Ukrainian Tankers Will Begin Training on the American M1A1 Abrams

Jun 08, 2023

The tankers, and their new tanks, should be ready by late summer or fall.

The Department of Defense is currently preparing to train more than 100 Ukrainian tank crewmen to use M1A1 Abrams tanks. The training, which will take place in Germany, will allow the crews to operate an entire battalion's worth of the American-made tanks. The transfer of refurbished Abrams tanks is being accelerated after criticism that the delivery of new tanks would have taken far too long.

The training will take place at the Grafenwoehr Training Area, part of U.S. Army Europe. The sprawling, 89-mile training area is one of the largest outside the continental United States. "Graf" is currently the home of the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine, which pairs Army National Guard units with Ukrainian units for combat training and instruction.

U.S. President Joe Biden made the decision to send tanks to Ukraine in late January 2023. The tanks were originally meant to be brand-new M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks purchased under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, the coordinating agency for new equipment purchased for Kyiv. New build tanks, however, would have taken a year to arrive on the battlefield, long after European-donated Leopard 2 tanks.

Here's a "commercial" that the Ukrainian government produced, lobbying for M1A2s; the video is based on Chevy truck commercials that ran in the 1990s:

After complaints from Congress that M1A2 tanks would take too long to arrive, the administration decided in March to send older M1A1SA Abrams tanks instead. The U.S. Army first deployed the basic M1A1—armed with a 120-millimeter M256 main gun, M2 .50-caliber machine gun, and M240 coaxial machine gun—in the late 1980s. The M1A1SA variant includes a second-generation forward-looking infrared sight, power train improvements, and Blue Force Tracker, a computer system that allows tank crews to view the location of both friendly and enemy forces on an LCD display.

While the Pentagon describes the M1A1 and M1A2 as having "very similar capabilities," the tanks the Ukrainians are set to receive lack some key features. One is the Commander's Independent Thermal Viewer (CITV), a rotating thermal sight that allows the tank commander to search for targets independently of the main thermal viewer. A tank with a CITV is a more efficient killer on the battlefield, with the tank commander identifying targets, handing them off to the gunner for destruction, and then quickly moving on to locate other targets.

Other features M1A1s lack are the CROWS-LP remote-firing weapons station, allowing the tank commander to fire the M2 .50-caliber machine gun while safely inside the turret; a digital tank-wide computer architecture; an auxiliary power generator to keep sensors and communications equipment powered up without running the turbine engine; a tank health monitoring system; and the ability to use a data link to program tank main gun ammunition.

The United States is giving Ukraine 31 M1A1 tanks. That's enough for a Ukrainian Ground Forces tank battalion, three companies of ten tanks each, and one tank for the battalion commander. The battalion will almost certainly never field all 31 tanks in combat. The Abrams is a complicated beast of a tank and breakdowns are common. The U.S. Army aims for a tank battlefield readiness rate of 90 percent, which would leave the Ukrainians with just 28 combat-ready tanks, but a Rand Corp study from the early 2000s showed M1A1-equipped units often struggled to field 63 percent of their tanks. Every "down" tank will hurt the unit's combat effectiveness.

It took nearly a year for Ukraine's Western backers to finally decide to send tanks. Now that the plans to send Abrams tanks are finalized, it's hard not to feel underwhelmed. The U.S. has hundreds of newer M1A2 tanks in reserve, and could send them to Ukraine if it really wanted to. It could also send more than just 31 tanks when the need is obviously for hundreds of tanks. This probably won't be the last batch of tanks the Pentagon sends to Ukraine.

Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he's generally in favor of it. Kyle's articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News, and others. He lives in San Francisco.

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