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How do you preserve Abrams building capacity without building new tanks?

glibgil 8y ago
That's a good question, but one of the most expensive ways to preserve building capacity is to actually build them
Tuna-Fish 8y ago
They don't want to preserve Abrams building capacity. The Army not only has enough for current needs, they already have enough for every possible contingency, including: "WW3, except for some reason it's not fought with nukes but with gigantic tank battles." Assuming the Army rotates tanks out of front line service before they are useless, by the time the fleet is too worn out, the Abrams design will be hopelessly obsolete. Not because the design is bad or obsolete, but just because that's how many of them there are. In contrast, the Army has massive deficiencies with many of their other, lighter vehicles, and has been trying to rectify them for decades now but all the projects have failed, for various reasons. Some of the failures have been the Army's fault, but others can be traced to the Congress deciding that the Army needs more tanks to stockpile instead of, say, armored ambulances. Honestly, what the army really needs to do is somehow push for a heavy IFV/APC design based on the Abrams chassis, similar to how the Russians have made the T-15. Not because that would be a great match for their needs, but because since the production line is apparently completely impossible to kill, might as well try to have them make something that is even marginally useful, compared to the vehicles they are building right now that just get driven from the factory to permanent stockpile where they will probably sit until they are decommissioned decades in the future.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  I think this video sums it up very well, example: Bradley Fighting Vehicle evolution https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA
  - regnerba 8y ago
    Applies very well to the Space Shuttle design, and more recently the F-35 from my understanding of that situation.
    - garmaine 8y ago
      Space Shuttle design was very good, overall. Do you mean SLS?
      - jacobreg 8y ago
        Eh, not really. It's an impressive piece of technology, but in the end it failed to realize the goal of low cost access to space through reusability. It made so many sacrifices to get reusability and the crossrange the air force wanted that it had many single points of failure and very limited abort options. This in turn required a very high degree of confidence that components would function as intended, which drove refurbishment costs through the roof.
        garmaine 8y ago
        Though you are not wrong in details, reality is a bit more complicated than that. The STS (shuttle) was pretty well engineered for the politically-driven requirements it had, and if not for the stupid don't-upgrade-human-rated-design mentality of space operations at NASA post-Challenger, it could have been iterated towards a cost effective solution (e.g. $150M per launch, 90's money). There were plans in place for this--flyback boosters instead of ocean recovery with impact and salt water damage; cross-fed H2/LOX boosters instead of explosion-prone SRBs; insulation-less external tank design; non-crewed variants with more payload to orbit; v2 of the main engine that would have required less refurbishment; etc. They just all got scrapped. Shuttle got expensive because of a bunch of unforeseen stuff that could have been fixed but they decided to work around instead. For a look at the design itself and how remarkably shuttle achieved its goals, I'd suggest the MIT engineering course that covered it[0]. Also look at Shuttle-C[1] or Magnum[2] for an idea of how things could have gone. [0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-C [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum_(rocket)
Jtsummers 8y ago
Depot maintenance. It’s a near full teardown and rebuilding of the platform. How do you think B-52s have been sustained over the past 65 or so years? Long enough that we may have four generations of pilots in one family (I’ve met several B-52 pilots who had a father or grandfather who flew the same airframe).
dotancohen 8y ago
Too bad nobody thought about that with the F-22.
- mulmen 8y ago
  Actually it sounds like it’s too bad we didn’t do with the Abrams what we did with the F-22.
  - dotancohen 8y ago
    You're probably right. Though the unit costs are probably two orders of magnitude difference, the two vehicles should have gotten opposite treatment.
    - mulmen 8y ago
      I don’t follow the logic. The vehicles do totally different things. We built enough F-22s and stopped. We built more Abrams than we need and continue to do so. The relative price has nothing to do with the need. Money we spend on building Abrams is wasted and could be spent elsewhere with better effect but not on F-22s which we have enough of.
      - dotancohen 8y ago
        This is why you buy more than you need, or keep production going, for things that you depend upon: http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2018/October%202018/Tyndall-F-22s-Left-Behind-Before-Michael-Hit-Possibly-Damaged-Beyond-Repair.aspx http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2018/October%20201... A dozen F-22s were just destroyed by a hurricane, possibly beyond repair.

That's a good question, but one of the most expensive ways to preserve building capacity is to actually build them

They don't want to preserve Abrams building capacity. The Army not only has enough for current needs, they already have enough for every possible contingency, including: "WW3, except for some reason it's not fought with nukes but with gigantic tank battles." Assuming the Army rotates tanks out of front line service before they are useless, by the time the fleet is too worn out, the Abrams design will be hopelessly obsolete. Not because the design is bad or obsolete, but just because that's how many of them there are. In contrast, the Army has massive deficiencies with many of their other, lighter vehicles, and has been trying to rectify them for decades now but all the projects have failed, for various reasons. Some of the failures have been the Army's fault, but others can be traced to the Congress deciding that the Army needs more tanks to stockpile instead of, say, armored ambulances. Honestly, what the army really needs to do is somehow push for a heavy IFV/APC design based on the Abrams chassis, similar to how the Russians have made the T-15. Not because that would be a great match for their needs, but because since the production line is apparently completely impossible to kill, might as well try to have them make something that is even marginally useful, compared to the vehicles they are building right now that just get driven from the factory to permanent stockpile where they will probably sit until they are decommissioned decades in the future.

ItsMe000001 8y ago
I think this video sums it up very well, example: Bradley Fighting Vehicle evolution https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA
- regnerba 8y ago
  Applies very well to the Space Shuttle design, and more recently the F-35 from my understanding of that situation.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Space Shuttle design was very good, overall. Do you mean SLS?
    - jacobreg 8y ago
      Eh, not really. It's an impressive piece of technology, but in the end it failed to realize the goal of low cost access to space through reusability. It made so many sacrifices to get reusability and the crossrange the air force wanted that it had many single points of failure and very limited abort options. This in turn required a very high degree of confidence that components would function as intended, which drove refurbishment costs through the roof.
      - garmaine 8y ago
        Though you are not wrong in details, reality is a bit more complicated than that. The STS (shuttle) was pretty well engineered for the politically-driven requirements it had, and if not for the stupid don't-upgrade-human-rated-design mentality of space operations at NASA post-Challenger, it could have been iterated towards a cost effective solution (e.g. $150M per launch, 90's money). There were plans in place for this--flyback boosters instead of ocean recovery with impact and salt water damage; cross-fed H2/LOX boosters instead of explosion-prone SRBs; insulation-less external tank design; non-crewed variants with more payload to orbit; v2 of the main engine that would have required less refurbishment; etc. They just all got scrapped. Shuttle got expensive because of a bunch of unforeseen stuff that could have been fixed but they decided to work around instead. For a look at the design itself and how remarkably shuttle achieved its goals, I'd suggest the MIT engineering course that covered it[0]. Also look at Shuttle-C[1] or Magnum[2] for an idea of how things could have gone. [0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-C [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum_(rocket)

Jtsummers 8y ago

Depot maintenance. It’s a near full teardown and rebuilding of the platform. How do you think B-52s have been sustained over the past 65 or so years? Long enough that we may have four generations of pilots in one family (I’ve met several B-52 pilots who had a father or grandfather who flew the same airframe).

dotancohen 8y ago

Too bad nobody thought about that with the F-22.

mulmen 8y ago
Actually it sounds like it’s too bad we didn’t do with the Abrams what we did with the F-22.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  You're probably right. Though the unit costs are probably two orders of magnitude difference, the two vehicles should have gotten opposite treatment.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    I don’t follow the logic. The vehicles do totally different things. We built enough F-22s and stopped. We built more Abrams than we need and continue to do so. The relative price has nothing to do with the need. Money we spend on building Abrams is wasted and could be spent elsewhere with better effect but not on F-22s which we have enough of.
    - dotancohen 8y ago
      This is why you buy more than you need, or keep production going, for things that you depend upon: http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2018/October%202018/Tyndall-F-22s-Left-Behind-Before-Michael-Hit-Possibly-Damaged-Beyond-Repair.aspx http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2018/October%20201... A dozen F-22s were just destroyed by a hurricane, possibly beyond repair.