There’s no reason why Our Troops should be without APS !!!
The Army was justifying it as “We’re going to wait for Raytheon to make the QuickKill APS, there’s no real rush, for now our armor is good enough.” This was a common attitude among NATO nations, only with the name of the contractor and system changing.
And then came Syria, where everyone (and I mean everyone, because videos of these fights showed up on YouTube) suddenly found out that yes, the Russian Konkurs and Kornet missiles really *did* work exactly as advertised and would cheerfully shred front line NATO tank armor. NATO thought the capabilities of Konkurs and Kornet were overblown (just like a lot of not terribly bright Freepers think about any foreign weapon system) despite the Indians and the Israelis telling them (and us) otherwise.
The US Army got a nasty wakeup call that they couldn’t hit the snooze button on any more and in 2018 placed the first of a series of rush orders with the Israelis to retrofit the Israeli Trophy APS to our M1s.
The reason our troops didn’t have APS earlier? Stupidity, parochialism/Not Invented Here syndrome and unfounded feelings of superiority.