www.19fortyfive.com
Doubtful and last I heard HDFM was unfunded as is the MCAV project. Likely not due to a lack of money, but more they dont have enough people to administer the projects with so many others on the books already.
www.telegraph.co.uk
If we can get Abrams in large numbers, and there's political willpower to do so, that's just as good.So that's a hard 'no' for the upgraded M1 then?
The U.S. Army's New M1E3 Tank vs. Russia's T-72: Who Wins in 5 Words
The US Army unveiled the M1E3 Abrams at the Detroit Auto Show. Here is how its radical redesign compares to Russia’s T-72B3M.
Abrams isnt the be all end all of armoured warfare. Its crazy heavy, logistically greedy and given our propensity to add-on armour, itll get even heavier.
Also the factory is just across the border, so we could order parts more easily and ship tanks for more extensive repairs.
I've driven past that facility in Lima, OH. My daughter had an offer to play soccer from a uni close to there.
The problem with that would be the CAF would be indistinguishable from the UA to both friends and foes. Essentially, the CAF would be an auxiliary to the US Military. We go that route, and all defence industries in Canada would dry up, because America is going to protect American jobs first. It already happens, and would only be worse if the official policy was just buy what America has.
meanwhile Ajax has IOC withdrawnCol. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon - late of the Royal Tank Regiment and Challenger veteran, also Telegraph defence correspondent
WRT to the AJAX
....That’s why I spent most of last Friday driving and personally operating the systems of an Ajax tank lent to me by the makers, to find out the truth – which I set out below.
....
I did not test a pristine, “gold-plated” demonstrator as Jeremy Clarkson might. The vehicle I was lent was a Drop 3 model, uncleaned, unpolished and representative of the most mature variant now in service, not the early versions that dominate much of the online criticism.
My conclusion is straightforward. In its current form, Ajax broadly delivers what it says on the tin. It is not perfect, but it is credible, lethal and essential. Combined with Challenger 3, air power, drones and modern gunnery, it restores a genuine all-arms capability. On my personal “Top Tanks” board, it sits firmly at number one: not bad for a judgement formed over twenty-five years of commanding armour in war and peace.
I’m a former tank commander. Here’s my Clarkson-style review after driving the reviled Ajax
Our writer spends a day at the track with the British Army’s trouble-prone light tank
....
The issue that cannot be avoided is noise and vibration, highlighted most starkly following Exercise Titan Storm in late 2025. I spent approximately six hours driving Ajax hard around the test track, reaching 70 km/h and still accelerating into turns. Powered by the proven MTU V8, the ride and noise levels seemed comparable to my old Challenger 2. Communications were clear, even with my own long-standing tinnitus which I acquired as an armour commander in former times. Claims that crew drills by today’s soldiers are at fault I reject entirely. The real issue here, in my view, is training continuity and training time.
Modern crews are transitioning from wheeled platforms and counter-insurgency mindsets into a high-end warfighting system, without the time historically required to master it. When I commanded my first tank, appropriately named “Dinosaur” – a Chieftain – I had the same tank for two and a half years, training across Europe and North America with 12 months in the field. That depth of familiarity is now unaffordable. Modern Whole Fleet Management and short exercise cycles mean that crews rotate constantly. Under those conditions, problems, medical and operational, are unsurprising.
ukdefencejournal.org.uk
I think the K1 was a derivative of sorts of an Abrams contender? A lot of copying from Chrysler?
Equipment commonality with NATO partners makes sense. Choosing to go all-in on American make little sense apart from making the CAF an auxiliary of the Americans.
There are lots of other countries that make kit perfectly suited to our needs, that have a smaller logistical tail than American kit, that we could be looking at buying. Specifically, there are numerous reports that the Abrams has proven hard for Ukraine to keep running compared to other tanks because of the logistics required to keep it going. The Challenger, and Leopard variants seem to have less of those issues. If the CAF is already struggling with logistics, adding American kit that has a higher demand for logistics support hardly seems like a wise plan.
There are plenty of reasons to R&D our own stuff, including jobs and technology that translates into civilian use products. The notion that the 10th largest economy in the world can't sustain a defence industry is the product of a culture of small thinking. We sit above America, so we look south and pout about not being rich enough to do anything, ignoring the reality that we are indeed rich ourselves and should be using that money to support our own industries and tech development.
America helped them develop the K1, which was an Abrams variant, but withheld advanced technology from them. The K2 was developed as a result, because the Koreans weren't happy having America sell them lesser variants of kit they could develop for themselves if they wanted to.
