation distinct from steady-state convoy refuelling problems, and an empirical demonstration that class-priority heuristics dominate in the operationally relevant fleet regime. The results have direct implications for the doctrinal sizing of Class III (Bulk) distribution platoons in small NATO and partner-state armoured brigades.