The End of the Tank? The Army Says it Doesn’t Need it, but Industry Wants to Keep Building it. By Marjorie Censer, Washington Post
… The manufacturing of tanks - powerful but cumbersome - is no longer essential, the military says. In modern warfare, forces must deploy quickly and “project power over great distances.” Submarines and long-range bombers are needed. Weapons such as drones - nimble and tactical - are the future.
Tanks are something of a relic.
The Army has about 5,000 of them sitting idle or awaiting an upgrade. For the BAE Systems employees in York, keeping the armored vehicle in service means keeping a job. And jobs, after all, are what their representatives in Congress are working to protect in their home districts.
The Army is just one party to this decision. While the military sets its strategic priorities, it’s Congress that allocates money for any purchases. And the defense industry, which ultimately produces the weapons, seeks to influence both the military and Congress…
Comments
I don’t believe in keeping anything “just because.” However . . .
"Nothing replaces a tank when you need one." Hammer999 hits the nail on the head. Sparapet appropriately addresses the issue too ("the most mobile and survivable . . . platform we have"). The tank is the right tool for some jobs – sans creating and buying a much more expensive tool.
This story is not new news. It made the rounds among my (mostly ex-) tanker buddies a year ago. I suspect it was recently provided the to Post with a spin for political reasons. See this Google search (with results): https://www.google.com/search?q=lima%2C+tanks%2C+ordierno%2C+congress&i…
Again, Sparapet: " . . . an industry problem, not a 'future of tanks' problem." I think that statement is correct. However, I suggest that it’s also a political and DOD budget problem. It’s part of a larger problem surrounding (clouding?) the defense budget. When the first articles made the rounds, the discussion among my friends addressed: the problems of “pork;” cutting the force while saving jobs in Lima; and more recently (this hasn’t died) compensation and retirement being considered while this kind of activity ("pork") is rampant.
Great... Here we go again... When the F-4 was built, it was built with no cannon... Because guns were obsolete... Why a super duper missile is better. Except when it isn't.
What really is worrisome is that the brass have forgotten this lesson. I am not saying tanks will not evolve... But right now we have nothing that fills that gap.
By this line of thinking, manned combat aircraft is obsolete, helo's especially.
In fact most of what we use is. The laptop I am using has more power than the 1100 lb computer the Apache carried for years and may still.
We must have systems for land, sea and air. They will change. Nothing replaces a tank when you need one.
I remember going to mountain school years ago where I was told "The US Army does not fight in the mountains"... What are those big piles of dirt I see in Afghanistan again?
Our senior leadership does more damage to our preparedness than the Taliban ever has or will.
The bottom line is the US never has the right stuff at the right time. Until no one else fields one I think we better keep them. Because our senior leadership cannot pick a field uniform that works, let alone something as important as this.
Well focusing on the Pentagon/DoD side for a moment, maybe the "forced" austerity will cause a) the Pentagon/DoD to focus on finding it's own "pork" and cutting out the unnecessary funding/waste that is probably so prevalent within the culture that it has become "accepted" (much like our political system that can't pass a bill without loading the bill with all kinds of unrelated funding) b) force some innovation within the culture and c) streamline the entire DoD's procurement system. I know there was a series of articles on here recently about how the DoD is so redundant and wasteful compared to a major business/corporation on structure, spending, etc. While I am an economic/business dummy, it seemed that the author of those pieces was making some great points about how much "really gets wasted" within the current system. Of course, a culture that is addicted to "spend everything by the end of the fiscal year" rather than a culture based on profit and innovation (to survive on a daily/monthly/yearly cycle like those in the real world have too) is doomed to become a bureaucratic glutton feeding until possibly dying of its own addiction instead of staying trim and in top shape for that upcoming marathon.
Unfortunately, much like the national level above it, it will probably take a major crisis before any real change ever happens. Fortunately, I feel America usually responds well in times of crisis though I hate thinking that it takes a crisis to bring out our better selves.
I’m not disagreeing with anything anyone has written.
Regarding the military (not just tanks), this isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last, time this issue (what to fund/where to fund) has arisen. I think most of our military’s leaders have strong opinions about the military’s role in warfighting, diplomacy, and defense. I think they would like to have a substantive force equipped with the latest technology and weapons systems (abilities to appropriately act and react).
Our military serves at the will of its civilian masters. Here’s the problem, in this economic environment: If Representative X knows that he/she is putting a home-state (or campaign contributing) business over the needs of the force then what leverage does the military have to make it right? What tools can it use? How does the military get what it needs when (especially in periods of peace and economic gloom and doom) there is a media and public perception that the “pentagon budget’ is bloated?
Points well taken and I was definitely not trying to make the argument against armor, especially heavy armor. I do believe, just like the aircraft carrier, that armor will always have a place on the battlefield. In fact I am a huge proponent of armor. With that being said, the military finds itself today in a very sticky point; how to continue to fund the expensive assets that it may someday have to use in anger. As pointed out, letting the capability completely vanish, especially the knowledge and skills to produce and use these systems, is something that would be folly to let go. Unfortunately, as pointed out, our priorities always seem to be focused somewhere else when crisis hits.
Sparapet:
All your points are very well taken. I have just two comments.
The importance of keeping tank designs teams (preferably more than one) intact and busy even if only making experimental models is very great. Tanks are complicated machines that operate in very demanding environments and designing them properly isn't something an inexperienced team would be able to do.
Also about American reverence for airplanes. The Chinese army was the beneficiary of almost complete air supremacy over the Japanese in China in 1944. This was courtesy of American aid, training and the USAAF 14th Air Force. That didn't stop the Japanese from shattering Chinese forces in the Ichi-Go offensive. The Chinese were very brave but inexpert compared to the Japanese and air power couldn't make it up. More Americans should know this.
In Washington, when the subject of allocating funds is discussed, the silliness of an argument seldom prevents the argument from being made. Unfortunately, many of the people who make the arguments know they are silly. That sort of discussion requires the use of a different version of English than that which is familiar to most of us.
The same can be said of the French tanks in 1940. (I retract the technologically inferior comment :)) I recall an Armor officer commenting that if in Desert Storm the Iraqis had M1A1's and we had T-72's, we would have still won because our crews were better trained, our tactics superior, and our aggression overwhelming (kinda like Wehrmacht 1940-1942).
History points quite effectively at several facts. Overwhelming air superiority in the West and the East in WWII did not invalidate the need for Shermans and T-34s (though the absence of Air superiority a la Bulge proved the value of CAS). It did not invalidate the need for Abrams in Desert Storm or OIF I.II.III.IV.V (by VI we were done fighting organized resistance and had 200,000 Iraqi infantry in support). It did not invalidate the threat of land invasion that forced Milosevic to capitulate (when 1AD(?) started to mass on the Kosovo border).
The MBT's coercive power is undeniable, especially in the offensive, and especially in state-on-state war. To bring it back to OIF I, a look at the assault across the Euphrates near Mahmudiya and the following push to OBJ Spartan makes for very different outcomes with and without MBTs.
But OIF was a Corps sized mission (as was Desert Storm). We have enough MBT's to pull off Corps sized invasions all day long. Indeed, we may have more tanks than we need, all considered. None of which has any relevance to the silly argument about future lighter and more deployable forces. Unless of course the proponents are under the dangerous illusion that state-on-state war is a "thing of the past".
I have to disagree with your last comment about the Soviet's tank technology at the start of the German invasion in 1941 "...and technologically inferior, Soviet contingent of tanks..."…
In fact, it was the Germans who were quite surprised by the quality of the Soviet armor, specifically the T-34s and KV-1s. Even the German anti-tank units, armed with the Pak 36 37mm guns, found out how under-gunned they were against the Soviet's medium-heavy armor. This is illuminated by the not so flattering nickname given to the Pak 36 "Heeresanklopfgerät" or in English "army door knocking device". What saved the Germans was the fact that a) the Soviets were caught flat footed b) employed poorly (as you mentioned) and c) the Germans advanced so quickly up to December of 1941 that many Soviet units were completely bi-passed and cut off (and often surrendering en masse after being cut off).
With that being said, the Germans learned really quickly that Soviet medium-heavy armor such as the T-34s and KV-1s was way more capable than the armor the Germans rolled into the USSR with. That was why the Germans put so much effort into producing the Panzer V Panther and Panzer VI Tiger tanks.
Also keep in mind that the eastern Front remained the "classic large tank battle" front. The Germans on the Western front, while no doubt much better armed than their allied counterparts when it came to armor, couldn't compete with the lack of air superiority thus relegating their armor into "mobile pill boxes" that they had to constantly keep camouflaged less they be spotted and jumped on by allied tank busters such as the P-47 Thunderbolts and Hawker Typhoons.
I suppose one could hypothesize that the cost of restarting production is less than the cost maintaining idle capacity. But that argument needs to be made, and it hasn't. BAE and GD aren't going to argue that. So it's left to the government to commission such an analysis.
Along those lines, one could also argue that the current inventory is sufficient to meet any conceivable threat (let's face it, the German army invading the USSR had fewer tanks than we do now, against a numerically superior, but poorly employed and technologically inferior, Soviet contingent of tanks). In which case, the time the current inventory would last in a conflict would be long enough to restart production. Again, someone needs to make these arguments.
The absolutely parochial and specious "lighter, faster, no enemy like us" argument is the one I take categorical issue with. That argument smacks of fashion, what-the-boss-wants-to-hear (aka brown-nosing), and incentive dollars.
The first two arguments are arguments about resourcing and capability. The third argument is about fads and pet ideas. The Post article makes no distinction between the serious and childish. Until the MBT as a platform can be shown to be inferior to another platform, it is still your best option, because the other guy with the MBT will still have an MBT even if you don't. The question of how many you need and how fast can you make them has nothing to do with the platform unless it becomes unaffordable. After 30 years in service, it's pretty affordable, all considered.
Sparapet:
If the industrial base that is capable of designing and producing tanks disappears, doesn't that mean the end of the tank, regardless of its combat utility? It seems to me it is a distinction without a difference if tanks disappear because they are wrongly judged to have no utility or because we can't make any anymore. It is still the end of the tank.
The tank has been obsolete since I was a cadet 11 years ago. In fact, the tank was obsolete in 1990's. We can say that the tank has been obsolete according to some theory or another since on or about the time of its invention. The tank is a weapons platform. If you can deliver the firepower+survivability+mobility (or some alternative) of an MBT on a non-MBT platform then go for it, provide it. Until that time, the tank is the most mobile and survivable 120mm canon + HMG platform we have.
I understand industry is fighting to keep its capacity alive in light of the fact that the Army/USMC have nearly fully modernized units. I also understand that a focus on future systems have slowed the development of new (and therefore replacement) upgrades for the Abrams. But that is an industry problem, not a "future of tanks" problem.
One does have to ask if rapid replacement of the current number and configuration of MBT's is feasible (in case of unexpected losses)without maintaining the factories in idle/stand-by (and therefore funded) mode. But again, that is not a question of the platform's utility.
On a final note, a more deployable Army doesn't mean nothing heavy. It means enough light BCTs to accomplish the goals you imagine tasking that Army with that require such deployability. Rapid deployment is one criterion. Just because you got there doesn't mean you are equipped to win.