Gen. Randy George has tasked the service with speeding up the Abrams’ development process.
When it comes to the introduction of new military systems, labor shortages and budgetary constraints have hampered the imminent arrival of platforms across the board in the United States. Next-generation destroyers, aircraft carriers, submarines, bombers, and fighter jets have all fallen victim to timeline pushbacks in recent years, perhaps negatively impacting military readiness. While the Army’s newest main battle tank (MBT) iteration appeared to have fallen off the priority list for the service, the nearly forty-year-old M1 Abrams tank may be receiving its long overdue facelift in the near future.
According to Defense News, U.S. Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George has tasked the service with speeding up the development process for the next-generation MBT variant. Instead of following through with planned upgrades for the Abrams tank, the Army opted to pursue a greater modernization effort for the MBT series back in 2023. While manufacturer General Dynamics has provided vague details surrounding the potential upgrades, movement on the development front has been slow.
According to the Army chief of staff’s chief technology officer, Alex Miller, engineers tasked with putting together the upgraded tank variant have been told to resume work on the tank quickly. Initially, the service predicted the new tank to be developed over a span of sixty-plus months. Now, the service is planning to cut that timeline down by at least a third. Miller specified, “In the last two or three months, we’ve been given a lot of latitude to go, ‘Hey, stop doing silly things, supercharge where you need to supercharge, accept risk where it is responsible and pragmatic. … Don’t encumber yourself on policies and regulations that were made for different pieces … Use all of the things that are legally, morally and acceptable available and stop trying to manage all the risk to the point where there’s no risk because there will always be risk.’”
An Overview of the Abrams tank
When the Abrams MBT was first introduced during the Cold War, its Chobham armor and 120mm main gun made it stand out as a top-tier platform. Within a decade, a second Abrams variant was introduced. Equipped with a commander’s independent thermal viewer and the M1A2 System Enhancement Package, the M1A2 was seen as a step up from its predecessor. General Dynamics revealed its latest Abrams tank variant last year. Expected to feature even greater capabilities than the M1A1 and M12, the Abrams X is set to sport a hybrid propulsion system that is capable of enhancing fuel efficiency, providing greater survivability to the platform with lower thermal and acoustic signatures. The new tank will reportedly also feature an embedded artificial intelligence capability. In terms of protection, the Army aims to incorporate active protection into the tank. Currently, the platform is equipped with the Israeli-designed Trophy Active Protection System. However, since this protective measure is not fully integrated into the tank, consequential tradeoffs make this arrangement not ideal.
About the Author: Maya Carlin
Maya Carlin, National Security Writer with The National Interest, is an analyst with the Center for Security Policy and a former Anna Sobol Levy Fellow at IDC Herzliya in Israel. She has by-lines in many publications, including The National Interest, Jerusalem Post, and Times of Israel. You can follow her on Twitter: @MayaCarlin. Carlin has over 1,000 articles published over the last several years on various defense issues.
Image: DVIDS.
