Older variant M1A1
USA announce Abrams delivery by fall
03/21/2023, 8:57 p.m
When Germany agreed to send its Leopards, the United States also wanted to send their Abrams tanks to Ukraine. First of all, it is said that the US military equipment first has to be repaired for a year. Now it can probably go faster.
The United States wants to deliver the already promised Abrams tanks to Ukraine by the fall. US Department of Defense spokesman Pat Ryder said in Washington that the department had decided to provide Kiev with the M1A1 Abrams tank variant – instead of the newer M1A2 variant. This will allow us to significantly reduce delivery times and send tanks to Ukraine by the fall, he said.
When asked what the timeline would have been otherwise, Ryder said the government did not initially commit to a timetable, merely expressed the expectation that it would likely take more than a year to make the tanks available to Ukraine.
At the end of January, after much back and forth and parallel to the German commitment to supply Leopard tanks to Kiev, the US government announced that it would deliver 31 M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Ukraine. However, Washington already emphasized that it would take “many months” for these to arrive in Ukraine.
Surprising U-turn by US in January
The US government had previously argued that it did not consider the deployment of this battle tank to be sensible for various practical reasons. In the end, however, Washington surprisingly swung around. There have been conflicting accounts from the White House and the Chancellery as to how the pledge of main battle tanks to Ukraine came about.
The US President’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said shortly before a visit by Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington at the end of February that Germany had made the delivery of US tanks a condition for the promise of German Leopard tanks. The federal government denied that.