Scripps Howard News Service April 17, 2003
Battle tank still rolling
By Lance Gay
Although Pentagon strategists last year forecasted the era of the M-1 main battle tank was coming to an end, the war in Iraq demonstrated the ponderous tank is still king of the battlefield.
Yes, the analysts acknowledge, the battle tank, called the Abrams, is overweight at 60 tons and a headache to move around the world to global hotspots. It's also a gas-guzzling pig powered by turbine engines that consume five gallons to the mile, requiring the support of a chain of gas tankers. Running it through the talc-like soils of a Middle East desert also makes the M-1 a maintenance chore because the tank columns have to stop so filters can be changed every three to five hours.
But the Iraq war demonstrated whatever its flaws, there's nothing to match the behemoth on the battlefield.
The Army even showed off its new "Thunder Run" tactics, which rely on the psychological effect the Abrams has on the enemy. U.S. forces drove the tanks through downtown Baghdad as proof U.S. forces dominated the landscape. The tactic was developed after Somalia to show the ability of the force to go into troublesome areas at will.
"The Abrams is still the king of the army," said Patrick Garrett, associate analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington think tank.
Garrett said one of the main lessons the generals learned from Iraq is the Army still needs a heavy-armored force to effectively fight a war with a well equipped enemy.
The Pentagon won't talk about American losses until the military completes its post-war analysis, but reports from the battlefield show three M-1s lost to enemy fire in the Iraqi war. Reports from embedded reporters said the enemy was using hand-held rockets to kill the tanks, and some analysts blamed the losses on Russian-made Kornet anti-tank weapons pointed at vulnerable rear parts of the Abrams.
Garrett said what surprised him was how little the ground war changed between the 1991 Persian Gulf War and this time around.
Although the size of the U.S. force used in Iraq was smaller, he said it took as much time to bring the equipment to the region by ship and position the forces in preparation for the fight. He said the Army didn't even use its more advanced versions of the M-1 tank and Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
Some believe Iraq could be the last hurrah for what the Army calls its "legacy armor."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is pushing all of the military services to come up with plans for fighting wars of the future with lighter forces that are easier to deploy. Decisions on what the future of the Army will look like are due next month, and production aims at putting the new equipment on the field by 2008 or 2010.
The U.S. Army last year cut future funding for heavy armor like the Abrams, signaling an end for the system. Some generals are pushing for a replacement that will be a version of the smaller, more gas efficient 20-ton wheeled tank called the Stryker, which could be easily air-lifted to battlefronts. The Army prefers to ship the Abrams by sea because only one fits inside the giant C-5A cargo plane.
Rumsfeld has signaled he agrees with Stryker critics, who say the vehicle is much too small and vulnerable to be an effective battle tank.
John Reppert, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who now works at Harvard University's Belfer Center, said the lesson he took from the Iraq war was that there is still a role for a heavy battle tank armor on the battlefield. He said there are still large armies in the world that would require the use of a big battle tank like the M1 if a conflict emerged.
"They go wherever they want to go, and whenever they want to go, and they can drive back out," Reppert said. "I think there is going to continue to be a role for the tank. The question is in what numbers."
Army planners conceived of the Abrams in the early 1970s when the Pentagon's war plans were concentrated on confronting the Soviets. The tank entered service in 1983, and most units are equipped with the M1A1 version first built in 1985.
A dramatically upgraded version, the M1A2, appeared in 1993 equipped with digital targeting equipment and improvements to its armor. The Army's 4th Infantry Division, which was still assembling in Kuwait when the heavy fighting ended, is equipped with this upgraded version, but most of the tanks that fought the Iraq war were the older M1A1 versions.
Army Secretary Thomas White says the generals are pleased with the Abrams.
"Once we can get it wherever you want it to get, it creates mayhem," he said. "But it takes awhile to ship it there, and it eats a lot of fuel."
Copyright © 2003, Scripps Howard, Inc.
