Merrick Carey
Soon after his first inauguration in January 2017, President Trump saved the Abrams tank. What started as a Fox News interview on lowering the price of tanks quickly turned into a dedicated plan to rejuvenate Army tank production and rebuild the Midwest defense industrial base, too.
2017 was a critical moment for the new President to address the Abrams tank program. The Abrams was designed during the Cold War specifically to defeat the large tank forces of the Warsaw Pact in central Europe. During the Reagan Administration defense build-up, thousands of Abrams tanks were produced at the U.S. Army’s Lima, Ohio tank plant, managed by defense contractor General Dynamics. Manufacture of new tanks ceased after the fall of the Soviet Union, but regular modernization of the Abrams tank continued to incorporate digital upgrades and battlefield lessons learned.
Then, the Obama Administration withdrew U.S. tanks from Europe as it pushed its “reset” approach to Russia. At one point, the U.S. Army even proposed shuttering the Lima production facility when faced with budget reductions. America’s armored vehicle defense industrial base shrank dramatically as activity at the Lima tank plant in northwest Ohio, which had once produced 60 Abrams per month, worked on only 12 per year. Only additional funding from Congress kept a minimal Abrams workforce and supply chain in place.
President Trump’s expressed preference regarding tank purchases kickstarted planning by the White House, OMB, the Army, and General Dynamics, which resulted in budget increases that would modernize more than 100 Abrams tanks per year to the newest capability. The work added a billion dollars annually to previous plans during the first Trump administration. As a result, the tank industrial base in the Midwest was rejuvenated, and employment at the Lima plant quickly increased from 200 to nearly 2,000 jobs.
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