David Axe
The U.S. Army just got a new tank. But you wouldn’t know it from the way the ground-combat branch describes the vehicle.
On Oct. 4, 2017, the Army’s program office for ground vehicles announced that the service had accepted the first M-1A2SEPV3 “on schedule and on budget.” General Dynamics Land Systems builds the tank in Lima, Ohio, using existing M-1 hulls as a starting point.
The Army asked to buy 58 M-1A2SEPV3 tanks in 2018, against a total requirement for around a thousand of the new vehicles — enough to equip all of the branch’s active-duty tank brigades. At present, a V3 costs around $20 million. The price should drop as the production rate increases.
While officially a variant of the nearly four-decade-old M-1 tank, the SEPV3 is, in all the ways that matter, essentially brand new. The preceding variant, the M-1A2SEPV2, entered service in 2007.
“Principal improvements are in lethality, survivability and sustainability,” Don Kotchman, a General Dynamics vice president, said in late 2015.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-army-building-new-tank-very-sneaky-way-22650
