THE JUGGERNAUT

It was the 1980s.  Reagan was in charge of the country now, and the US was engaged in an urgent rebuilding of our military.

Vietnam was still a fresh wound and the country was emerging from a crisis of confidence in itself and in its institutions.

On the other side of the world, the menace known as the Soviet Union was churning out weapons and had just invaded Afghanistan.

Europe, so the thinking went, or the Middle East at large, might be next.

Or perhaps both at once.  Or perhaps they would just pound the US with a surprise nuclear first strike.

Nikita Khruschev had sworn to bury us.

The Soviets weren’t building all of their stuff for show, and were openly preparing for The Big One with us. The Soviet menace blared from every side—TV, books, and movies—and had transfixed me. My America and this entity were on a collision course.

My idiotic pacifist classmates told me I was paranoid.  I knew better.  I knew the things I was reading were fiction, but behind it was a very real, deadly, and evil menace that was killing and enslaving many people on the other side of the world.

On this particular day I’d left the video arcade by way of the bookstore and sat down in the mall reading a Popular Mechanics issue that had a rather gripping cover.  It was a very well-drawn Soviet T-72 tank—charging towards the viewer in exquisite detail with a gun bore about three feet wide.

The issue talked about America’s new M-1 Abrams tank, its close cousin the German Leopard 2, the British Chieftain, and some other vehicles I’d never heard of before.

How did these US and NATO tanks stack up against the Soviet tanks?  Our brand-new M-1 was “probably the best all around tank,” it said, “but expensive compared to the opposition.”  And somewhere out there would be a new Soviet “T-80.”  I read on….

It seemed America had a tank problem—and a big one.

The problem was the Soviets had thousands of tanks, thousands more than the US did, or all the other Western countries put together.

It was feared that they could charge and overwhelm NATO or the vital oil fields of the Mideast before we could get enough mass over there to stop them in a hypothetical World War Three scenario.

The article went on to discuss “smart weapons,” such as missiles that could come down overhead a Soviet tank formation and pick them off.  The articles seemed skeptical; there was at least one cartoon around with two Soviet officers eating at a Paris restaurant and asking, “By the way, Comrade:  Who won the air war?”

Airplanes might be able to take on other airplanes—but what about stopping huge tanks?  The missiles seemed small.

I read and watched numerous talking heads insist the US was wasting its money on tanks, and that our “smart weapons” were going to break down in the “real” mud and blood of an outside-the-laboratory battlefield.

Many thought the Soviets might have it right by taking the approach they appeared to be:  making a large number of good-enough weapons to overwhelm a force with fewer “great” weapons.

There was historical precedent.

In World War Two, the tanks of the US and allied armies had generally been inferior to the German Panther and Tiger tanks in capability; but we built three or more for every one they built.  The rest was history.

Fast forward to January, 1991.

Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait with a force of all of the previously discussed Soviet Cold War arms.

We were going to serve an eviction.

None other than retired Colonel David Hackworth was skeptical that the United States and Coalition would succeed, at least at first.

The arguments about the money the US had invested in the Cold War US military were entering the wash—the microchip force at its peak versus the force that we might have faced in Europe with the Soviets.

It was the most one-sided military massacre in human history.

The Coalition forces, led by the US, paralyzed the Iraqi Army, air forces, and order of battle like a cobra striking a rat; our M-1 Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters picked off Iraqi tanks that were mostly helpless to return fire.

Our weapons killed everything they hit.

Almost no US tanks took fire, and when they did, their armor and design served them well against the guns of Iraqi tanks.

There was nowhere to hide from us.  Revetments, holes, caves, and reinforced bunkers had bombs dropped into them by precision guidance or by the precision instruments on our aircraft.

Iraqi tanks and vehicles blew up as we sent round after round onto them.

You can divide dialogue about military preparation and power into two eras:

1. The era before the Gulf War, which was rife with Vietnam memories, the discussion of modern war as a slightly improved extension of World War Two, and great skepticism of technology revolutions. Microchips were fragile things—not like the cold steel of real weapons.
2. The era after the high tech (that many were skeptical of—and would rather not admit to now) shattered the Cold War legacy forces and doctrine into flaming scraps in the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait.

Let’s talk about just one of those wonder weapons that did so well—that M-1 Abrams that I first heard of in the shopping mall, that was “probably” the best all-around tank at the time.

The US almost didn’t get the M-1.  If many Cold War generals and “experts” had gotten their way, it would have died in concept.  A few forward-thinking and determined officers and politicians saw the light and kept up the fight for it.

The M-1 had to take on waves of Soviet tanks of at least average lethality while being badly outnumbered.  It was the Tiger Tank up against numerous Soviet Shermans.  We needed a juggernaut.

It was a new concept—a tank that depended on digital fire control technology to get the most effectiveness out of its main gun: the first one a 105 millimeter cannon, later upgraded to 120 millimeters.

The fire control system is so sophisticated that it accounts for atmospheric humidity and the microscopic droop of the barrel. It makes the cannon a precision-guided weapon on its own.

The sights the gunner and commander have are also thermal—they can see the heated surfaces of enemy troops and vehicles at over 2,000 yards and through dust and smoke; rendering many traditional camouflage techniques useless.

But it didn’t stop there.

It had a gas turbine engine to deliver the horsepower it needed to move on the battlefield; an uncommon and thirsty choice for a ground vehicle.

It ate much more fuel than a traditional diesel would, but the five thousand horsepower it delivered made the tank move and fight with the speed and flexibility of a helicopter gunship.

It needed that horsepower because of another fact that really rankled its critics—it weighed sixty-two to seventy tons, depending on the variant.

The critics quailed.  The US had never, ever had a tank that heavy to move around!

The advanced armor it sported made up a good chunk of that weight.  Chobham, or Burlington, armor is a secret combination of steel, ceramics, and other special materials that make up plates and blocks around the turret and chassis of an M-1.

Originally British, and covered by a skin of regular steel to the observer, this armor is bulky, heavy, and worth it.  They enable most of the tank’s front and turret to stop tremendous punishment; even direct hits from weapons that would slice older armor like butter.

This means death for the enemy the M-1 is engaging—they get a deadly main gun able to hit them in the eyeball with advanced ammunition, and an almost impenetrable turret and frontal arc to shoot back at.

The M-1’s fusion of gun, armor, mobility, and situational awareness created a tank that could take on five or more times its number in a fight and win.  It was the answer to the huge Soviet tank numerical advantage in the 1980s.

Like with so many other weapons the Reagan-era budgets delivered, punching above your weight was the only answer possible to numerically superior forces.  They broke the paradigm of “good enough” beating the best.

For more than forty years, the M-1 has been the dominant tank on every battlefield where it has been deployed; enemies of the US know that when they encounter it, they will probably die.

Thank Heavens the critics lost.

To the casual observer, the M-1 and older tanks—such as the T-72 and the even older T-55 tanks the Russians are now sending to Ukraine, look similar.  If you imagine them as cars, you might think that if the T-72 is a Ford Explorer, the M-1 might be a Chevy Tahoe.   That imagining is deadly wrong.

The Soviets—now the Russians—have yet to field a tank that is anywhere near as proven or as lethal as the M-1.

The best weapons really can slay the second-best weapons in droves, particularly in well-trained and -led armies, and the M-1 proved it.

If the US allows its technological superiority to lapse, or its quality in training, leadership, or people lapse, we can suffer utter defeat in a contest with who gets ahead of us.

When the chips were finally counted, the most lethal version of the T-72 was the black monolith I saw on the Popular Mechanics cover.  The US built the juggernaut; the Tiger Tank, and did it better than the Germans originally had done.

Mark Deuce has had a life-long career in community law enforcement. He is the author of Deuces Wild for TTP.