Bad news for Ukraine: Army finally admits Abrams tank is a dud

Destroyed Ukrainian tanks in Zaporizhzhia

Have a look at the photo above, showing Ukrainian tanks and armored personnel carriers destroyed by a Russian artillery strike in the early days of Ukraine’s spring offensive in the Zaporizhzhia region.  Now imagine that the photo shows what American armored vehicles would look like if they are destroyed in a future war. 

But wait a minute!  You don’t have to!  At least one of the destroyed vehicles is an American Bradley armored personnel carrier supplied to Ukraine by the U.S.A.  Another one is a Leopard tank supplied to Ukraine by Germany.  In fact, here’s a section of the same photo with the vehicles identified by a website called armyrecognition.com.  The tank called the BMR2 in the upper right is a Leopard tank fitted with a mine clearing device mounted on its front.

Now imagine you’re a general at the Pentagon in charge of planning for the Army’s future combat capability and readiness.  What does this photo tell you if your job is implementing the Army’s latest upgrade for the Abrams main battle tank, the most fierce war machine in the Army’s armored arsenal? 

Well, according to a recent Pentagon announcement, it tells you that the M-1 Abrams is finished as a war machine. Kicking and screaming: That is the only way to describe how the Army was dragged this week into reluctantly admitting that all its upgrade plans for the Abrams M1A2 model have been shit-canned.  Even loaded down with the latest target acquisition technology, the latest anti-tank armored-piercing rounds for its main gun, even if the Abrams has been outfitted with the Israeli Trophy Active Protection System (APS) – which the Pentagon has purchased to retrofit the Abrams and two different active protection systems to be added to Bradley and Stryker armored personnel carriers – the Abrams, not to mention the armored personnel carriers, would likely meet the same fate as the vehicles in this photo if they go to war against a country such as Russia, even with the last-gen armaments it has used to fight Ukraine.

A story in Defense News published yesterday revealed that the Army has canceled its long-planned upgrade of the Abrams in favor of designing and producing the M1A3, a whole new tank that will “be focused on challenges the tank is likely to face on the battlefield of 2040 and beyond.”

Hmmmm…let’s see…the war in Ukraine is going on right now.  In fact, it has been raging for more than 560 days.  What the hell good is an as-yet-designed version of the Abrams tank – said by Pentagon sources to likely have a hybrid powertrain, including multiple electric motors and their accompanying highly-flammable battery packs – that won’t be in the pipeline, as they call it, for more than a decade?

The so-called upgrade the Army has cancelled, the System Enhancement Package version 4 (SEP4), included what Defense News called a “third-generation forward-looking infrared camera and a full-site upgrade including improved target discrimination.”  That is mil-speak for making the tank more accurate when finding and firing at enemy tanks or other armored vehicles.  The thing is, the Abrams already has extremely accurate aiming and firing systems, so what the SEP4 was supposed to do was just fiddling at the edges of an already very high-tech tank. 

The real problem the Army has with the Abrams is an old one:  it’s too heavy, and it consumes way too much fuel.  That means the tank cannot be relied on to move in adverse conditions – read:  mud – and it requires what the Army calls a “logistics tail” that is too long and too hard to resupply.  The easy way to understand this is to envision tanks on the front lines followed by a convoy of many, many highly vulnerable fuel tankers.  That’s because the Abrams consumes 1.85 gallons per mile when it’s being driven on a flat paved road, and an astonishing 3.5 gallons per mile when driven on dirt over open country.  Add stuff like big hills and mud and snow into that equation, and you’re talking about even more gallons per mile.

The Abrams, for some reason known only to God and Pentagon weapons acquisition officials, has a turbine engine and carries 500 gallons of the jet fuel it burns, allowing it to travel as far as 300 miles before refueling.  One problem – there are others, and they are numerous – is that the turbine runs continuously once started, making it incapable of idling at rest.  So once you start the thing up, you are driving it continuously even while at rest.  The way they are used in combat, tanks spend a lot of time at rest, still consuming fuel in great gulps.  Another, almost as serious, problem is that the Abrams doesn’t run on diesel, the fuel practically every other military vehicle uses.  It runs on JP-8, a type of kerosene burned in jet engines.

Then there is weight.  The Abrams weighs 70 tons.  The German Leopard and Russian T-72 tanks weigh about 25 tons less, around 55 tons when laden with fuel and ammunition.  70 tons is a lot of weight.  The Abrams must be moved with specially designed flatbed trucks when not on the battlefield.

So, to sum up, pretty much everything about the Abrams tank is inconveniently unique, from its fuel, to its weight, to the specialized capabilities of the mechanics who work on it.  When you start adding stuff to the Abrams, like passive and active armor protective systems, you’re adding even more weight to a vehicle that is already off the charts.

The Abrams tanks bound for Ukraine won’t have either of those armor protective systems, despite the fact that the passive systems are outfitted on every tank we have in this country, and the Army has purchased 100 of the Israeli active protective systems for at least some Abrams tanks in the Army’s inventory.  You’ll have to ask the same Pentagon officials who won’t supply Ukraine with long-range guided missile systems why the Abrams that the Ukrainian military will take into battle won’t be as protected as the ones we use only for training here in the U.S.A.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is all prepared with whole new vocabularies of mil-speak to describe the tanks they are just now designing for a future that is at least a decade away, and maybe two decades in the future, if Pentagon development of new systems follows the pattern every other weapon that has come along.  “As longer-range threats increase in both lethality and survivability, the M1E3 Abrams will be able to defeat those threats,” the Pentagon bragged in a statement released this week.  The new Abrams will have artificial intelligence systems – there it is, the modern robotic battlefield brought to life – “that enhances lethality, survivability, mobility and manned/unmanned teaming,” a statement from General Dynamics helpfully added. 

Boy, as long as it doesn’t get stuck in the mud and get hit by a massive artillery barrage, everything sounds just peachy.