Peter Suciu
The United States military’s M1 Abrams main battle tank (MBT) is nearly half a century old. It was first developed in the days of disco, and first entered service in 1980, as Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency and the world wondered who shot JR.
An upgraded model of the tank, the M1A1, first rolled off the assembly line six years later, at the same time Tom Cruise made the F-14 Tomcat an international star in Top Gun.
Although the Abrams was developed singlemindedly for use in Europe in a conventional war against the Soviet Union, it didn’t see its baptism by fire until 1991 in the desert of Iraq, where it engaged and took out Soviet-designed T-72s with devastating effectiveness.
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