Facts about tanks
Sometime last week, someone at Quantico decided to ruin my otherwise mute and productive day with 4 straight hours of high explosive tank target practice.
(To give you some reference, I live about 20 miles north of Quantico where I can both hear and, more significantly, feel every explosion, every minute.)
I was a little disgruntled, so I thought spent the afternoon learning about how this here all works*.
A few things I thought worth highlighting:
The most common, current-generation main battle tank in the world is the M1 ABRAMS, which cost about 7 million dollars each.
A single tank round (ammunition) costs about $50,000, each(!)
Meanwhile, a tank consumes 30–40 Liters of diesel per km.
A tank is pretty useless without a trained crew. Which means that for every tank, there needs to 3-5 trained combat soldiers who know how to operate one.
This means that every year said soldiers need to be trained using actual tanks and real ammunition (which of course costs money and man-hours and consumes energy).
Field training tanks are transported by train to a railway station near a field firing range, unloaded, transported to the range, driven to a firing point some 30 Km or more, and then used indefinitely for training (again, not actual combat).
Unexploded ammunition can remain active for a very long time and poses a significant threat to both humans and the environment.
*FYI: I'm not against tanks or target practice, or even ensuring we have soldiers who are battlefield-ready if and when we ever happen to actually need to use those tanks…I do, however, think it's worth acknowledging that there's a least a dozen other ways we could spend our tax-dollars that don't involve blowing things up.