Huh. Ignorance fought. I had always assumed they’d include bottled oxygen as a backup.
Does that mean the NBC system stops working if the turbine fails?
I can’t conceive of a 1:1 ops/maint ratio. It’s beyond ludicrous, even for a desert (high dust) environment. We ran ours for 6 months in Saudia Arabia/Iraq with the routine crew maintenance dictated by the manual, with the previously mentioned 95+% OR rate.
Only if their deployment coincided with a Q-cycle maintenance program can I even begin to believe a 1:1 ops/maint ratio, and that would only be for the day or so per tank it would take to complete the Q-cycle.
Could the additional equipment packages being used for urban operations in Iraq/Afghanistan make the difference?
[ol]
[li]Paint the tank up like a Panzer.[/li][li]Drive on the Autobahn as much as possible[/li][li]Heil Opal[/li][li]Disconnect the Abrams speed governor.[/li][/ol]
Possibly. Then again, the Marines could also be working with much older equipment that needs that extra TLC to keep them up-and-running.
But short of battle damage, it doesn’t take 4-5 hours to do a pre-op, daily, and post-op PM check on an Abrams engine, transmission, and drivetrain. Unless that Captain was factoring in weapons maintenance time (cleaning dust out of machineguns keeps them happy), even adding routine turret maintenance won’t account for 4-5 hours.
Even adding in “extra special” attention being paid to the engine air intake and filtration doesn’t add up to that much maintenance.
Color me dubious until more information is brought to light.
I doubt that the 1944 paving of the Autobahn could support the weight of an M1 tank.
It’s what they were designed for: moving military equipment around the country.
Bad idea if you’re low on spare parts. That governor exists to make the tracks and transmission last longer.
In Germany, we used to run up-and-down a ~20km chunk of old, disuded/never opened autobahn (called “The Ghost Autobahn”) in our Abrams with no problem.
It was being built right at the end of WWII, but discontinued with the fall of the Third Reich.
ET, not sure if you saw this:
I did miss it. Sorry
Only the “Overpressure” System. There was a regular filtered system backup that could handle most chemical agents, but not nuclear or biological agents.
With the overpressure NBC system, we technically didn’t have to mask up or wear chemical protective clothing inside the turret, but we had the chem. protection suits close to hand inside the crew compartment anyway. And we always had our gas masks strapped to our sides; it was the closest I came to sleeping on a pillow for 6 months.
We were intially very afraid that Saddam would be crazy enough to use chemical agents against us, but for me at least, that faded over time. By the time the ground war actually kicked off, I personally wasn’t very worried about it at all.
Wow, crazy. Thanks!
Well, since Grant, Lee, Sherman and Sheridan were honored by having tanks named after them, I’d say it undoubtedly has to be a Thomas.
You’re the first tanker I’ve ever seen that didn’t complain about maintenance. I thought they were trained to bitch about it. 
A 95% OR rate means your unit had 95% of the vehicles operational on average, but there were breakdowns, right?
The OP’s scenario is different, with a lone Abrams in battle in rough terrain with zero support, zero spares, fighting 750 miles from Normandy to Berlin. The track pads and bushings alone probably won’t last long enough to get it there unless it drives on a smooth road the entire way.
Maintenance sucks. None of it is easy on a tank. But a lot of the break downs can be prevented with proper maintenance. Not all of course and I’m talking about the mechanical parts not the electronics.
Technical question about the tranny – is it difficult to persuade him/her to drink that much?
It’s the Army. They have guns. They can be very persuasive.
Don’t shoot, don’t tell.
We had one of our original M1IPs catch onfire as soon as we hit deep desert, and it wasn’t something the crew could have really prevented; an in-line fuel filter broke apart right over the turbine, dumping fuel right on a hot engine.
Another of our new M1A1’s wa slossed due to water damage when the hole/fighting osition the Engineers dug for us didn’t drain during a severe rain storm. Again, not crew fault.
And we had one that just broke down on our end-run around VII Corps on 26 or 27 Feb 91. I don’t recall what the problem was, but the mechanics and crew had her back up-and-running in an hour or so, and they caught back up with us atthe next fuel point.
And we didn’t bitch about maintenance; the modern cavalry may not ride horse, but the tradition of paying particular attention to your “mount” (vehicle) was still pretty deeply ingrained.
That’s a good choice. But it might be fun to tell Patton that it was going to be called the Monty.