Does the Army say no more tanks or does Obama’s people say no more tanks - always a question these days
Or do you thing we can get away with fewer carriers, women in combat, and fewer jets without harm?
Congress knows what they’re doing here... there may or may not be another big foreign tank battle in our immediate future, but these tanks will also be quite handy for putting down Christian insurrection in rural areas of the US. ;-)
Another corruption exposed while Nero fiddles and the people Facebook and Tweet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lima_Army_Tank_Plant
Problem is we are down to a single plant that can produce M1 tanks. Stop production and the ability to make tanks rapidly deteriorates.
I can think of three machines which have totally dominated the battlefield for 30 years. Maybe longer than that.
The M1 Abrams, the F-15 and the Warthog. They are all getting pretty old. I wonder if their successors will be as good.
So, how's the Navy doing these days?
-PJ
Cut government spending. Everywhere. Well, everywhere except where “I” want it.
It’s all crap. Are we still planning on sending them to the Fulda gap?
If anybody thinks I'm some crazy loon conspiracy nut, take a look around the news
and do your own due diligence.
In all fairness, tanks have entered the realm of ‘permanent component’ for a modern military. Importantly, this doesn’t mean in their current form, it means in their principle.
To explain, the world changed with Napoleon Bonaparte, because he used his units much like chess pieces. Engineers, artillery, infantry, light cavalry, heavy cavalry, with their movements much as how their pieces move on the chess board.
The Russians, and later the Soviet Union noted that every type of unit that Napoleon used had a modern, technologically more advanced equivalent. In the case of heavy cavalry, they used both tanks and heavy armored helicopters in that role. Even chemical and nuclear weapons did not change this theory.
The US, however, is more fixated on the technology involved instead of its use. And in truth, there is so much technology today devoted to killing tanks that much of their tactical abilities are reduced. But that is only true technologically.
That is, the role of the tank on the battlefield, as heavy cavalry, still exists.
The US has tried to blend light and heavy cavalry together in the form of the Stryker armored vehicle. But this is a risky gambit.
Yet, the die is pretty much cast. So now it is up to the weapons designers to develop a better mousetrap. And I would not be surprised if it was a tank, reborn, to once again fill that particular role on the battlefield.
Enough emphasis on pork. Tanks aren’t invincible, and they do cost a lot in several ways (e.g., transportation). The Army knows what it’s talking about in this case and doesn’t have any extraneous motives.
GPS/laser guided bombs/rockets/missiles and anti-tank aircraft are much more efficient in doing the missions formerly done by tanks, which was primarily taking out other tanks.
These newer weapons are to tanks what aircraft carriers were to battleships.
This is why government spending will never decrease. Defense contractors (and others feeding at the taxpayer trough) have cleverly put facilities in most states, often in small towns, to make their projects impervious to cuts. As soon as the military says it doesn’t want something, the politicians from those areas insist that whatever it is, is vital.
Lockheed Martin, as one example, sells the government the most expensive, useless crap, and the politicians make sure the party never ends.