How did they expect to produce tanks in the future? Have China do it?
“How did they expect to produce tanks in the future? Have China do it?”
I was employed by General Dynamics and mostly worked on the Abrams subassemblies and other heavy vehicles. GD had the contract to run the plant discussed here. The reason the army wanted to stop producing the Abrams and close the plant was the tanks are terribly vulnerable. Not the tank itself, but the logistics train behind the tank. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but the tanks had a pretty short range as they burned several gallons of fuel for each mile. They weighed somewhere around seventy tons and could only be moved by ships, special trucks and rail cars. When they were moved to Saudi Arabia the entire fleet of tanks were on two ships which, if I recall, were rented. We don’t even own the ships we need to move them. Any future war where the tanks had to be moved by ship would probably be against a power with submarines. Also, drones and shoulder carried technology make the tanks, if not obsolete, extremely vulnerable. The tanks, depending on the version and upgrade package, costs in the many millions of dollars. Drones and shoulder fired ammo to take them out costs anywhere from ten to a hundred thousand dollars. The economics of the tradeoff no longer makes sense.
A drone that is effectively undetectable can cruise behind the line and take out the tankers. No fuel, no tanks.
The army wanted to go smaller, lighter and stealthy. Because they are spending so much on armor they can’t transport to where they need it, they can’t spend money on what they want.
Tanks are nice to have, but so were battleships. We have thousands of tanks in storage, and we simply don’t need any more.
Here’s a political oddity. There are much more efficient engines that we could reequip the existing tanks with. But because Congress insists, we keep buying new tanks, which go straight to storage, there’s no money to change out the engines.