In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
Light, mobile weapons win over lumbering tanks
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Light, mobile weapons win over lumbering tanks
By LANCE GAY
Scripps Howard News Service
August 14, 2002
WASHINGTON - The days of the Army's main battle tank are coming to an end.
There is no longer a threat from the former Soviet Union to pour tanks into the plains of Western Europe through Germany's Fulda Gap, and there is no industrialized nation putting together a tank army that's a threat to the United States.
U.S. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki last month signed off on the Army's latest battle plan for the future, dubbed "Objective Force," which will feature equipment that can be quickly deployed in areas like Kosovo. The lumbering M-1 Abrams battle tank was too large to maneuver through Kosovo's streets, and too heavy to transverse crumbling bridges.
Jane's Defense Week says Shinseki's July 25 decision to cut future funding for heavy armor like the Abrams main battle tank is the latest in a series of cutbacks the Army has made in traditional forces to fight future wars, where light rather than might is expected to prevail. The decision doesn't mean the Abrams will be sidelined as parade ground pieces, but that the Army won't seek funding to modernize the 8,800 Abrams that were made.
Veterans of Cold War budget battles say the Army's decision vindicates the arguments of military reformers. They have long argued the Abrams was a costly blunder - too heavy at 65 tons, too maintenance-dependant for a battlefield, and a nightmare to supply with enough gas to feed its turbine engine, which can consume six gallons to the mile at the top speed of 45 miles an hour.
"Junk 'em," said Pierre Sprey, one of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's "brain trust," who still maintains the Army would be better off updating the diesel-powered M-48 - the Army's 45-ton Pershing main battle tank produced in 1948.
Sprey, who now runs Mapleshade Records, a recording studio in Washington's Maryland suburbs that features East Coast blues and jazz, contends the M-1 Abrams "is one of the worst tanks in the world" and scoffs at the Army boasts about the effectiveness of the tank.
Although the Army claims the 1991 Persian Gulf War showed the power of the Abrams, Sprey says the tank's flaws were the main reason Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard escaped back to Baghdad during Desert Storm.
The tanks were supposed to do a pincer movement behind enemy lines to capture the retreating Iraqi troops after the assault on Kuwait began, but Sprey said the pincer failed to close because the desert dust clogged the filters of the Abram's high-tech turbine engines, causing the tanks to stop for maintenance and new filters every two hours, resulting in fatal delays.
Sprey stressed he is not against tanks and said it's foolish to conclude that tanks are now headed the way of horses and crossbows in a modern army. The Army would rush out plans for a new tank if the United States saw an industrialized country militarizing on the scale of Soviets or Germans, he said.
Although Hollywood scriptwriters love tank-on-tank confrontations, the main advantage of the tank on the battlefield is for getting behind enemy front lines and using its machine gun to disrupt the supply chain keeping the front line in food and ammunition.
Sprey quotes World War II Gen. George Patton as saying "the function of the tank is to bring machine guns to bear on the soft underbelly of the enemy."
The United States is not the only country re-thinking the Army's love of heavy tanks. Britain's defense ministry last year announced it has no plans to replace its Challenger, the British Army's 70-ton main battle tank, and will keep the remaining tanks in service only until 2025. Germany is trying to convert its Leopard tanks into fire-fighting equipment.
Marcus Corbin, a defense analyst at the Center for Defense Information, said in spite of impressive armor - today composed of composite ceramic and titanium- big tanks aren't invulnerable.
He said the Pentagon has developed newer generations of precision-guided missiles delivered by helicopters, planes or unmanned drones that hit tanks on the lid of tank - a notorious thin spot.
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Egyptian troops showed that the other area of vulnerability of the tank is axle or tread, and confident Israeli forces suffered heavy tank losses to Egyptian ground troops using antiquated grenades and missiles.
Corbin said helicopters today are doing much of the work generals once relied on tanks to do. "In many ways, armored helicopters are replacing the tanks," Corbin said. "If you put an Apache helicopter against a tank, I would go with the helicopter and its 16 Hellfire missiles."
Corbin said tanks are still fearsome weapons used in Third World battlefields, where the enemy doesn't have airpower or precision guided missiles to challenge them, although the Army has not used M-1 tanks in Afghanistan or the Philippines to fight al Qaeda.
"The big thing is the psychological element - they are so big and make so much noise that they still can be useful," he said. "But their role as a centerpiece of the army force is gone."
http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=TANKS-08-14-02&cat=AN
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
By LANCE GAY
Scripps Howard News Service
August 14, 2002
WASHINGTON - The days of the Army's main battle tank are coming to an end.
There is no longer a threat from the former Soviet Union to pour tanks into the plains of Western Europe through Germany's Fulda Gap, and there is no industrialized nation putting together a tank army that's a threat to the United States.
U.S. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki last month signed off on the Army's latest battle plan for the future, dubbed "Objective Force," which will feature equipment that can be quickly deployed in areas like Kosovo. The lumbering M-1 Abrams battle tank was too large to maneuver through Kosovo's streets, and too heavy to transverse crumbling bridges.
Jane's Defense Week says Shinseki's July 25 decision to cut future funding for heavy armor like the Abrams main battle tank is the latest in a series of cutbacks the Army has made in traditional forces to fight future wars, where light rather than might is expected to prevail. The decision doesn't mean the Abrams will be sidelined as parade ground pieces, but that the Army won't seek funding to modernize the 8,800 Abrams that were made.
Veterans of Cold War budget battles say the Army's decision vindicates the arguments of military reformers. They have long argued the Abrams was a costly blunder - too heavy at 65 tons, too maintenance-dependant for a battlefield, and a nightmare to supply with enough gas to feed its turbine engine, which can consume six gallons to the mile at the top speed of 45 miles an hour.
"Junk 'em," said Pierre Sprey, one of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's "brain trust," who still maintains the Army would be better off updating the diesel-powered M-48 - the Army's 45-ton Pershing main battle tank produced in 1948.
Sprey, who now runs Mapleshade Records, a recording studio in Washington's Maryland suburbs that features East Coast blues and jazz, contends the M-1 Abrams "is one of the worst tanks in the world" and scoffs at the Army boasts about the effectiveness of the tank.
Although the Army claims the 1991 Persian Gulf War showed the power of the Abrams, Sprey says the tank's flaws were the main reason Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard escaped back to Baghdad during Desert Storm.
The tanks were supposed to do a pincer movement behind enemy lines to capture the retreating Iraqi troops after the assault on Kuwait began, but Sprey said the pincer failed to close because the desert dust clogged the filters of the Abram's high-tech turbine engines, causing the tanks to stop for maintenance and new filters every two hours, resulting in fatal delays.
Sprey stressed he is not against tanks and said it's foolish to conclude that tanks are now headed the way of horses and crossbows in a modern army. The Army would rush out plans for a new tank if the United States saw an industrialized country militarizing on the scale of Soviets or Germans, he said.
Although Hollywood scriptwriters love tank-on-tank confrontations, the main advantage of the tank on the battlefield is for getting behind enemy front lines and using its machine gun to disrupt the supply chain keeping the front line in food and ammunition.
Sprey quotes World War II Gen. George Patton as saying "the function of the tank is to bring machine guns to bear on the soft underbelly of the enemy."
The United States is not the only country re-thinking the Army's love of heavy tanks. Britain's defense ministry last year announced it has no plans to replace its Challenger, the British Army's 70-ton main battle tank, and will keep the remaining tanks in service only until 2025. Germany is trying to convert its Leopard tanks into fire-fighting equipment.
Marcus Corbin, a defense analyst at the Center for Defense Information, said in spite of impressive armor - today composed of composite ceramic and titanium- big tanks aren't invulnerable.
He said the Pentagon has developed newer generations of precision-guided missiles delivered by helicopters, planes or unmanned drones that hit tanks on the lid of tank - a notorious thin spot.
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Egyptian troops showed that the other area of vulnerability of the tank is axle or tread, and confident Israeli forces suffered heavy tank losses to Egyptian ground troops using antiquated grenades and missiles.
Corbin said helicopters today are doing much of the work generals once relied on tanks to do. "In many ways, armored helicopters are replacing the tanks," Corbin said. "If you put an Apache helicopter against a tank, I would go with the helicopter and its 16 Hellfire missiles."
Corbin said tanks are still fearsome weapons used in Third World battlefields, where the enemy doesn't have airpower or precision guided missiles to challenge them, although the Army has not used M-1 tanks in Afghanistan or the Philippines to fight al Qaeda.
"The big thing is the psychological element - they are so big and make so much noise that they still can be useful," he said. "But their role as a centerpiece of the army force is gone."
http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=TANKS-08-14-02&cat=AN
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Comments
Edited by - Iconoclast on 08/15/2002 11:43:35