- The US Army’s tank proficiency has fallen after two decades of counterinsurgency warfare.
- “Many crews struggle with the basics of tank gunnery,” an armor expert wrote.
- The Army is refocusing on training its crews to get the most out of their advanced tanks.
The US Army may have the best tanks in the world. But it has a problem: its tank gunners are rusty.
“A gap exists today between the capabilities of tank weapon systems and the ability of crews to employ them to maximum effectiveness,” warned Robert Cameron, the historian for the US Army’s armor branch, in an article for Armor Magazine, the professional journal of the Army tank force.
“Tanks possess the ability to engage varied targets with precision at ever longer ranges whether stationary or moving,” Cameron wrote. “Yet many crews struggle with the basics of tank gunnery.”
Two decades of focusing on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq has taken its toll on the Army’s proficiency in mechanized warfare. Iraq, for example, began with an armored charge into Baghdad but turned into a counterinsurgency fight where highly trained tank crews were used as infantry for foot patrols. Now the US military must prepare for the sort of combat that characterized World War II and the Cold War: operations by large mechanized units — brigades, divisions and corps — against well-armed opponents such as Russia and China.
“We have a new or reinvigorated focus on large-scale combat operations, which involves longer ranges and engagement distances, and maximizing training to use the fullest ability of our fire control systems, ammunition and optics,” Steve Krivitsky, weapons and gunnery branch chief at the US Army Armor School at Fort Benning, Georgia, told Business Insider.
But this requires brushing on basic skills like gunnery. Cameron pointed to a 2019 study, as well as the results of the 2022 Sullivan Cup, a biennial Army competition at Fort Benning for the best M1A2 Abrams main battle tank crews. “Crews struggled with boresight, target detection and identification, machine gun engagements, and target sensing,” he wrote.
For a tank to hit its target with the main gun — a 120-mm cannon for the Abrams — several steps are required. The target (or multiple targets) must be detected and identified, and the correct ammunition must be loaded. Crews need to know how to handle problems such as estimating range and hitting a moving target.
This isn’t the first time the US Army has had tank gunnery problems. The huge expansion of America’s armored force in World War II required training hordes of conscripts quickly.
In the 1960s, Army tank gunnery suffered from sloppy training and the demands of the Vietnam War, in which tank crews were used as replacement boots on the ground. By the 1970s, the Army had to confront the possibility of a massive Soviet surprise attack against outnumbered NATO armor. “For tank units in Central Europe this prospect was frightening indeed, since popular forecasts of the life expectancy of a tanker in the event of war were measured in hours and days,” Cameron wrote.
Army marksmanship vastly improved in the 1980s with the introduction of tougher gunnery tests, more cohesive tank crews, improved simulators, laser rangefinders, and better training facilities such as the National Training Center in California. These efforts bore ample fruit in the Gulf War in 1990, when US tanks demolished Iraqi armor in the US’s last major armor-on-armor fight.
But yet again, gunnery skills bowed to the demands of counterinsurgency in the 2000s. “Armor brigade combat teams, faced with compressed training timelines and recurring deployments found little time for traditional gunnery and combined arms maneuver,” wrote Cameron. “The frequency of gunnery fell from semi-annually to perhaps once or twice over a three-year period.”
For the past 25 years, US Army active-duty crews have been allowed to fire up to 102 rounds from the tank’s main gun per year. Each tank company has 18 live-fire training days per company, plus additional opportunities at their home station and abroad, as well as four hours of simulator time per month (which “equates roughly to 2000 main gun trigger squeezes within their simulator,” according to Krivitsky, who joined the Army as a tank crewman in 1986 and became a master gunner).
The result is that the US Army is caught in a contradiction. Its tanks are better than ever. The current M1A2 SEP (System Enhancement Package)v3 and the upcoming M1E3 — a tank being designed by the Army and General Dynamics Land Systems, the maker of the M1 Abrams — boast firepower and protection that make a 1940s Sherman or a 1960s Patton tank look like vehicles from the Flintstones.
Nor are tank crews incompetent. “I think that our crews right now are performing to standard quite frequently,” Krivitsky said.
Cameron cautioned against reading too much into the results of competitions such as the Sullivan Cup. “It’s not necessarily an indication that the entire tank force cannot function,” he told Business Insider. “It simply means that a particular crew at that particular time is struggling with a skill.”
The real question is whether they are able to get the maximum out of their equipment. It is clear that the battlefield is becoming ever less tank-friendly: Russia is estimated to have lost over 14,000 armored vehicles including tanks in three years of combat in Ukraine.
Yet well-trained tank crews can accomplish a lot despite formidable odds, as Israel proved on the Golan Heights in 1973. The US Army wants tankers who can accurately shoot at long range — 1,800 to 2,400 meters (2,000 to 2,600 yards) — and quickly engage and destroy multiple targets. “In general, the average time to defeat a threat of any type for our crews is approximately 31 seconds,” said Krivitsky.
The Army’s Armor Standardization and Training Strategy 2030 plan aims to improve skills and training. A new gunnery manual — the last one came out in 2015 — is slated for release within the next four months.
The modern Army tank force does have an advantage that its World War II predecessor didn’t have: a comprehensive tank gunnery program. “You didn’t have a standardized tank gunnery program going into World War II,” Cameron said. “Too often, essentially, you had units doing their own thing.”
The chance to fire the tank’s cannon is incentive alone. “I loved being a tanker,” Krivitsky said. “Gunnery made me want to stay in the Army longer. That was the best job I ever had.”
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
