Swapping M-1A2s For Older M-1A1s, the Pentagon Speeds Up Tank Deliveries To Ukraine. But Not by Much.

The United States plans to speed up delivery of M-1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine—by giving the Ukrainians a slightly older version of the tank.

Instead of paying General Dynamics Land Systems to build 31 new M-1A2s for Ukraine, the U.S. Defense Department will send an equal number of secondhand M-1A1s—apparently Firepower Enhancement Package versions.

The change should shave a few months off the existing delivery schedule. The Ukrainian army could deploy its American-made tanks in late 2023 instead of early 2024. Still far too late for Kyiv’s widely-anticipated spring offensive.

Reuters was the first to report the switch from new to secondhand tanks. And on Tuesday morning, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby all but confirmed the decision. “The Pentagon is working as fast as they can, and they’ll have more to say on adjustments they’re making,” Kirby said in an appearance on MSNBC.

“New” and “secondhand” actually are inaccurate terms when it comes to describing an Abrams tank. All M-1s are secondhand, in the sense that General Dynamics Land Systems stopped manufacturing brand-new Abrams hulls back in the 1990s.

Today, when the U.S. Army or some other customer orders an M-1, GDLS pulls an existing tank out of long-term storage at one of the Army’s vast vehicle parks and ships it to the sprawling Abrams factory in Lima, Ohio. The Army has as many as 3,700 M-1 hulls in storage.

In Lima, workers build the “new” tank on the old hull—adding new automotive components, optics, fire controls, radios and armor.

The armor might be the most sensitive part of the build. American buyers—that is, the Army—get M-1s with a classified depleted-uranium armor mesh slotted into pockets on the tank’s steel hull and turret.

Foreign buyers get a downgraded “Foreign Military Sales” armor package that replaces the uranium—which the Pentagon sources from the U.S. nuclear industry via a highly-regulated process—with tungsten. The tungsten armor still is very hard, and it has the benefit of being less regulated.

So the plan, as recently as last week, was for GDLS to build for Ukraine 31 M-1A2s with FMS armor—a process that the Pentagon expected to take as long as a year. GDLS also is building FMS M-1A2s for Poland and Australia.

The main feature of an M-1A2 is an independent thermal sight for the commander of the tank’s four-person crew. The independent sight allows a commander and their gunner separately to search for targets—and quickly engage them with the tank’s 120-millimeter gun, one after another in daylight or darkness.

In swapping new M-1A2s for old M-1A1 FEPs, the Ukrainians give up this hunter-killer enhancement. The armor, however, should be the same: steel pockets containing tungsten mesh.

And the M-1A1 FEP despite lacking an independent commander’s sight is a highly capable tank. Its optics are world-class, and should allow a crew to identify targets as far away as 8,000 yards. “The upgrades FEP provides will increase the M-1A1’s combat capabilities by allowing improved target identification and extended engagement ranges,” U.S. Marine Corps captain C.S. Roos wrote in a 2005 paper.

If Ukraine indeed is getting M-1A1 FEPs, the tanks almost certainly are coming from former Marine Corps stocks. The Marines starting four years ago disbanded their tank battalions and transferred to the Army all 450 of their M-1A1s.

Poland promptly bought 116 of the ex-Marine tanks. As always, GDLS first opened up the M-1A1 FEPs’ armor pockets and replaced their uranium with tungsten.

That armor-swapping is the main reason a foreign army can’t get M-1s any faster than a few months, and why even secondhand M-1A1s won’t arrive on Ukraine’s front lines until late this year.