i saw a concept drawing once of an M1 with a GAU-8 Avenger cannon mounted on it for urban warfare, BAD ASS!!!
Posted on 11/19/2019 6:49:44 AM PST by Lowell1775
The U.S. Army’s newest tank in the summer of 2019 should enter service with the first large unit to use the type.
The Army in late 2017 accepted the very first M-1A2C Abrams tanks. Nearly two years later the service has enough of the new vehicles to equip an entire brigade.
“We’re in the throes of getting that together,” Hank Kennedy, a manager at General Dynamics’ tank plant in Lima Ohio, told Lima News.
The “first brigade is critical because we need to get [them] into the soldiers’ hands so they can get trained on it and everything else,” Kennedy said.
A U.S. Army armored brigade typically operates around 100 tanks. The Army has 16 armored brigades as part of a total force of 58 combat brigades.
The M-1A2C is the latest variant of Abrams to enter production. Congress in 2019 gave the Army $1.5 billion to buy 135 M-1s from General Dynamics, extending a program that began in the 1970s.
The Army’s budget proposal for 2020 asks for 174 new and upgraded tanks.
The new M-1A2C Abrams boasts new active and passive protection that could help to protect it from the latest enemy weaponry. The most obvious new features of the M-1A2C are the vehicle's Trophy active-protection systems and an additional slab of armor on the front of its turret.
Trophy uses a radar to detect incoming missiles and rockets then fires tiny projectiles to intercept the munitions. The Army also is back-fitting Trophy to some older M-1 models.
The first M-1 entered service with the Army in 1980. The original M-1 packed a 105-millimeter gun. The Army bought 3,300 of them. In 1984 the Army added thicker armor to a batch of new M-1s and called these 900 tanks M-1IPs. The U.S. military no longer uses these early M-1s.
A major upgrade in 1986 added a new 120-millimeter gun. This is the M-1A1. The Army and Marines bought 5,200 copies through 1992. Roughly a thousand M-1A1s still are in service with the Marines and Army National Guard. Another 3,000 or so are in storage.
There are a bewildering number of subvariants of the M-1A1, each boasting incremental improvements in drive-train, armor and electronics. The latest upgrade, the M-1A1SA, has a factory-fresh engine, digital electronics and a top-secret armor blend that includes a thin layer of uranium.
The Army plans to retire all M-1A1SAs by 2025.
The M-1A2 appeared in 1992. It’s pretty much a new tank, with better armor than the basic M-1A1 plus a new internal layout and fresh sensors that together allow the gunner and the commander independently to search for targets.
The Army has acquired around 1,500 M-1A2s and converted most of them to the System Enhancement Package Version 2 standard. The M-1A2SEPv2, which General Dynamics describes as a "digital tank," features high-end computers, a remotely-operated machine gun on the turret and a dozen batteries that allow the tank quietly to operate its sensors without turning on its engine.
The M-1A2C in essence is a better-protected M-1A2SEPv2 that's also easier to upgrade. In addition to Trophy and more armor, the new tank boasts more electrical power, better diagnostic systems and a data-link that's compatible with programmable ammunition types that are in development.
"The Abrams M-1A2C can host any mature technology the Army deems operationally relevant," the Army stated.
The latest version of the M-1 arguably is the best tank in the world. For now.
Russia and China both are developing new fighting vehicles. Russia's high-tech Armata tank has run into development problems. China successfully has fielded hundreds of new Type 99A tanks that roughly are similar to mid-generation, digital M-1s.
But China has struggled to adapt old-style doctrine to its new armor. In early 2019, the Chinese army's 81st Group Army, riding in Type 99As, lost a mock battle during a war game in Mongolia, Global Times reported, citing the state-run CCTV television news network.
"We rushed with the Type 99A too close to the frontline, which did not optimize the use of the tank's combat capability," CCTV quoted Xu Chengbiao, a battalion commander in the brigade, as saying.
"We only studied the capabilities of older tanks, but have not completely understood new ones," Zhao Jianxin, another battalion commander, reportedly told CCTV.
Anticipating the day when Russia resumes modernizing its tank corps and China figures out how to use its own new fighting vehicles, the U.S. Army already is planning a new M-1 variant to follow the M-1A2C.
The "cornerstone technology" of the M-1A2D is a new infrared sensor, according to the Army. The newest Abrams will also sport a new laser range-finder and will be compatible with artificial intelligence that could make the tank more autonomous, the Army stated.
The plant in Lima, the only factory in the United States that builds tanks, nearly is doubling its workforce in anticipation of large orders for new tanks.
Kennedy told Lima News the tank plant’s workforce has grown from around 500 to more than 600 since a hiring spree started in late 2018. He said he expects the workforce to expand to 700 by the end of 2019 and exceed 900 in 2020.
David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad. This article first appeared earlier this year.
I disagree. If the amplitude is high enough to melt your alternator (bridge across and melt wires) and short across your battery then it would kill you first.
Ummm, alternators require control circuitry, which includes semiconductors. You have to go back to generators to avoid that.
They require rectifiers. Rectifiers take the alternating waveform and rectify it to create a basic DC that is filtered to remove ripple.
And yes, you need a generator.... which old cars have.
Thinking about it more, the old tech diodes were massive, mostly because the technology wasn’t refined, and might actually survive an EMP.
A bridge rectifier in an alternator in a modern car is probably robust enough to ride through an EMP. It is the small geometry computer chip and computer control system that would fry.
For convenience, I installed a solid state cut out on my old generator based car. It would probably survive simply because it is a power device, capable of dissipating a lot of power, and it is a large geometry.
I was formerly involved in high energy EMI/RFI testing for cell phone towertop equipment and we occasionally used the testing site and gear on old junker vehicles. No, the diode trio will not survive, not even on a 68 GM B-Body. All of the things I mentioned earlier were things we saw happen in the test cell.
How did if fail? Damage and non-function or drop out and recovery as soon as the source was gone. The two standards...
And was the 68 GM car modified. People restoromod old cars and then they are no longer old. I put a solid state cut out on my 29 Model A Ford. The device is huge.
We tested at an OATS.
Cell? Sounds like an anechoic chamber? Surprising that you could fit a car in a chamber.
Radiated or conducted?
I also saw an EMP test range/site once and you could definitely fit a car in it; a tank, a jet fighter,...
Adblock slows down my system. It consumes way too much RAM and CPU cycles.
I’ve used it in the past, but uninstalled it.
Trust me when I say, The National Interest has many, many more ads than the typical web site.
I did them so. Doubt it would matter, but I did use the Contact Us page to complain.
The cars were usually bog standard junkers bought pre-Cash-For-Clunkers for a few hundred bucks at most. Don’t recall seeing any significant or pertinent modifications. The batteries wouldn’t necessarily short out but the hydrogen gas in/around them would sometimes ignite impressively (which was part of why we kept doing this). Alternators would be non-functional afterwards, points would pit and/or spotweld.
Interestingly, the later cars with EFI tended to actually do better. Aside from the alternators (which was almost always a guaranteed kill, no matter how old the vehicle was), the additional shielding required by EFI tended to make it more “reboot and go”. The big early heavily shielded Ford EDIS distributorless modules were surprisingly and ridiculously resistant (we had *lots* of crap Tauruses with bad transmissions that we could get for $100 or less).
Look at uBlock - which is lighter on system resources by far.
This was at a subcontractor for Decibel Products of Dallas Texas. They were having to test entire towertop assemblies, including completed antenna assemblies, so the test cell was pretty big for what they were doing. You could fit two large cars in it, but that was about it; the observation that the cell was large enough for cars by one engineer was what started the after-hours experimentation.
Both conducted and radiated was performed at this particular facility. After some unfortunate ‘rapid disassembly’ incidents with larger objects, conducted EMI testing was perfomed in the same cell.
At least with a BOLO I always know where I stand; “FOR THE HONOR OF THE REGIMENT”.
One BOLO with honor is a whole lot better than a thousand democrat office holders without!
Interesting. So you were testing the interaction of a cell phone with an older automobile?
What was your source? A wand? Conducted or radiated? EMP test? Or was it a frequency sweep?
That would suck — key your cell phone and your car shuts down. Never heard that happening before and there was a theory that it might happen at a gas pump but that was proven to be false.
No, we weren’t testing cell phones. The company was testing towertop equipment and site equipment used in the cell network. The automobiles were after hours goofing around with the engineers to see what if any validity the doomsday EMP prophecies had.
The intended use of the cell was to test things like these:
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/cell-tower-top-antennae-877121.jpg
Er, “The intended use of the cell” should be “the intended use of the company’s testing cell/facility”.
Oh so it wasn’t the same frequency and amplitude as a standard cell transmission. Go it. You guys were goofing around...
So they were able to reproduce the EMP spectrum and amplitude with a cell phone tower? Interesting. Sounds doable.
And you placed a car within proximity of the antenna and started it and looked for a reaction such as batteries exploding and the alternators melting. Got it.
i saw a concept drawing once of an M1 with a GAU-8 Avenger cannon mounted on it for urban warfare, BAD ASS!!!
Yes, there was much beer involved.
Have you ever seen a Tesla coil in operation? Something that you can build as a hobby project.
Well, at least product-improved, 5 tankers having been killed in ammunition fires and 2 in NBC filter fires. 26 Abrams crew members died between 1982 and 2002, and that's waaaay too many for mostly peacetime operations, even to the point that the commander of the Armor Center wrote an article about it in 2003.
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