Washington: Instead of traipsing blindly through the byzantine labyrinth that is the regular defence acquisition process to modernise its nearly 40-year-old M1 Abrams tank, the US Army Chief of Staff General Randy George has ordered the service and its industry partners to move much more quickly to get something better, said his chief technology officer, Dr Alex Miller.
“We don’t want to turn into Pentagon Wars,” Miller said in a recent interview at the Pentagon, referring to a satirical comedy exposing bureaucratic dysfunction of the 1970s development of the Army’s Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
The Army has long adhered to acquisition timelines in which a program could be greenlit, but then take a decade to proceed through technology maturation “so that the government can feel comfortable and understand all the potential risks that could ever happen,” Miller said. “Because you have to understand all of the environment and all the technology so well that the decision you make today is right for 30 years, and that doesn’t make sense anymore.”
The Army decided in September 2023 that it would pursue a more significant modernisation effort for the Abrams tank, rather than go through with planned upgrades to increase the tank’s mobility and survivability on the battlefield.
The service then awarded a contract to General Dynamics Land Systems — Abrams’ original equipment manufacturer — in the spring of 2024 to begin shaping requirements and work on a preliminary design of the new tank variant.
A lighter, high-tech Abrams tank is taking shape.
But little has been revealed over the last year about those plans, except that the Army wanted to align the fielding of the new M1E3 with the fielding of its Bradley replacement, the M30 Mechanised Infantry Combat Vehicle, which is expected in the early 2030s.
