Quote:
Originally Posted by Oberon
The Whispering Death.
It can see you, you can't see it, you can't hear it, and then it reaches out and touches you.
M1A2 Abrams, soiling Middle Eastern underpants since 1991.
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The M1A2 must be pretty wicked then because it did not enter service until 1992.
They had no problem taking a few out with powerful IEDs though lot of good the thermal vision did then.Every weapon has an Achilles heel.There was a thread a while back that mentioned this.In some cases crewman where killed.
Another huge factor in 1991 is that the Americans had far far superior training and had trained to fight a very determined foe.The IRG was the best of Iraq but nothing compared to the skill of the US Army tank crews who had been trained to be highly accurate and rapid in order to attempt to deal with masses of Warsaw Pact tanks.No tank is invisible and if you took an M1A2 and put people that had little training they would perform very poorly in combat and likely allow a T-72 even to get near enough that it could disable or destroy an Abrams.
In 1991 an Abrams did get disabled by a T-72 on 73 Easting it did not get noticed and laid in wait and fired into the back rear of an M1A1 it destroyed the engine and the ammo storage as it burned the crew was able to get out unharmed.The T-72 got killed by other M1A1s as soon as it had fired its main gun but it did pretty much destroy the Abrams.The Abrams was designed to have high mobility high accuracy and high crew survivability those things it does have but there are men that served as crewman in them that where killed by enemy action.
The Abrams is impressive but there is a whee bit too much legend around it.
This will give you an idea just how hard US tank crews train and this only the basic school active tankers must take a gunnery range test that is very demanding if they fail they will not deploy.I have some good friends from Old Iron Sides which had Abrams stationed in Germany up until a few years ago these guys are very good at what they do without them the Abrams is a high priced hunk of metal.
An impressive machine is nothing without a highly skilled and motivated crew the US military and the Israeli military have proven this fact.