"The World’s Best Tank Has the World’s Longest Designation" Topic

"The U.S. occupation of Iraq is over. The Afghanistan war is winding down. Today America faces "emerging threats in an increasingly sophisticated technological environment," according to Gen. John Campbell, the Army vice chief of staff.

For the U.S. ground combat branches that means a renewed emphasis on fast-moving armored warfare. The Army and Marines are dusting off heavy vehicles that played a minor role in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this series, we spotlight some of the more obscure, weird and lamented armored behemoths. The battle wagons of a new era of warfare. The focus of this volume — the Army's latest M-1 tank … with all the bells and whistles…"

Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Just sounds like we are doing the same thing that was done with the M1 Sherman and all the variants. I would agree that the current crop of Abrams are a completely different tank than the early M1A1s

One thing the article did not go into detail about is that in addition to all the upgrades to the Abrams United States Armored forces along with British now have a plethora of real combat experience and learning. That is a qualitative asset that cannot be underestimated if the balloon were to go up in the near future. Which I doubt will happen.

M1a2SEPv2?????….just call it the "Easy-Peasey".

Wait the M1a1AIMv2???…Did A.I.M. design this one?

We told the Army to put to infantry phones on the prototypes back in 1980. But did the "experts" listen? Of course not. After all, what does a new 2LT know?

Phones are a great idea, but I thought there was a problem with the engine exhaust in the rear on the original tanks. It was a little hot.

The phone box on the M-60 series tanks was over the right rear fender. That is the same place they could have put it on the M-1, where it would have been out of the way of the exhaust.

LOL !! You got that right Cold Steel !

merkava is not a very long word
it means chariot

The Merk is a very good tank, probably the only tank in the world more survivable than the Abrams (and that's one hell of a bar to clear!).

But I don't know that I would call the current, top-of-the-line Merk IV better than the M1A2. The Abram's Commander's Independent Thermal Viewer (CITV), which lets the commander search for a target and mark it for the gunner to engage after the current target gets blasted, makes a huge difference.

To be honest, I'm expecting newer tanks to have both a CITV and a driver's independent thermal viewer. Driver's viewer may not have the target-marking capabilities of the Commander's viewer, but giving everyone a thermal viewer (with or without a more ordinary night-vision camera) will only improve overall situational awareness.

The driver does have a thermal optic on the M1A2. It's just a drop-in unit that replaces the old fishbowl style driver's night optic.

I meant a driver's thermal viewer that followed the movements of the driver's head or some funky sensor-fusion display like the F35 has, as opposed to an only-looks-straight-ahead viewer.

Dunno. Speaking as a tanker, the driver needs to be focused straight ahead. If I was going to pick someone to get another optic, I'd put a screen over by the loader's station for him to run the CROW, so that way it's the CITV, GPS, and the CROW scanning at once instead of the GPS+CITV or the CROW.

For the driver, some blind spot cameras (like directly to the rear and maybe left/right front skirts) would be helpful. But driving the tank is a full time job. If he's driving right, I don't think he's going to be scanning for targets.

Without wishing to get into a 'our tank is better than your tank' shouting match. I thought that it is the Merkava and the Challenger II that are the most survivable tanks in the world…

NOT the Abrams.

What is the basis for your belief, Bindon?

Looking at loses in combat really…even if you scale it to take into account the much larger numbers of Abrams used, the Challenger has a better survival rate

In 1944 they stuck telephones on the back of shermans.

The Challenger II was in a much less active AO, and was deployed much less aggressively (not in the "hearts and minds" sense, more the "politically unacceptable to lose one of these" sense). It faced only T-55s in combat, and never was exposed to the sort of concentrated urban fight the Abrams was.

So no. Challenger II isn't somehow the wondertank tank, and the Merkava suffered pretty bad in Lebanon. Given similar missions to the Abrams, you'd have lost just as many of each of those thanks, just as much as the Abrams would have been roughly handled in Lebanon too given similar crews.

If you get down to it you can easily figure out the top 5 or so tanks with some high degree of consensus. But it's pretty stupid to really try to pick a best one of those top few tanks simply because of how much of it comes down to simply which one of them you "like" more than a practical performance difference.

Re: Phones

Yeah but the SEP v2 has it hard wired into the tanks commo system (it even has the same junction box as where you hook in the tank crewman's helmet). The World War Two version was just strung through the commander's hatch from my understanding.

Possibly so, but one did survive 14 RPG hits, which is rather impressive…

Yep. I know M1 tankers who've survived a similar amount. One of them actually got the Bronze Star for parking his tank between the enemy and his wingman while the wingman attempted to fix a broken track.

Especially on the frontal arc shrugging off older model RPG-7 rounds is no big deal, and the Iraqis especially insisted on firing the fragmentation and anti-personnel kind at tanks quite often.

Challenger 2s never operated in an AO with deep buried IEDs, EFPs, proliferation of RPG-29s, or did the mini-Stalingrad that was Fallujah. Don't get me wrong they're not bad tanks, but they'd be just as hosed as the Abrams was if AOs were swapped.