As the Abrahams is jet fuelled and it's a fact is uses twice the volume of a diesel MBT, I googled to find the answer and stumbled across this:
Author:
How come only the US Army decided to use a gas turbine for its M1 Abrams main battle tank despite its advantages while all other countries chose diesel engines?
Despite?
The first thing that must be understood about the Abrams, the one piece of perspective that makes everything else about it make sense, is this:
In 1970s, the United States decided it was possible to defeat the Warsaw Pact in conventional battle in Europe.
That's it. That's the show.
From 1950–1970, the Soviet juggernaut was considered invincible. Mutually Assured Destruction was the strategy.
If the USSR had gone West in 1965, the NATO allies would have used up their available ground forces, then plastered most of everything from the Netherlands to Switzerland, Bonn to Moscow, with thermonuclear fire, then retreated to a handful of facilities and waited for the Soviet bombs to drop.
Nuclear Armageddon. The 7th Angel pouring their bowl forth. Game over, man.
Something weird happened in the 1970′s, though. The Space Race began to alter how the US saw itself, especially in comparison to the USSR.
Remember, the West knew diddly-squat about the true state and power of the Communist East… until Apollo straight up left the Soviets eating dust.
The West also started to get better intelligence assets. Not Human ones, those had always been in the game, and by necessity taken with a grain of salt.
No, the West started getting pictures from satellites. Started tapping in on phones with microwave antennas far above the Earth.
Started to find out that the Red Army was mostly a paper tiger.
In addition, Vietnam had really rattled a lot of American cages. It had become clear that draftees just… weren't good enough anymore.
Not the levels of patriotism or verve the vast majority of draftees brought to the Service, but the time needed to make a modern warrior.
A proper Infantryman now took nearly 18 months to train correctly. Tankers, aviators, sailors in Nuclear powered ships, they needed even longer to train.
And so the United States and much of NATO (not all), went to volunteer units, who stayed in at least 4 years instead of 2.
The Soviets didn't.
A strange thing happens with volunteer forces. By virtue of greater practice and training, not to mention lots of people wanting a second hitch, or even a career, you start developing a really professional fighting force that knows what it is about. They can handle weapons systems that drafted Soldiers simply cannot learn in time to be useful.
And so weapons develop in complexity and power.
This brings me back to the Abrams. Its turbine was adopted at a time when Abrams was a lot lighter, and was governed to 50mph, not that much faster than other NATO tanks of the day.
However, my father trained the 3rd Infantry Division's maintenance guys on their new Abrams back in the 80′s.
In a pinch, a real pinch, that governor came right off and the engine worked just fine without it, allowing the Abrams to sprint at far greater speeds and still hit T-72 size targets at 1,000 meters or more.
See, the German Bundeswehr had to, for obvious reasons, defend every inch of their soil.
Can't very well just allow the Soviets to march all the way to the Rhine and then start resisting. However, even the mighty US Army was not going to stop the whole Soviet Army right on the border, so the idea was this:
Set up in a line, foxholes, artillery aiming points, close air support to include A-10s, Apache helicopters, and F-16s, and wait.
The Soviets would attack in Echelon, one regiment following the next. Remember, simpler tactics because their guys have not practiced as much.
The NATO, especially American and British, units, were to rip the faces off that first echelon, kill as many Soviets as possible, and then disappear.
Pull back a kilometer or two, and get set in the same sort of positions. Do this again and again and again until the spearpoint of the Soviet Army, equipped by 1985 with T-62, T-72, and T-80 tanks, was destroyed.
The Soviets would increasingly place their Category B divisions (broadly equivalent to US Army Reserve formations) in the field with older equipment.
And NATO would push into the attack.
The Abrams-equipped US Army would race forward, supported by British, French, and West German troops, would begin a blitzkrieg style assault across Germany, aiming generally at Moscow.
Here, again, the turbine engine if the Abrams would shine once more, outpacing anything the enemy could throw up, annihilating support and maintenance battalions, and making further resistance by Soviet front line troops untenable.
Eventually, the Soviet Army or the Soviet leadership would collapse. Most leading thinkers on the subject figure the Soviet Union would release Nuclear weapons against a single target, probably in England, and then the United States would respond from Minuteman silos in the Continental United States to make the point- yes, MAD is still in effect.
At which point, the current Soviet leadership would likely be overthrown and executed, and the matter settled at the conference table.
All of this to say that the US picked a turbine engine because blitzkrieg remains the best way to defeat Russia, and the United States does blitzkrieg better than anyone else.
Have no idea how seriously to take that analysis. But it reminds me of reading "The Third World War" back in the 1980s (confession: I didn't buy it, I sneakily read it while lurking in the bookshop!). I now gather that book had a slightly propagandist function. Maybe it was part of the very debate you allude to here?
General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: Or, How to Think about a Future War with Russia Today
DR JEFF MICHAELS In the vast majority of cases, scenarios of future war have rarely come to pass as originally envisioned. At least two inter-related reasons can account for this. First, due to the…
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