Or, more specifically, why they decided to do the M1A3 rather than than M1A2SEP4. And the main reason is weight.
“This list of proposed capabilities for the new design that include:
An autoloader
New main gun new turret
Hypersonic gun launched missiles that maneuver in midair
The ability to pair with robots
Masking capabilities to reduce thermal and electromagnetic signatures
AI systems that detect incoming fire and prioritize return fire
Hybrid electric drivetrain
Reduction of crew from 4 to 3.
Reduction of weight from 75 tons down to sub 60 tons.
But the coolest thing is it’ll likely get a brand new sleek hull for the first time in 30 years.”
“US Army leadership [is] reversing course on decades of tank design philosophy to do a last minute complete overhaul from the ground up based on new lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.”
The gun-launched anti-tank guided missile is something the army has worked off and on for a long time. The Soviet’s had one, but mainly because their main guns were inaccurate at longer ranges. U.S. had a prototype ATGM that hit a T-72 at 8,600 meters. “But the Army never invested in it to go full rate production. Part of the reason for this might be because it’s also true that tank-launched ATGMs have a smaller warhead and they don’t perform as well against modern composite armor compared to the 1970s.”
So why does the army want it now? Line of sight studies in Latvia and Lithuania (i.e, the border with Russia) shows a whole lot of areas where it would be useful.
Tank optics are also a lot better now.
The new XM 360 cannon uses the same 120mm diameter, but save a full ton of weight by using composites, and delivers the same 17 megajoules of energy to the target as a conventional 140mm cannon, thanks to more efficient plasma ignition.
The Russo-Ukrainian War reveals a much more deadly threat environment for tanks. Drones are a huge threat.
“They’re going to link the new cannon to a remote-controlled, optionally manned turret by switching to an autoloader and making the turret interior smaller. That’s a lot less volume that has to be protected by heavy armor, which equates to a lot less tons of armor.” When we last checked with western tankers looking at the T-14s autoloader some six years ago, they were skeptical of both smaller crews (“all we do is maintain tanks, and they still break down”) and autoloaders (Abrams tank crews currently put shots on target faster than Russian crews with autoloaders). But since then, the Russo-Ukraine War happened and technology galloped furiously, and presumably higher crew survivability will make the tradeoff worthwhile.
M1A3 almost certainly wouldn’t have the cassette design that gives the T-72 its turret toss reputation. “Newly designed autoloading tanks can have all of their ammo secured behind a bulkhead blast shield and can work with blowout panels to prevent detonation from cooking the crew.”
“We’ve also seen from combat in Ukraine that the Abrams engine deck with it air intakes and radiators is a popular target point for drone swarms, so the army is looking at unique ways to keep the engine better protected from above without sacrificing cooling performance.”
“The new M1A3 Abrams tank would also upgrade from that puny 50 caliber machine gun to possibly the 30mm chain gun remote weapon station. The big advantage there is that it could fire specially made 30mikemikes that provide air burst capability for shooting down drones.” That sounds both awesome and the makings of an extremely complex turret with multiple automatic-feed weapon systems.
“We have to remember that systems enhancement packages was always supposed to be a stopgap temporary band-aid solution for the Abrams, because the service thought that they would do with that until a full replacement vehicle was chosen that’s how we ended up with like a dozen different variants of Abrams tanks with various levels of advanced features in the early 2000s.”
“The main difference between the M1A1 and A2 is its electronics. However, with this new M1A3, it’s now likely to have a whole brand new hull and turret. There’s conflicting reports on that, but I can’t see any other way that we get the kind of weight reductions that they’re looking for without a whole new hull.”
“The first version of the Abrams tank weighed 54 tons. The SEPV4 that was cancelled was on track to weigh over 75 tons. Add in a mine plow and it was going to break the scales at 83 tons.”
In May this year, an expert analysis board came to some sobering conclusions. “The M1A2SEP3 and 4 upgrades will improve effectiveness, but not restore dominance. Near transparency in all domains will significantly increase the lethality our forces will experience. We will continue to have to fight outnumbered, exacerbated by a low MBT operational readiness rate and aging fleet.”
“Lessons learned in Ukraine is that tanks are sometimes dead meat if they’re too heavy. They get stuck in the mud, they’re too slow not nimble enough to fire and then escape from drones that are searching for them.”
That same Latvian-Lithuanian study showed lots of no-go zones for Abrams due to their weight in muddy conditions. “From a tactical perspective a defending Force could easily mine trafficable routes, destroy bridges to complicate Abram’s combat operations during the wet season and funnel them into choke points.”
“The study recommends new band tracks to lower the ground pressure to help fix that problem along with the lighter weight.”
SEPV3’s heavier weight lowered operational range from 300 miles down to 264.
He references the role of tank in the army’s current FM3-0 Operations Guide, which you can read at the link.
Transcom says that SEPV3 is too heavy to transport for a lot of roles.
Meantime between failure for current tanks is 200 miles, which does seem worrisome.
“It will likely have the hybrid electric drivetrain that reduces fuel consumption by 50%.” He calls it the Prius of tanks, but it’s not ugly enough for that.
More stealth.
More active protection.
“The future of armored warfare, the way the army envisions it, is that they’ll be preparing for a major change to tank tactics unlike anything we’ve seen since the introduction of the Abrams in 1980 …they all seem to believe that the future will be a combination of manned and unmanned platforms that are integrated with aerial UAVs. The M1A3 is the first step in that direction.”
A major Abrams redesign was probably slightly overdue anyway, but the torrents of real-world information coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian War forced their hand to make more radical changes.
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18 Responses to “Why The Army Wants The M1A3 Abrams”
Most of that seems like slapping a band-aid on top of a sucking chest wound that’d be better addressed with a pneumothorax kit, but… Well… I guess let Armor be Armor.
It also reminds me of how the Navy got their new F-18s… About the only thing that they kept from the older airframe was the noun nomenclature. Once you start talking “new hull”, that’s a “new tank”, and ought to be given a new designator. By rights.
As it is, I remain highly dubious of the entire current military-industrial complex. There’s a lot of crap to unpack about the conflict in Ukraine, and how it’s being fought. I suspect that a lot of the crap they’re putting on this thing will prove to be either useless or superfluous, going forward.
What I think they need to be doing is designing these things not from the unitary vehicle approach, where the tank has to have everything on it and be included, but from a “Let’s design the combined-arms platoon” vector. In other words, they need to figure out how the hell to build a force-package system that does about what an air force mission package does for a particular strike environment.
In other words, you need specialized vehicles and crews. Going into a high-threat electronic warfare environment? Then you need to take along the ground equivalent of a Wild Weasel aircraft to get in and out… Something that has absolutely huge power capability for pumping out full-spectrum jamming, coupled with capable point-defense systems for taking out HARM missiles that will inevitably be vectored in.
They really need to quit trying to put everything into every single vehicle. You need purpose-built EW vehicles, drone carriers, and all of that needs to be integrated into a system across the entire force package you’re sending out. To include maintenance/replacement crew provisions.
The Army, in other words, needs to start looking at the vehicles and units in much the same way that the air force does, right down to the maintenance/crew aspect of it all. I don’t know that you need to go to the extent of having navy-like Blue and Gold crews, but… Something like that would help for 24/7 operations.
– a new hull design
– a new turret design
– a new powerplant
– a new main gun
That sounds an awful lot like…a whole new tank design. I think Big Army is sliding this in as an ‘M1 upgrade’ to avoid having to go ask Congress for new tank $$$. And probably to avoid having to go through the whole competitive trials process. (Borrowing a page from the Navy’s ‘Super Hornet’ playbook.)
Does it really matter? They won’t even have the ability to logistically mass these enormous beasts for weeks and months on end prior to heavy ground operations in the next high intensity global conflict. They’ll be sitting at the bottom of the ocean with 1/3 to 1/2 of all Global Military Sealift Command assets.
The opening pre-nuclear phase of WWIII is going to preclude any movement of anything with a logistical footprint too heavy to fly in quantity.
Although there is still efficacy for armored formations, Ukraine is revealing that niche is shrinking. Can you even imagine one of these crawling around somewhere in the Pacific? The logistic footprint to support one of these leviathans is enormous.
I think you almost have to count on US forces being at a grave disadvantage in the next major conventional war. The system is simply unable to really adapt or learn.
Trust me on this… I spent a chunk of my career starting in the early 1990s trying to get Big Army interested in fixing both rear area security and countermine warfare. We advocated for them to at least procure some uparmor kits for the trucks, and MRAP vehicles for route clearance.
We protested that they bought cabover designs for LMTV; they told us that these were “not combat vehicles” and would not need armor, ever. Cabovers are bad, mmmkay, ‘cos they put the front axle (most likely to detonate something…) right under the crew compartment. Seriously stupid design choice…
They refused to buy or evaluate mine-proof vehicles until well into Iraq; they should have been there from day one, but “we’ll never fight a war like that”.
Most of the people staffing the military are abysmally stupid and unimaginative. Civilian and military both; they’re stovepiped and unable to think outside their boxes and stovepipes. If you set them a problem within their realm, they’ll solve it, but don’t expect them to come up with anything creative or at all adaptive.
We had a problem with the Iraqi Police we were supporting getting blown up by IEDs. The solution was to procure MRAP vehicles for them… Two years away after they’d all be dead, really. That’s how long the procurement process was going to take. I pulled out a copy of Peter Stiff’s Taming the Landmine, which detailed how Rhodesia and South Africa developed the basis for MRAP technology after sanctions were put on them, and handed it around. None of the staff officers or civilians involved in “Police Support” seemed to “get” the idea of having local facilities do what the Rhodesians did, and build their own off of existing chassis… Too much of a leap. They read the book like it was a comic book, unable to get past the pretty pictures. Same bunch of morons also couldn’t get the idea of a “Q-Ship” effort to lure the IED emplacers into attacking us; fucking JAG put paid to that one, saying that it was a violation of the laws of war, somehow…
Do not expect the vaunted US military to prevail in anything like WWIII. Not at first, and they’ll only win if we somehow manage to eliminate about 90% of the existing upper officer corps right off the bat…
That will happen anyway. People don’t realize that huge numbers of field grade and general officers and admirals got canned in the months and years of WWII leading up to 1943. It was the process that got us hard-chargers like Curtis Lemay and Omar Bradley (who overtook his original boss, Patton) and, in Russia, Zhukov. Results talk and bullshit walks. It will be the same for WWIII. But there’s a problem…
WWIII isn’t going to remain non-nuclear. We already know this. If we’re lucky it will be limited to naval weapons (watch…they’ll bring back warheads for ASROC and SUBROC) because the effects would be highly localized to combatant and combatant support forces and highly specialized low-yield tactical warheads for super-niched applications like bunker-busting/decap and interdiction strikes. Again, because the effects would be highly localized. But that doesn’t change the elephant in the room…nuclear weapons will likely be used in some capacity, and that begins the wheels rolling for escalation to counter-force and even counter-value strikes.
I really really really hope this doesn’t happen, but their are powerful forces that seem hellbent on believing that now is the right time to have the next big war because if we don’t have it now we will be weaker in the future so might as well go big or go home.
Our government is not currently staffed with sane individuals. Hopefully they get fired in the first few weeks of whatever’s coming and replaced by people that actually know what they’re doing.
I’d never presume to predict squat about “the next war”. I now know better, after watching the last fifty or so years of history spin out of alignment with all that was expected.
Nukes may or may not get used; I suspect that the problem with them is that a.) they’re a weapon of last resort, not likely to be used by a power that’s in any sort of position of strength, and b.) if they’re weak enough to be willing to use them, then… Odds are pretty good that the complex systems behind maintenance and delivery aren’t healthy enough to risk annihilation by trying to use them, and discovering that “they don’t work, boss” at the last minute.
I think you’re a lot more likely to see nukes flung around by countries like India, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, to be quite honest. It’ll be a relatively small-scale thing, stomped out by bigger powers as soon as it initiates. General nuclear war by any healthy state isn’t a strong likelihood; too much to lose. Russia, right now? I dare say that Putin has had some long conversations with his people in the Strategic Rocket Forces, and the FSB security detachments for those forces, the ones who keep the nukes. If the reports I had related to me by guys who went in after the START process got going for verification were at all honest with me, I would have severe doubts about “will they f*cking work…?” if I were in Putin’s shoes. Given the performance of the rest of the Russian Federation forces, I’d limit my betting on their strategic forces being in any better shape. Especially the ones nobody ever expected to have to actually, y’know… Use.
Like every other vet reading this, I found calling Ma Deuce “puny” jarring, to say the least…
I am astonished that the brass have allowed the weight of this thing to grow to the point that it is a big, exposed pillbox during the raputitsa. Back in my day ..
Concur that they’re calling it an upgrade from A2 to A3 because it’s easier to get $$$ for an upgrade than for an M4 tank. (Or would it be the M6?)
The TRQ32 signint systems we had when I retired bore no resemblance to
the one we were using when I enlisted. No money for MI geeks, call it an upgrade… ( Although they did solicit proposals and bids )
I still think the whole concept needs re-thinking from a very deep level upwards.
The fixation on playing Patton/Rommel is an actual thing in the Armor branch. You can also observe it in the Infantry, with regards to the Bradley. These guys get so hopped up on “maneuverium” that they lose sight of the whole point of the exercise, which is to engage and destroy the enemy using shock and firepower such that you reduce your own casualties. The tank is but an instrument, and it may not be an instrument that’s suitable for today’s battlefields. At least, not the way we conceive of it.
Long-term, my money is on specialization and redundancy. One vehicle with all that crap bolted on…? Not a good idea. Too many eggs in one basket, too much money, too much weight. I’d be a lot happier with them building multi-function modular chassis that can take various pieces from the mission stockpile, and then go from there to the mission. Need jammers? Pull the cargo module, plug in the jammer unit, and away you go. Everything ought to be modular and palletized, such that the armored platoon consists of several mobile chassis units and has a bunch of modules in the base area that they use as needed, while said module is also doing its thing back on the ground in the base cluster. If you need something like CIWS for the assault, take it; if not, it’s back at the base area defending that against whatever comes along…
Kirk: Isn’t that basically what FCS was supposed to be? Or, for that matter, LCS?
All: While “puny” may be intended as irony, the key capabilities that 30mm brings to the table are 1) range, and 2) HE+airburst. These allow it to perform as an adequate CIWS against threats that are detected early enough for the computer and crew to complete the kill chain. Active defenses *should* have been capable of doing the job, but domestic manufacturers have somehow been unable to even replicate Trophy, much less do so with a cheap, lightweight munition that could be carried in respectable numbers. And if the future is drones packing EFPs that are smart enough to detonate at max effective range rather than using contact fuzes, then Trophy-style defenses will be obsolete anyways.
Long-term, we need energy weapons. They need to be small/light enough to mount as secondary weapons, unlike the current models being tested, powerful enough to disable subsonic threats at range, and cheap/rapid enough to handle swarms. That’s a fairly big ask with today’s tech. Oh, and regardless of all of the above, each vehicle needs sensors and automatic target recognition software capable of detecting, classifying, and targeting a threat within seconds.
The new “Mobile Protected Firepower” aka light tank is the M-10 Booker.
So, unless the Army has separate designator lines in the nomenclature for MBTs and light tanks, this should be the M-11 or higher.
(When you think about designations in the nomenclature, think of the M1 rifle and M1 carbine from WWII. Or the M1917 rifle, M1917 machinegun, and M1917 revolvers from WWI.)
The M1E3 program and it’s companion M30 MICV program will cost something more than $ 100 billion. The Army land systems budget lacks the political support to secure this level of expenditure.
The M1E3 (still it’s official designation) will never enter production.
Kirk says: “I’d be a lot happier with them building multi-function modular chassis that can take various pieces from the mission stockpile, and then go from there to the mission. ”
To which I reply: I think you just described the LCS…
I knew a bunch of the guys who worked for the LCS program. It was right up the street from us, and a bunch of the staff officers I knew who took the early out during the first Clinton administration wound up working for Boeing on that program.
There was a lot of valuable research done, and I think that they had their heads in the right place when it came to a lot of this stuff. The mobility hardware really ought to be a different track of development than the payload/weapons one; you should be able to swap out a turreted heavy armor module with a kinetic energy weapon for something else fairly easily. We don’t design that way, however, preferring the “integrate everything and then upgrade piecemeal”, which leads to your vehicles looking like kit-bashed idiocies with protruding boxes and modules everywhere. Ever want a vision into nightmare? Look at some of the upgrades to Soviet-era tanks, where they’ve jimmied all that crap which makes up a modern fire control system into a T-72. It often ain’t at all pretty, or even manageable. I can’t do it here, but the “switchology” for the gunner in an M1 anything is light years ahead of a lot of those “upgraded” Soviet tanks. You wonder why they have so much trouble training crew on them? LOL… You just don’t know until you’ve sat through turret training for the M1, and then gotten the familiarization course for the Soviet version. There’s a reason why their rates of fire are so damn slow…
In any event, the drivetrain and mechanical stuff ought to be something separate that you drop the combat or support module into. Play your cards right, and you could have your base defense stuff set up like that, with the ability to drop things like the air defense or CIWS system inside the perimeter and power it with a generator, allowing your combat power to go out and do its thing.
I think a lot of what killed FCS is that the powers-that-were in Armor and Infantry simply couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of a modular system. It would have been a solid idea, properly implemented.
I’m still wildly resistant to the idea of a unitary approach, where you have one vehicle doing it all. The IFV concept is just ‘effing nuts, to my mind and experience. I never once observed a single tactical situation such that you could both drop your dismounts where you needed them to be, and effectively engage with your main firepower. You always wound up either making the grunts move far enough that they reached the objective too exhausted to do anything, or you had to take your guns into ground where they were ineffective and hazarded to the enemy… Plus that, most of the time? The Bradley “GIBs”, or Guys In Back, were always just extraneous bodies there to add to the casualty lists after the platoon leader got done playing General Patton and getting his sh*t blowed up real good…
Most of that seems like slapping a band-aid on top of a sucking chest wound that’d be better addressed with a pneumothorax kit, but… Well… I guess let Armor be Armor.
It also reminds me of how the Navy got their new F-18s… About the only thing that they kept from the older airframe was the noun nomenclature. Once you start talking “new hull”, that’s a “new tank”, and ought to be given a new designator. By rights.
As it is, I remain highly dubious of the entire current military-industrial complex. There’s a lot of crap to unpack about the conflict in Ukraine, and how it’s being fought. I suspect that a lot of the crap they’re putting on this thing will prove to be either useless or superfluous, going forward.
What I think they need to be doing is designing these things not from the unitary vehicle approach, where the tank has to have everything on it and be included, but from a “Let’s design the combined-arms platoon” vector. In other words, they need to figure out how the hell to build a force-package system that does about what an air force mission package does for a particular strike environment.
In other words, you need specialized vehicles and crews. Going into a high-threat electronic warfare environment? Then you need to take along the ground equivalent of a Wild Weasel aircraft to get in and out… Something that has absolutely huge power capability for pumping out full-spectrum jamming, coupled with capable point-defense systems for taking out HARM missiles that will inevitably be vectored in.
They really need to quit trying to put everything into every single vehicle. You need purpose-built EW vehicles, drone carriers, and all of that needs to be integrated into a system across the entire force package you’re sending out. To include maintenance/replacement crew provisions.
The Army, in other words, needs to start looking at the vehicles and units in much the same way that the air force does, right down to the maintenance/crew aspect of it all. I don’t know that you need to go to the extent of having navy-like Blue and Gold crews, but… Something like that would help for 24/7 operations.
Let me get this straight…it will have
– a new hull design
– a new turret design
– a new powerplant
– a new main gun
That sounds an awful lot like…a whole new tank design. I think Big Army is sliding this in as an ‘M1 upgrade’ to avoid having to go ask Congress for new tank $$$. And probably to avoid having to go through the whole competitive trials process. (Borrowing a page from the Navy’s ‘Super Hornet’ playbook.)
I’ve never heard Ma Duce called puny before. It seems strange.
“ Masking capabilities to reduce thermal and electromagnetic signatures”
We’re developing cloaking devices? Fascinating!
Does it really matter? They won’t even have the ability to logistically mass these enormous beasts for weeks and months on end prior to heavy ground operations in the next high intensity global conflict. They’ll be sitting at the bottom of the ocean with 1/3 to 1/2 of all Global Military Sealift Command assets.
The opening pre-nuclear phase of WWIII is going to preclude any movement of anything with a logistical footprint too heavy to fly in quantity.
Puny Cal .50? Really!?!
I look forward to the results of the field tests in Ukraine.
Although there is still efficacy for armored formations, Ukraine is revealing that niche is shrinking. Can you even imagine one of these crawling around somewhere in the Pacific? The logistic footprint to support one of these leviathans is enormous.
I think you almost have to count on US forces being at a grave disadvantage in the next major conventional war. The system is simply unable to really adapt or learn.
Trust me on this… I spent a chunk of my career starting in the early 1990s trying to get Big Army interested in fixing both rear area security and countermine warfare. We advocated for them to at least procure some uparmor kits for the trucks, and MRAP vehicles for route clearance.
We protested that they bought cabover designs for LMTV; they told us that these were “not combat vehicles” and would not need armor, ever. Cabovers are bad, mmmkay, ‘cos they put the front axle (most likely to detonate something…) right under the crew compartment. Seriously stupid design choice…
They refused to buy or evaluate mine-proof vehicles until well into Iraq; they should have been there from day one, but “we’ll never fight a war like that”.
Most of the people staffing the military are abysmally stupid and unimaginative. Civilian and military both; they’re stovepiped and unable to think outside their boxes and stovepipes. If you set them a problem within their realm, they’ll solve it, but don’t expect them to come up with anything creative or at all adaptive.
We had a problem with the Iraqi Police we were supporting getting blown up by IEDs. The solution was to procure MRAP vehicles for them… Two years away after they’d all be dead, really. That’s how long the procurement process was going to take. I pulled out a copy of Peter Stiff’s Taming the Landmine, which detailed how Rhodesia and South Africa developed the basis for MRAP technology after sanctions were put on them, and handed it around. None of the staff officers or civilians involved in “Police Support” seemed to “get” the idea of having local facilities do what the Rhodesians did, and build their own off of existing chassis… Too much of a leap. They read the book like it was a comic book, unable to get past the pretty pictures. Same bunch of morons also couldn’t get the idea of a “Q-Ship” effort to lure the IED emplacers into attacking us; fucking JAG put paid to that one, saying that it was a violation of the laws of war, somehow…
Do not expect the vaunted US military to prevail in anything like WWIII. Not at first, and they’ll only win if we somehow manage to eliminate about 90% of the existing upper officer corps right off the bat…
@Kirk
That will happen anyway. People don’t realize that huge numbers of field grade and general officers and admirals got canned in the months and years of WWII leading up to 1943. It was the process that got us hard-chargers like Curtis Lemay and Omar Bradley (who overtook his original boss, Patton) and, in Russia, Zhukov. Results talk and bullshit walks. It will be the same for WWIII. But there’s a problem…
WWIII isn’t going to remain non-nuclear. We already know this. If we’re lucky it will be limited to naval weapons (watch…they’ll bring back warheads for ASROC and SUBROC) because the effects would be highly localized to combatant and combatant support forces and highly specialized low-yield tactical warheads for super-niched applications like bunker-busting/decap and interdiction strikes. Again, because the effects would be highly localized. But that doesn’t change the elephant in the room…nuclear weapons will likely be used in some capacity, and that begins the wheels rolling for escalation to counter-force and even counter-value strikes.
I really really really hope this doesn’t happen, but their are powerful forces that seem hellbent on believing that now is the right time to have the next big war because if we don’t have it now we will be weaker in the future so might as well go big or go home.
Our government is not currently staffed with sane individuals. Hopefully they get fired in the first few weeks of whatever’s coming and replaced by people that actually know what they’re doing.
@Andy Markcyst,
I’d never presume to predict squat about “the next war”. I now know better, after watching the last fifty or so years of history spin out of alignment with all that was expected.
Nukes may or may not get used; I suspect that the problem with them is that a.) they’re a weapon of last resort, not likely to be used by a power that’s in any sort of position of strength, and b.) if they’re weak enough to be willing to use them, then… Odds are pretty good that the complex systems behind maintenance and delivery aren’t healthy enough to risk annihilation by trying to use them, and discovering that “they don’t work, boss” at the last minute.
I think you’re a lot more likely to see nukes flung around by countries like India, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, to be quite honest. It’ll be a relatively small-scale thing, stomped out by bigger powers as soon as it initiates. General nuclear war by any healthy state isn’t a strong likelihood; too much to lose. Russia, right now? I dare say that Putin has had some long conversations with his people in the Strategic Rocket Forces, and the FSB security detachments for those forces, the ones who keep the nukes. If the reports I had related to me by guys who went in after the START process got going for verification were at all honest with me, I would have severe doubts about “will they f*cking work…?” if I were in Putin’s shoes. Given the performance of the rest of the Russian Federation forces, I’d limit my betting on their strategic forces being in any better shape. Especially the ones nobody ever expected to have to actually, y’know… Use.
Like every other vet reading this, I found calling Ma Deuce “puny” jarring, to say the least…
I am astonished that the brass have allowed the weight of this thing to grow to the point that it is a big, exposed pillbox during the raputitsa. Back in my day ..
Concur that they’re calling it an upgrade from A2 to A3 because it’s easier to get $$$ for an upgrade than for an M4 tank. (Or would it be the M6?)
The TRQ32 signint systems we had when I retired bore no resemblance to
the one we were using when I enlisted. No money for MI geeks, call it an upgrade… ( Although they did solicit proposals and bids )
I believe the 50 cal comment was an attempt at humor.
I still think the whole concept needs re-thinking from a very deep level upwards.
The fixation on playing Patton/Rommel is an actual thing in the Armor branch. You can also observe it in the Infantry, with regards to the Bradley. These guys get so hopped up on “maneuverium” that they lose sight of the whole point of the exercise, which is to engage and destroy the enemy using shock and firepower such that you reduce your own casualties. The tank is but an instrument, and it may not be an instrument that’s suitable for today’s battlefields. At least, not the way we conceive of it.
Long-term, my money is on specialization and redundancy. One vehicle with all that crap bolted on…? Not a good idea. Too many eggs in one basket, too much money, too much weight. I’d be a lot happier with them building multi-function modular chassis that can take various pieces from the mission stockpile, and then go from there to the mission. Need jammers? Pull the cargo module, plug in the jammer unit, and away you go. Everything ought to be modular and palletized, such that the armored platoon consists of several mobile chassis units and has a bunch of modules in the base area that they use as needed, while said module is also doing its thing back on the ground in the base cluster. If you need something like CIWS for the assault, take it; if not, it’s back at the base area defending that against whatever comes along…
Kirk: Isn’t that basically what FCS was supposed to be? Or, for that matter, LCS?
All: While “puny” may be intended as irony, the key capabilities that 30mm brings to the table are 1) range, and 2) HE+airburst. These allow it to perform as an adequate CIWS against threats that are detected early enough for the computer and crew to complete the kill chain. Active defenses *should* have been capable of doing the job, but domestic manufacturers have somehow been unable to even replicate Trophy, much less do so with a cheap, lightweight munition that could be carried in respectable numbers. And if the future is drones packing EFPs that are smart enough to detonate at max effective range rather than using contact fuzes, then Trophy-style defenses will be obsolete anyways.
Long-term, we need energy weapons. They need to be small/light enough to mount as secondary weapons, unlike the current models being tested, powerful enough to disable subsonic threats at range, and cheap/rapid enough to handle swarms. That’s a fairly big ask with today’s tech. Oh, and regardless of all of the above, each vehicle needs sensors and automatic target recognition software capable of detecting, classifying, and targeting a threat within seconds.
Drang-
The new “Mobile Protected Firepower” aka light tank is the M-10 Booker.
So, unless the Army has separate designator lines in the nomenclature for MBTs and light tanks, this should be the M-11 or higher.
(When you think about designations in the nomenclature, think of the M1 rifle and M1 carbine from WWII. Or the M1917 rifle, M1917 machinegun, and M1917 revolvers from WWI.)
The M1E3 program and it’s companion M30 MICV program will cost something more than $ 100 billion. The Army land systems budget lacks the political support to secure this level of expenditure.
The M1E3 (still it’s official designation) will never enter production.
Kirk says: “I’d be a lot happier with them building multi-function modular chassis that can take various pieces from the mission stockpile, and then go from there to the mission. ”
To which I reply: I think you just described the LCS…
I knew a bunch of the guys who worked for the LCS program. It was right up the street from us, and a bunch of the staff officers I knew who took the early out during the first Clinton administration wound up working for Boeing on that program.
There was a lot of valuable research done, and I think that they had their heads in the right place when it came to a lot of this stuff. The mobility hardware really ought to be a different track of development than the payload/weapons one; you should be able to swap out a turreted heavy armor module with a kinetic energy weapon for something else fairly easily. We don’t design that way, however, preferring the “integrate everything and then upgrade piecemeal”, which leads to your vehicles looking like kit-bashed idiocies with protruding boxes and modules everywhere. Ever want a vision into nightmare? Look at some of the upgrades to Soviet-era tanks, where they’ve jimmied all that crap which makes up a modern fire control system into a T-72. It often ain’t at all pretty, or even manageable. I can’t do it here, but the “switchology” for the gunner in an M1 anything is light years ahead of a lot of those “upgraded” Soviet tanks. You wonder why they have so much trouble training crew on them? LOL… You just don’t know until you’ve sat through turret training for the M1, and then gotten the familiarization course for the Soviet version. There’s a reason why their rates of fire are so damn slow…
In any event, the drivetrain and mechanical stuff ought to be something separate that you drop the combat or support module into. Play your cards right, and you could have your base defense stuff set up like that, with the ability to drop things like the air defense or CIWS system inside the perimeter and power it with a generator, allowing your combat power to go out and do its thing.
I think a lot of what killed FCS is that the powers-that-were in Armor and Infantry simply couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of a modular system. It would have been a solid idea, properly implemented.
I’m still wildly resistant to the idea of a unitary approach, where you have one vehicle doing it all. The IFV concept is just ‘effing nuts, to my mind and experience. I never once observed a single tactical situation such that you could both drop your dismounts where you needed them to be, and effectively engage with your main firepower. You always wound up either making the grunts move far enough that they reached the objective too exhausted to do anything, or you had to take your guns into ground where they were ineffective and hazarded to the enemy… Plus that, most of the time? The Bradley “GIBs”, or Guys In Back, were always just extraneous bodies there to add to the casualty lists after the platoon leader got done playing General Patton and getting his sh*t blowed up real good…