There's a New Sheriff in Town: ISIS Fighters Fear "The Beast"
Despite their psychopathic barbarity, ISIS fighters fear many things — women, music, culture, bathing, and now a lone tank dubbed “The Beast.”
According to U.S. military official Col. Steve Warren, an American-trained Iraqi tank crew has become a one-vehicle Dirty Dozen in the aptly named Iraqi city of Hit, the Associated Press has reported.
As part of ongoing efforts to retake the city from ISIS militants, the lone crew is “tearing it up” with its distinctively midwestern machine, obliterating every unfriendly target of opportunity with its General Dynamics M1A1 Abrams.
Warren tweeted a video recorded on April 12 of The Beast engaging a bomb-laden vehicle that was trying to target anti-ISIS forces:
A Bombed car was trying to target hero’s in , and was blown away by a Cornet Rocket! pic.twitter.com/pUVvS1zZ5z
— جهاز مكافحة الإرهاب (@iraqicts) April 12, 2016
There’s no word on whether the crew rides into town with “Ride of the Valkyries” blasting over the audio system.
The M1A1 Abrams, produced either at the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant in Warren, Michigan, or the Lima Army Tank Plant in Ohio, bristles with firepower. A .50-calibre heavy machine gun and two 7.62 mm general-purpose machine guns complement the tank’s 120-millimetre main gun.
Under what passes for a hood, a 1,500 shaft horsepower multi-fuel Honeywell turbine engine and Allison transmission motivates all the armament, allowing the Abrams to make short work of Toyota pickups packed with explosives — or the odd plumber truck.
For doing a good job taking out the trash, hats off to the operators of The Beast.
[Image: Nathan Rupert/ Flickr ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)]
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The Abrams is a terrific fighting machine, to be sure, but I worry about what would happen if we ever had to deploy it in a conflict with an enemy having something approaching parity with our tech. The fuel type and quantity demands of that engine are massive and very real. I think in a protracted campaign, where the enemy could actually hit our supply lines, the Abrams would be stopped not by direct fire, but more often by running out or low on fuel. The Army really should have a standby swap plan to put these guys on another powertrain.
"there were three, but mechanical issues sidelined two of them" That seems to sum up the continued gap between Pentagon theories on "what we need to win the war" and what the guys at the sharp end are finding in reality. It seems scrambled egg on the cap tightens the pressure on the brain...