It is a strange reality we exist in.

The small amount of older Abrams released into Ukraine have in all respects not shown the same catastrophic weaknesses russian armor has. In particular while the turret armor is still vulnerable on older abrams tanks without armor upgrades crucially the turret basket and ammunition stores from the very beginning featured blowout doors on the outside of the tank to vent a cookoff of ammunition AWAY from the tank. This was done out of a knowledge that some kind of threat would eventually make it through the armor of the Abrams no matter what.

Why does this matter to Geopolitics? Because the world seems to be convinced of a simple narrative that tanks are obsolete and that US military doctrine is obsolete, and I think that is dangerous even though I don’t desire the US to be militarily superior to everyone so it can continue to behave like a child on the world stage.

The reality is that the current rise in incompetence and fascism in the US does not really extend yet to the military structures of the US. Which is all to say that the next Abrams tank is going to be an extremely formidable beast that most of the world turns around and laughs at as an obsolete toy of fascism. This will not be the correct assessment.

To bring it back to why I brought up the Abrams in a Geopolitical context, the designers of the Abrams and implementators of main battle tank doctrine in the US did not need to forsee or understand the threat of drones in order to avoid the same pitfalls russia launched themselves into at terminal velocity.

Understand the context behind the apparently non-political aspects of war and it all resolves into politics eventually.

If you want to replicate the military might of the US, don’t look to drones or tanks, to superior sensors or even to air power, look to a broader philosophy and institutional value system that places keeping the warfighter alive first and foremost as the goal. This is in many ways gone culturally in the US, but that doesn’t mean the retreat of it is instant or that it necessarily will ever reach Main Battle Tank design given how strategically and ideologically important the Abrams is to the US’s self image of military power.

I want to emphasize how radically different this is as an expression of lethal strength vs. the fascist idea of what the capacity for lethal strength is… i.e. a willingness to see life as something that can be tossed away lightly, especially if it is weak or suffering.

I think there is even more of a point to uncover here in that when you examine US politics and the production of Abrams tanks, it becomes pretty quickly apparent that it would not be easy politically to actually halt the production of Abrams tanks even if Main Battle Tanks were truly obsolete.

https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/the-army-tank-that-could-not-be-stopped/

^ During the very middle period of the period of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the necessity for a heavy true Main Battle Tank that could smash advancing russian armored columns to pieces seemed obtuse, outdated and absurd to everyone especially when resources were needed for the Iraq and Afghanistan War in other areas, even then the production of the Abrams could not be stopped because of politics. It is a good thing that the Abrams is still relevant then, though again that has nothing to do with the political immortality of the Abrams. The point was the Abrams was designed with the right priorities.

The very reason the US hasn’t backed itself into the same corner of doubling down on obsolete, deathtrap tanks russia did is because from the beginning the US military prioritized the survivability of the people who were going to use the tool in the development of the Abrams.

That is the Geopolitical point about power, military or otherwise that should be noted by the “Middle Powers” of the world.

Interestingly, what has been seen so far of the expected crew compartment for the M1E3 is also similar in many broad respects to the design of Russia’s T-14 Armata. Despite having made its public debut in 2015, the T-14 has, at best, seen very limited operational service. In addition, the M1E3’s driver will operate the tank via a controller that looks like one that might come with a video game console, which the Army has said is a deliberate choice.

It is not that russia could not have pursued this future, in many ways the M1E3 is precisely amusing because it validates many of the things “western” tank enthusiasts refused to acknowledge about autoloaders and now must either disagree with the designers of the next generation Abrams or admit they were wrong in reflexively hating on the T-14, but the key point is that russia was not able to follow the same path because they already had warehouses full of things the general population of russia had been told for decades were tanks when they were not. They were deathtraps all along, from the very moment they rolled off the production line right up until they charged headfirst into the iron wall of Ukraine’s defenses that never changed for an instant.

The remains of a russian turtle tank after ammunition cooked off from a drone hit.