Will Tanks Still Play a Major Part in Battle?  Geeking Out on the New Abrams M1E3 (From the Joe Piscopo Show)

The Army’s new M1E3 Abrams tank prototype is five years ahead of schedule and attracting attention for its formidable capabilities: a Caterpillar engine, hybrid-electric drive, active protection, Xbox controls, and plug-and-play software. Highlights below, and full segment at the link here.

Joe Piscopo: I’m going to geek out on you now.  The M1E3 Abrams tank.  This sounds great, and I love the piece that you wrote about it on Fox News.  Tell us about it.

Rebecca Grant: The M1E3, it’s got all those letters, because it’s a major engineering change. This is the Army’s new tank, and it’s designed to be a silent killer.  It’s a hybrid; it’s going to have a diesel engine and a hybrid electric drive.  There are a lot of other changes coming, including having a three-man crew and video-game-style controls…The most amazing thing about this tank, Joe, because this is a defense program, right?  It is five years early.  They said, “Oh, you can have this tank in 2032.”  And the Army Chief of Staff said, “No way.  I want it now.”  And it rolled out at the Detroit Auto Show in late January, and it should be in the hands of soldiers, with the prototype, maybe by the end of this year.

Joe Piscopo: Very exciting…it looks beautiful.  It looks well-designed.  You think about George Patton when you think about tanks and the Third Army during the Second World War.  But with drones and everything, do tanks still play a major part in battle?

Rebecca Grant: Yes, they do.  And that’s the right question: can tanks survive on the modern battlefield?  This Abrams is designed to do just that.  There have been other models of the Abrams.  Abrams himself was a tank commander at the Battle of the Bulge; that’s who this tank is named after.  But this tank has all the modern features: it’s got software, it’s got reactive armor, which absorbs a blast, and it’s also got active protection.  So, if you shoot at this Abrams tank, it is going to detect where that fire is coming from, fire back, and obliterate you.  Of course, that includes drones.  There’s been some special attention to lessons from the Ukraine war about how to make tanks survivable against drones.

Joe Piscopo: The M1E3 tank can remotely fire a Javelin anti-tank missile with a 2.5-mile range and other weapons, including loitering munitions.   This is quite extraordinary.  But you also said it’s electric…So how do you charge this thing up?  You can’t plug this thing in in the garage, you know.

Rebecca Grant:  Don’t worry, the Army has not gone eco-friendly; it’s all good.   It’s a hybrid, and it’s like a Prius, only it’s a lot bigger.   Also, it’s a tank on a diet.  It’s going to weigh a lot less than the current models of the Abrams because they’ve changed the way the armor is done.  What’s neat about this is that you can switch into the electric hybrid drive mode and sit there and wait for your target to present itself.  That really diminishes what the Army calls the acoustic signature of the tank, and it also means that there’s a lot more electric power on board.  This tank is very connected to other Army units, other tanks, the TOC, the tactical operations center; everything is all connected through this open systems architecture, and it’s also plug and play.  You can put in new capabilities as time goes forward.  It’s also more fuel efficient, and that’s really important when you’re in battle, to minimize your logistics tail.

Joe Piscopo: Dr. Grant writes: “Iraqis facing the Abrams in ‘91 called it whispering death, but the new Abrams takes the silent mode into a new realm, when the tank is running on electric and in heat signature reduction and electric jammers…” So this is like really kind of a stealthy kind of weapon, right?

Rebecca Grant: Yes, this makes it much more difficult for the tank to be targeted, and it makes it much more effective as a fighting platform.   The bottom line why we need these is that you just look at what is happening with Putin and Russia.  We’re going to have to contain Russia for a long time, even after we get a Ukraine ceasefire.  I expect to see these tanks all up and down that line in Europe, from Helsinki to Istanbul.  Ukraine will need to protect that front at some point, and in Poland and around the [Suwalki] gap, that’s where you need the tank to discourage Putin.  Then, if he tries to send something across, you need this new M1E3 Abrams to make sure that he only gets about two inches.

Joe Piscopo:  Wow.  And it’s ready for the battlefield, you’re saying?

Rebecca Grant: The prototype is going to take some experimentation, but what’s so great about this is that they’ve rushed it.  What they do now is they send it out to soldiers, so they can look at the prototype, crawl around it, maneuver in it, and use the systems and get some feedback and say, “Hey, I want you to change, you know, this button over here, etc…” Then it will go into production.

Trump has a lot of great programs underway: the Golden Dome and possibly a new battleship. But this tank will be ready, operationally ready, in 2028, in the last year of President Trump’s term. This is the one we know can deliver because the Army has put such a priority on getting it done, and the tank plant in Lima, Ohio, is going to be able to turn them out.