As the Ukrainian military has already received M1 Abrams on the front lines, it is necessary to understand the main difficulties in using them, as the M1s require careful maintenance – Forbes reported.
The problem lies in the filters at the inlet to the engines, i.e. the filters that keep dirt and debris from clogging and destroying the fragile but powerful M-1 engine. Due to the nature of their design, these filters require thorough and fairly frequent cleaning.
The Abrams’ four-man crew must clean them every 12 hours, otherwise dirt can seriously damage the engine and create a difficult situation, after all, this is one vehicle out of 31. Meanwhile, the process of cleaning the filters is quite complicated: twice a day, the crew must crank the tank’s engine to high revolutions per minute to run a pulse-jet system that blows air out of the tank rather than into it, knocking dust and debris out of the rear grill.
Certainly, the Ukrainian military are surely forewarned of this, but will they be able to cooperate when it is most necessary? In other words, on the battlefield under a barrage of fire.
All those things can be taught to the crew, but if ever they make a mistake – and they will- it blows a million-dollar engine that can’t be repaired in the field, Mark Hertling, a retired US Army general, told The Kyiv Independent.
Before US President Joe Biden’s administration officially handed the M-1 to Ukraine earlier this year, many experts and even some officials worried aloud about the tank’s fuel needs.
The M-1 typically uses just 0.6 miles per gallon of fuel, but the engine’s flexibility lies, for example, in the fact that the US Army fuels its tanks with aviation fuel and the Australian Army makes heavy use of cheaper fuel. There is no indication that replacing aviation fuel with diesel significantly degrades the performance of the M-1.
As a consequence, it makes no sense for the Ukrainian army to complicate the situation, and it will fuel the Abrams with the same diesel fuel as other types of tanks.
It is through this practice that filters can last a long time, but it must be learnt by practice as this cleaning is necessary even in the most extreme conditions.
