And This Is the Tanks I Get!

Now is not the time to cut back on U.S. tank production.

By and
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“Why do we have more tanks than drones?”

So asked the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith, and sources say that Sen. Jack Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, agrees.  “I mean, tanks are not as useful as they used to be,” continued Smith at a late March panel hearing. “Drones are a lot more useful. … We need to modernize our approach to warfare technology.  It’s all about information and survivability now.”

Thanks to the Biden administration’s insufficient defense budget request and the Army’s political myopia, the two chairmen may get their way.  Rather than propose a defense budget in line with U.S. national security strategy and the realities of current inflation rates, the administration and the service dramatically reduced funding in the 2023 Pentagon proposal for the Army’s M1 Abrams tank production from what had been 165 tanks in 2020 to only 22 in 2023. Why did the Army cut its tank production? It’s counting on Congress to increase procurement and, as it has in the past, save the service from itself.

Four months ago, this might have been a reasonable gamble; it has been clear from the start that Congress would increase the defense topline budget and the M1 program has long enjoyed broad congressional support. But with escalating worries about China’s rise and frustration with the languid pace of Pentagon modernization and lack of innovation—“The Pentagon is not innovating as fast as they need to.  We’re going to keep putting pressure on them,” says Smith—the Army might well be hoisted by its own too-clever petard.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Very interesting! A timely rebuttal to the fools (and I often worried Smith fell into this category based on his previous remarks) who assume that the wars of the future will be so futuristic we can neglect physicality and kinetics and land warfare and basically all the traditional stuff about armies and navies.

    “ Terminating this sole remaining tank program in the midst of a raging land war in central Europe—and with a Russian leadership mesmerized by a vision of imperial restoration—is an “innovation” to avoid.”

    It’s myopic. It would be one of the most shortsighted moves in modern US military history.

    “ While not even the M1 can last forever, the need for a similar capability will endure. And the real lesson of the Ukraine conflict should be that war remains an unpredictable affair, one that inevitably gives the lie to overly precise predictions of future combat.”

    That about sums it up.

    “ While the consequences in peacetime appear manageable, this procurement pattern hollows the industrial base and supply chain not only to provide American soldiers with what they need but limiting our ability to act as the “arsenal of democracy” for others.”

    So true! We’ve been shouting ourselves in the foot on hollowing out the defense industrial base for years now and at a certain point we can’t keep limping along on a bloody stump.

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  2. Avatar photo
    Michael Dan Martin

    “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” - Yogi Berra

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    Joe Delanis

    I live in Ohio, not far from a State Route that leads directly to Lima, where the Abrams tank is built.

    For those unfamiliar with the minutiae of Buckeye State geography or demography, Lima is a mid-size (by Ohio standards) "legacy city," aka a Rust Belt post-industrial has-been manufacturing city. For its size it has a remarkably high crime rate, something like 24% poverty rate, and its population has declined by over 30% from its 1970 Census peak.

    So the first thing that pops into my mind when I see a headline like this is, "people advocating for a jobs program masquerading as national defense."

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  4. Avatar photo
    Antebellum Whig

    Fantastic headline

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  5. Avatar photo
    Tmcke

    I despair of this piece. I see nothing that explains why or how the US will need massive tank columns in the wars it expects to fight. Please correct me,

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  6. Griffin Gasink

    Here's the problem with this article. Who are these tanks supposed to fight? Any war with China will be a naval and air war. Russia isn't a serious threat to take on NATO directly and can be defeated with weapons we already had. Tanks are also not that great I'm counter insurgency operations either.

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    1. Bdecicco2001

      Well, to start with we need to send Ukraine a lot of tanks right now.

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    2. Pohl

      Not sure why you would assume a war with China would not involve ground forces. What if it occurs in Africa? Not likely now, but it could happen one day. Even if you mean China proper, the Marines are taking your advice by abandoning the tank. But they are not the Army. Also, Marines land.

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    3. Avatar photo
      David Chen

      It honestly seems like the desired tank (M1 for example) is never with the people who need it most (Ukraine).

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  7. Pohl

    QOTD:Thank you for this well-argued article.

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    Bill B

    I've no particular opinion on one side or the other here. I do suspect that technological obsolescence will rapidly become a critical issue in the coming years - perhaps even a paradigm shift. I also suspect we have some truly scary advanced weaponry sitting in some secret DOD warehouse waiting for that day when the gloves come off. I doubt tanks will be on that list.

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  9. Evan in the middle

    At what point are you just mass producing the last wars weapon? Look at battleships. Not that tanks don't have a place, but doesn't seem like the best way to spend money

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  10. Avatar photo
    George.Skinner

    Allow me to play devil’s advocate here and ask what exactly is a tank’s mission in today’s conflicts? Is is killing other tanks? If so, is it the best way or only way of killing other tanks?
    The fact is that the M1 Abrams *is* an 80 ton behemoth. It guzzles gas, requires a huge logistical tail, is at the edge of what much roads and infrastructure can bear, and typically needs ships to transport it in number overseas. It’s just as vulnerable to a top-kill attack as Russian armor, and will be dependent on active protection systems to defeat those weapons. Its main job is killing other tanks. It will support infantry (and that’s got value), but it’s possibly bigger than you’d like for urban combat and also requires the presence of infantry to protect it.
    In short, the M1 is probably the best MBT ever built. It’s the culmination of the era of tank warfare that started WW2. However, like the dreadnought navies of the early 20th century, technological change may have made it obsolete.

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    1. Pohl

      I prefer to be persuaded on the battlefield first. Aircraft carriers are probably nearer extinction, and they’re not going away for decades, barring some military disaster.

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      1. Avatar photo
        George.Skinner

        There's definite similarities between the asymmetry of the missile threat to both carriers and tanks. However, the difference is in the mission of carriers vs. tanks.
        The job of an MBT is primarily to kill other MBTs. Yes, it can provide support to infantry and even provide a limited function as artillery (as the Ukrainians have been demonstrating recently in Donetsk.) You can keep piling additional protection on the tank to defend against the missile threat, but eventually you have to stop and ask what's the point? The missiles are eventually going to overwhelm the tank, and if the missiles can kill the opponent's tanks anyway, why are you going to all the effort of preserving your own MBT force?
        A carrier's job isn't killing other carriers, it's power projection. You can park a mobile airbase anywhere, and control the air and sea space in a 100-1000 km bubble. It's still a harder target to kill - you're not going to do it with a handheld missile launcher, and even a big ballistic or cruise missile might require multiple hits to take a carrier out of action. That makes it easier to defend as well. If China ever figures out how to reliably target their DF-11 missiles to achieve a kill without a nuclear warhead, carriers could be in real trouble.
        Anyway, if you're looking for proof on the battlefield for the end of MBTs, the Ukraine-Russia conflict might be it. Everybody points at the poor quality of Russian troops and tactics, and flaws in the design of Russian tanks. However, the top armor on an M-1 isn't that much better than a T-80, and you don't have to blow the turret off the tank with a faulty magazine to knock it out of action. The big unknown is whether the Trophy defense system will be sufficiently effective against something like a Javelin missile, but I'm guessing that heavy armor may be going the way of cavalry units in WW1. I'd just rather that the US Army anticipates the change to come rather than being shown that their reliance on heavy armor was a mistake on the battlefield.

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        1. Alan

          At some point the point is to be a sponge. Tanks will die but you are forcing the enemy to spend energy killing them. Because while tanks may lose to missives, left unopposed they are quite powerful. It’s a bit circular but that’s how arms tend to work

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        2. Pohl

          Even so, I prefer the tank be proven obsolete on the battlefield, and it hasn’t been yet. I’m definitely not saying the Abrams is still the future as there is a wide array of armored vehicles under consideration, including lighter tanks and unmanned vehicles. I think land warfare simply requires it for now. And I don’t accept that countries like Russia and China, with their large tank fleets, will not deploy them where we will have to engage. You can’t defeat great powers by sea.
          But the article also explains why armor only works in combined arms. In that respect, the tank faces a different battlefield than in the past. I won’t touch the carrier this time as it is here for a while, but still not as long as tanks.

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