Brandon J. Weichert
No matter how awesome the AbramsX will be, it will likely never be worth the cost in the age of advanced drone warfare and anti-tank weapons.
The United States Army is quite proud of itself as it shows off its designs for a new version of its iconic M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank (MBT). To be clear, the Abrams MBT is the Army’s greatest tank ever conceived. The tank single-handedly defeated Saddam Hussein’s Soviet-armed army during the ground campaign of the 1991 Gulf War.
Yet, those days are over—and the Ukraine War shows how muddled the record of MBTs are in the age of drones. So why is th Pentagon blowing through so much of its massive budget to build systems that, no matter how advanced, will not perform as well as their designers claim?
The History and Specs of the “AbramsX” Tank
General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) unveiled the so-called “AbramsX” at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in 2022. Designed to address the limitations of the current M1A2 Abrams while incorporating cutting-edge technologies, AbramsX aims to ensure American armored dominance well into the 2050s. But it is extremely dubious that the hype surrounding the AbramsX will result in a tank that can stand up to the AI-driven drones and hypersonic weapons of the future battlefield.
Originally, the Army had intended to simply make another upgraded variant of the original Abrams. But the Pentagon chose to cancel the proposed M1A2 SEPv4 in favor of the more ambitious M1E3 Abrams, the precursor to the AbramsX.
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