Army says no more tanks. Congress says yes!

reply to post by Zaphod58


Then you obviously never had a car and needed to get parts replaced. Or you don't comprehend that attrition will remove some of those tanks from the field. Full production of a complete tank may not be needed, but parts to replace those in the field are always needed. Not like you can just order parts like for a car.

reply to post by hangedman13


With the sheer number of tanks in storage, even with attrition, there are enough parts to keep the current M1 fleet going for decades. Over 9,000 Abrams have been produced, with the vast majority of those going to the US Army. The Army has over 7900 Abrams in their possession. That's not counting the ones that are in storage. That's more than enough to keep them in operation for years even if the Lima plant is closed for the next few years as the Army wants to do.

Originally posted by projectvxn
There's a bunch of stuff we don't need that politicians shove down our throats in the Army.

The current Army Combat Uniform in the "Universal Camouflage Pattern" is a good example. 5 billion spent on camo that doesn't work only to replace all the equipment for OEF to multicam.

This was a political decision, as well as a senior military decision that has wound up costing the taxpayers a bundle for no reason.

Better yet we could get rid of the each service having its own pattern and have one combat pattern for DoD - period. It would make us all identifiable at a distance and save money.

I see the esprit de corps value in the traditionally disparate styles and types of service dress uniforms but combat fatigues should be standard DoD wide.

Yep! Exactly what said meant about the military-industrial complex.
Pretty blatant. but the next thing they will do is to declare a war of sorts somewhere.

Oh, I forgot about Syria....

I was an abrams crewman for 8 years in the US Army. It blew my mind how much money was spent on just gassing up and maintaining them. We would shoot gunnery twice a year. At gunnery we would shoot up thousands of training rounds (each about 1,000 a piece) and we were just one cavalry troop. Abrams is a beast but it takes alot of maintenance, alot of parts and alot of gas and supplies to keep them worth a damn.

The army is the stupidest when it comes to waste and fraud. They would spend money on things that would not even work in theory. I remember when I ws stationed at Hood several years ago and they wanted to install autoloaders on the A2's. They spent so much money designing and installing autoloaders on the tanks there to get rid of the 4th crewman and just have a 3 man crew. In the end they found that it was much more cost efficient to just pay a private to push rounds into the damn thing but that was after they had already spent tons of money on it.

I also remember back in 2003 when they decided to switch over from the garrison caps to the berets as headgear. I think it was estimated 2-3 million dollars to issue everyone new hats so we would look like the European guys. I could go on and on but its safe to say that the Army would make anyone sick with their dumb money spending.