Stop Pretending Abrams Tanks Aren't an Existing Asset

The Russians are heavying up their already relatively heavy airborne forces. This should be a lesson for the Army.

Russian paratroopers will get T-72s, among other improvements:

The Russian airborne troops (VDV) are forming three tank battalions, as well as units equipped with electronic warfare (EW) systems and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), this year, VDV commander-in-chief Colonel General Andrei Serdyukov has said.

The Russians are also expanding recon companies into battalions.

Earlier this year, in "Preparing for a Heavier Fight: Look to Abrams Tanks to Support the Infantry," Army Magazine, April 2018 (sorry, not online, but oh, here it is, and I mention it here in my post worrying about survivable tank-killing power), I argued that American infantry units that might have to face enemy mechanized forces should be reinforced with Abrams tanks (or combined arms formations) that we have tons of in storage, rather than building a new light tank-type vehicle for them.

Such a light vehicle is a niche capability for airborne forces in airmobile forcible entry operations. Light armor would be too weak for conventional combat and would ignore Russian practice and even American Army experience in World War II of attaching tank and tank destroyer battalions to American motorized infantry divisions.

And no, active protection systems won't make a light tank as protected as a heavy tank.

And now we see that Russian airborne forces that already have the light armor, see the need for heavier actual tanks for conventional combat.

The Army shifted forces from heavy to light in response to counter-insurgency fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. A shift back is evident already, but adding armored battalions or combined arms task forces (or just companies or combined arms teams)  to the various infantry units that might go into combat is a good interim step.

UPDATE: We are updating 135 Abrams tanks to the latest standard per year. That's enough to upgrade 1.5 heavy brigades per year. We have 10 active and 5 National Guard heavy brigades.

This is higher than before but is not major production. Clearly, a lot of our heavy brigades won't have the latest Abrams for quite some time. Let alone giving the Army the option of giving infantry brigades the latest Abrams, if the Army chooses to do so.