Here’s the real history of the nation’s only factory for the massive M1 Abrams tanks.

Alarming headlines to the contrary, the US Army isn’t building robotic “killing machines.” What they really want artificial intelligence to do in combat is much more interesting.

Last month, the Army committed to buying an initial brigade’s-worth of the Iron Fist Active Protection System for the M2 Bradley. Meanwhile, with Tuesday morning’s announcement, the US is spending over $200 million to install the rival Trophy APS on not only Army but Marine Corps M1 Abrams tanks.

The Army’s said it wants 504 of the MPF light tanks. But analyst Byron Callan is betting that either the Marine Corps or foreign buyers (or both) add another 106, bringing the total to 610 machines.

Yes, MPF is much lighter and less heavily armored than the M1 Abrams or even Russian tanks like the T-90. But MPF is going to light infantry units that currently have no armored vehicles at all, just a handful of Humvees, towed M777 howitzers, and whatever weapons the men can carry on their backs.

“It doesn’t have to be a tank, it just has to be decisive and lethal,” Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman answered. “If that is run by a flux capacitor, hovers, and has a ray gun — and we can make it run at a reasonable cost — we’ll look at it.”

By 2022, the service plans to field new advanced reactive armor tiles to neutralize incoming warheads, a laser early warning system to warn crews they’re being targeted, and a signature management effort to avoid detection in the first place.

Imagine explosive charges so precise they can cut apart an incoming warhead milliseconds before it hits your vehicle. That’s the operating principle for Iron Curtain, an Active Protection System whose computer brain makes 50,000 calculations in the time you take to blink. Installed on a frame around the vehicle that looks like a militarized shower… Keep reading →

Army Futures Command is just a means to an end: modernizing the Army for high-intensity war against Russia or China. That includes replacing the iconic but aging M1 Abrams main battle tank, as well as other war machines, with an all-new Next Generation Combat Vehicle optimized for urban warfare, Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The new combat vehicles must be “optimized for fighting in dense urban terrain.” Fighting in narrow streets, in turn, requires smaller vehicles than the massive M1 — and one way to reduce weight is to take the humans out.