In a world of hypersonic weapons, undetectable drone aircraft, and ballistic missiles, is there still a place for the humble tank?
Tank. Even the name sounds almost prehistoric; a one-syllable name for a blunt instrument that almost offends our 21st century expectations of technological precision.
But the tank is neither humble nor blunt. In fact, at this moment, the world’s armies are imagining new and positively surgical ways to implement a weapon that, in its basic design, has not changed much for more than a century.
Like they did on the Western Front in 1917, tanks still roll across forbidding terrain on treads, and they still pivot their enormous guns on turrets. But tank armor is tougher (and heavier) than ever. Those old clanking mechanisms have been replaced by whisper-quiet drives. New technology senses incoming fire faster than ever and allows response within split seconds.
Most importantly, in the end, wars are not won in the air, but on the ground. And no one has come up with a more brutally efficient way to clear the way for an advancing army than a tank.
Chillingly, many military experts even agree on where the world’s next major tank battle will most likely occur: On a strip of land shared by Poland and the Baltic nation of Lithuania, a region sparsely occupied except for the small Polish town of Suwalki.
It’s known as the Suwalki Gap. Military experts call it NATO’s Achille’s Heel.
In the southeast corner of Lithuania, at the end of a short trail, stands a cylindrical red granite monument, about 8 feet high, marking the point at which the borders of Lithuania and Poland meet that of Kaliningrad, a Russian province that, thanks to the whims of history and politics, is entirely separated from the rest of the country.

Western military strategists see a scenario in which Russia — as it did while invading the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 — claims they also have a right to occupy areas of the Baltic nations, where thousands of Russians were living at the time the old Soviet Union collapsed.
“The Russians claimed their countrymen were being abused by the Ukrainians — forced to speak Ukrainian, stuff like that,” says retired U.S. Army Colonel Greg Fontenot, a historian and threat emulation consultant for the Army. “That was part of the justification for going in there.
“They could well try to make the same claims about the Baltic nations.”
And the most likely spot to try and assert those claims would be through the Suwalki Gap.

The Russian ally — some would say puppet nation — Belarus lies just 40 miles east of Kaliningrad. In the eyes of many military scholars, a Russian victory in Ukraine could well embolden the country to, at the very least, use Belarus as a platform to launch an occupation of that strip of land, creating a direct and politically friendly link.
That would mean going to war against Lithuania and Poland — and also NATO, the treaty organization to which they belong, and which has pledged mutual defense in case of invasion.
On both sides, tanks would sooner or later lead the way.
Imagining nightmare scenarios like this is all in a day’s work for Fontenot. But he’s no armchair strategist; he commanded a tank battalion during the 1991 Gulf War and has experienced first-hand the ferocity of tank warfare.
“For a Russian force heading toward Kaliningrad, the Baltic states are much easier than just about any other place along their border to get at it,” says Fontenot. “There are rolling hills and not a lot of forest. There’s also a lot of marshy ground, which makes tank warfare difficult, but not impossible there.
“Depending on the time of year, the tanks would mostly have to stay on the roadways.”
Then again, in Europe there are a lot of roadways.
The big-boy NATO tanks that would protect western Europe against a Russian invasion force are called Main Battle Tanks (MBTs) — armored vehicles with the most powerful engines, thickest armor, and heaviest guns. About half of the alliance’s tanks are U.S. M1 Abrams tanks: 54-to-67-ton behemoths that can reach 25 miles per hour off-road and hurl a projectile more than two miles.

Those Abrams have a lot going for them: A computerized defense system automatically detects and defends against incoming ammo, and a smoke screen feature can hide their precise position from attackers. They have double layers of side armor that can slow down so-called armor piercing rockets. In front they have shields made of depleted uranium, thicker and more impenetrable than lead. Unlike any previous U.S. tank, they have seats that can be adjusted for height, enabling women to more easily operate them. And their revolutionary turbine engines can run on jet fuel, diesel, or gasoline.
On the minus side: They are unimaginably heavy, and are as likely to collapse a bridge as pass safely over it. Plus, that neat turbine engine generates a whole lot of heat, creating an irresistible target for heat-seeking missiles.
Russia’s battlefield king, the T-90 tank, is much lighter than the Abrams, which gives it certain advantages, especially in urban settings. Still, there are reasons to believe it would be seriously mismatched by the best the West could throw at it. For one thing, the war in Ukraine has revealed a fatal Russian tank design flaw: While most NATO tanks have their ammo stored and loaded in the tank’s well-protected bottom half, Russian tanks keep ammo up in the turret, which is much more vulnerable to missile strikes. The result: A chain reaction explosion that kills the entire crew and sends the multi-ton turret hurtling skyward. Tank experts call it the Jack-In-the-Box effect.

Not that the flaw would prevent Russia’s leaders from throwing their inferior tanks up against a line of Abrams. At under $5 million, the Russians can build two T-90 tanks for the cost of one Abrams. And as Michael Gjerstad of London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies recently observed, Russia has shown remarkable willingness “to sacrifice quality for quantity.”
What’s more, assuming Russia’s relations with China are experiencing one of their upswings, NATO tankers could well find themselves face-to-face with one of the most advanced tanks on the planet: the Chinese ZTZ-99, a hunter-killer tank with advanced laser-based defense weapons and a smoke screen system similar to that being developed in the U.S.

If the next tank war erupts in Europe, NATO will put its best tank crews on the front line. And if you want a preview of who those tank teams will be, look no further than a military base located in western Georgia.
You might call the place Top Gun for Tanks.
The base, known for more than 100 years as Fort Benning, is likely suffering a bit of an identity crisis these days. Named for a Confederate general, the fort’s name was changed in 2023 to Fort Moore, after a Lieutenant General and his wife who are buried on the grounds. But sentiment still rides high for returning to the old name, a position that is shared by President Donald Trump. And so, as Reveille sounds each morning, no one on the base knows for sure what the fort’s name will be by the time Taps is played that night.
One thing they know for certain, though: If you’re looking for the top tank teams in the world, you need look no further. In fact, the best of the best — selected from U.S. Army and National Guard units plus units from our allies worldwide — converge every two years on this military base to compete for the highest honor in tank training: The Sullivan Cup.
The winner is declared, simply and impressively, The Best Tank Crew.
On the first night of the Sullivan Cup trials, formally known as Armor Week, the crews gather at a reception. The atmosphere is friendly and informal, but make no mistake: The teams — this year from the U.S., Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Kuwait and Poland — are sizing each other up, looking for weaknesses, hoping to see telltale jitters.
“In one sense, everyone is on the same team,” says Command Sgt. Major Greg Brobst, who helps organize the competition. “But then again, the rivalry is off the charts.”
For 10 unimaginably intense days, 23 crews — men and women — compete in a dozen events ranging from individual duties to team activities. Teams race across the rolling hills of western Georgia in their tanks, firing their large and smaller guns for distance and accuracy at distances up to a mile and a half, loading and re-loading ammunition on the fly, breaking down machine guns and putting them back together, and clambering from the safety of their tanks to set up field operations under mock battle conditions.

In one activity, teams must physically break the track of their tank — the long conveyor belt-like tread that allows the vehicle to traverse rough terrain — then repair and re-install it. Later, in a trial of superhuman physical ordeals, tankers must, among other feats, repeatedly lift heavy ammunition, drag a detached tank track, and run one mile.
Finally, everyone competes in what the Army calls The Thunder Run, but which can only be described as a tank decathlon: In an outrageously intensive show of skill and strength, the teams perform most of the exercises they have done as individual activities during the previous days nonstop, then run a mile and navigate an obstacle course.
“Last time,” says Brobst, “the teams completed it all in less than 30 minutes.”
Finally, a committee of top officers declares two winning teams: One four-person Abrams team and one three-person Bradley tank team.

The assembled tankers cheer as the winners — poker-faced, holding pistols aloft — accept their silver trophies. But don’t let that show of camaraderie fool you: Every single tanker there believes they should be standing on that stage.
“No question,” says Brobst. “The whole Sullivan Cup week is 100 percent about who gets bragging rights to being the Top Tank Team.”
There’s more than pride at stake: At every turn during the 10-day competition, each team is being scrupulously evaluated by the Army’s top brass — who, in the case of an actual military outbreak, will decide which teams will take the lead in repelling an assault.
Not so coincidentally, they’re also checking to see how U.S. teams measure up against their foreign compatriots.
Despite the fever-pitch rivalries, says Brobst, “I know for a fact that there are some lifelong friendships forged among the tankers during the week. It’s a very close-knit community.”
On the final night of Sullivan Cup Week, the tankers button themselves into their military finery for a gala awards ceremony. At the conclusion, there are handshakes and hugs…and the distinct possibility that the next time they meet it won’t be for a friendly competition.
For anyone raised on tank warfare in World War II movies — with the deafening roar of diesel engines and the incessant clanking of metallic tracks — an outing in a 21st century Abrams can be a startling revelation: The superb suspension system rides much like a Cadillac. The interior is air conditioned. Flat screens and joy sticks abound.
Most significantly, the muted interior sound is not unlike what you’d hear on the inside of a flying airliner.
Inside an M1 Abrams tank (Uploaded to YouTube by USA Military Channel)
“I have been on or associated with every tank in the Army’s inventory for the last 33 years,” says Brobst. “And I can tell you the inside of the Abrams is significantly quieter than anything ever portrayed in a movie.”
Except, he hastens to add, for the fanciful, super-silent Abrams tank Denzel Washington drove in his 1996 Gulf War film, Courage Under Fire. “The crew in that movie could actually whisper to each other,” he recalls with a laugh. “Believe me, as quiet as they are, you can’t have a whispering conversation in an Abrams on the move.”
Besides a heightened comfort level, he adds, the relative silence of an Abrams also provides a distinct advantage on the battlefield. “When an Abrams is coming at you, you cannot hear it — except for, maybe, at the last moment, the squeaking of the track,” says Brobst. “If you’re the enemy, when an Abrams sneaks up on you, you don’t know what’s happening until you’re dead.”
That’s why many Abrams teams have adopted the motto “Creeping Death.”
It’s not easy for civilians to get up close and personal with an Abrams tank. One of the very few on public display is an M1A1 Abrams at the American Heritage Museum in Stow, Massachusetts. A veteran of Operation Desert Storm — one of some 1,900 Abrams dispatched against the Iraqis in 1991 — the thing is 32 feet long and weighs nearly 68 tons.
At the museum, I happened to meet Paul Sousa, retired from the 1st Cavalry Division, a Desert Storm Abrams gunner. He was admiring the machine as if he’d just been reunited with his first car. Beaming incongruously, Sousa described spending 100 straight hours at his station, pursuing Iraqi tanks across the desert. The only times he emerged were to fuel up, hold a machine gun while his tank mates fueled up, or to go to the bathroom.
The Soviet-era tanks employed by the Iraqis were perfectly serviceable, but no match for the Abrams. After hours of virtually muzzle-to-muzzle tank warfare in the desert — in a battle that came to be known as Fright Night — the carnage inflicted upon the Iraqis was so extreme many U.S. tankers came home suffering from PTSD.
Prior to Desert Storm, Sousa, like many U.S. tankers, had spent the bulk of his career in Europe, sitting on that knife’s edge between NATO and Russia — and, before that, the Soviet Union. “We all thought Europe is where it’s at,” Sousa told me. “It never occurred to any of us we’d be fighting a tank war somewhere in the desert.”
Now, as Russia presses its aggressive ambitions in Ukraine, the eyes of the world’s war futurists is once more shifting north to Europe and the Suwalki Gap.
Technology wise, it is generally accepted that NATO’s tank force is in most ways superior to the Russians’. But with a country that spans 11 time zones behind it, Vladimir Putin’s army would have a hard-to-match logistical advantage.
And there are, to be sure, new weapons on the battlefield that place tanks in greater peril than ever before. Cheaply made drones can deliver a fatal blow to any tank, no matter how well-armored, if they manage to slip past the tank’s defensive measures. Repeated projectile attacks to the same spot on a tank’s armor can weaken it enough to allow a kill shot through.
Says historian Fontenot, “Drones will continue to work well against tanks until they come up with effective countermeasures, and I’m confident that will happen. The fact remains, in future wars we’re still going to need the kind of mobile protected firepower a tank provides, and no one has come up with anything better. Yet.”
The next tank war will almost certainly see the implementation of new Artificial Intelligence technologies that enable remote-controlled armored vehicles to penetrate enemy lines without endangering the lives of crew. Already, the U.S. military is working on drone advance vehicles that will push ahead of a tank, conducting surveillance and possibly offering firepower.
The final step, of course, will be driverless tanks that automatically identify threats, load, aim, and fire.
“I guess at that point we’re in Terminator territory,” a former tanker told me at the American Heritage Museum, referring to the futuristic movie in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a warrior android.
“I mean, at what point do we just let the robots fight all our wars for us?”
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