The best use of the M1 Abrams tanks currently in the U.S. military arsenal would be to give them away to Taiwan, South Korea, and Ukraine. We would not be able to get additional tanks to Taiwan in the event of an invasion by the People's Republic of China, or South Korea in the event of a North Korean invasion, in time to make a difference. Ukraine would welcome anything we can provide it.
Note that Australia is sending its M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine.
The M1 Abrams tank is also ill-suited for the conflicts we could conceivably fight, as the U.S. Marine Corps has already realized. The U.S. military is an expeditionary one. All of the near peer conflicts it would fight are overseas and it is very challenging to get its 70 ton plus mass to the front. They are too heavy to cross bridges, or to be carried on trains over rail bridges, in much of the world. They destroy roads and leave a clear trail of where they have been. They are noisy. They are the opposite of stealthy. They have poor situational awareness outside of a flat plain or desert.
The Ukraine War has shown how vulnerable they are to FPV drones and other modern anti-tank weapons despite their extremely heavy armor. Thousands upon thousands of tanks and heavy armored vehicles on each side have been defeated.
Tanks very rarely destroy other tanks in modern warfare, greatly reducing the utility of their main guns. Their main guns have a shorter range than the anti-tank missiles and artillery rounds that can be used against them.
They are slow at a peak speed on roads of 45 mph or so, and are slower off road (even though they are much more competitive in speed off road), and the experience of other modern wars have shown that off road warfare is very much the exception rather than the rule. They require an immense amount of fuel and mechanical support to keep running, and those support units generally can't go off road and lack the heavy armor of the tanks.
They are too wide for urban warfare on narrow streets or in mountain passes or dense forests. Their limited angle of fire makes them ineffective against opponents on top of buildings. Drive a heavy tank into a building with a basement and it will fall into it.
It isn't that armored military vehicles are obsolete entirely.
An armored vehicles is a formidable adversary to a force without anti-tank weapons that has only small arms. It can ignore the small arms with impunity, and if it has appropriate weapons to engage infantry and more lightly armored vehicles than other tanks (which doesn't require a heavy main tank gun), it can very effectively take on these adversaries. But armored vehicles only make sense in an environment where the force using them has air superiority, has taken out all enemy artillery within range, where the enemy doesn't have modern anti-tank weapons and is unable to place effective anti-tank mines or IEDs.
There is a niche for armored military vehicles in those conditions, but a huge main gun with a couple of light machine guns added as after thoughts doesn't fill that niche. If one needs the power of a tank round now and then, it can be supplied with a missile or large recoilless rifle round, at a fraction of the weight.
If an adversary has anti-tank weapons or the adversary can attack with ground attack fighters or attack helicopters, the solution is not more armor beyond what is necessary to stop small arms, it is to use active defenses instead. This is a lesson which the U.S. Navy has already learned, but which the U.S. Army continues to ignore.
2 comments:
Um... moderate agree. Apparently the Russians and Ukrainians are using their remaining tanks as assault guns and short range artillery. However, when the circumstances allow it, the heavy armor thrust can be devastating... as all the Cavalry commanders in WW1 were always pointing out.
In WWI they were devastating, and even in WWII and Korea they were very effective. Tanks were ill-suited to the jungles of Vietnam, however.
By 2025, anti-tank weapons have advanced dramatically and any tank, no matter how heavily armored, can be defeated by a soldier or drone carried anti-tank weapon. The circumstances no longer allow it. And, since anti-tank weapons have longer range than tank main guns, and people firing them can flee much faster than the tank can pursue them, they are pretty much useless against a properly equipped opposing force.
There basically hasn't been a single successful heavy armor thrust in the entire Ukraine War and this kind of attack was rare in Afghanistan and the Iraq War and Kosovo.
Tanks are only effective against opponents who don't have anti-tank weapons, and their heavy main guns are ill-suited against those kinds of opponents (usually light insurgent forces). They aren't designed to be effective against dispersed infantry. The last time that tanks killed large numbers of enemy tanks was the Gulf War, 35 years ago, in open flat desert terrain against inferior older model Russian tanks, and even then M2 Bradleys with anti-tank missiles destroyed more enemy tanks than the M1 Abrams did, as did A-10 attack fighters.
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