Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, during an appearance on Cynthia Pooler’s “Issues that Matter” youtube channel alongside Diane Sare, argued today that the 31 M1 Abrams tanks that President Joe Biden promised to Ukraine on Jan. 25 may never actually make it there. Biden’s offer was nothing but a political gesture on the part of the US, Germany and NATO to be seen as doing something in support of Ukraine when in fact, Ritter Ukraine is losing the war against Russia and there’s nothing that NATO can do to change that outcome.
Ritter pointed out, as Politico reported yesterday, that the US will not be supplying the most advanced versions of the Abrams available, but rather the second generation of the tank called the M1A2 except that it won’t be equipped with the “secret armor” that the A2 version was built with. Instead, the tanks will be equipped with the same steel armor that the first generation M1A1 was built with back in the 1980’s. The “recipe” for the “secret armor” includes depleted uranium and is prohibited by law from being exported.
Secondly, as Ritter also pointed out, the Biden Administration has determined that there are no M1 tanks in US Army stocks available to be pulled out, upgraded and shipped to Ukraine and so has decided that they have to be built from scratch. “We just don’t have these tanks available in excess in our U.S. stocks,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters yesterday. “But there’s only one plant in the US that can assemble M1 tanks. It’s a government-owned facility in Lima, Ohio which is operated by General Dynamics and can turn out 12 tanks per month, but is backed up filling orders for 250 tanks for Poland and another 108 for Taiwan. So where are the tanks for Ukraine to come from? That question seems to still be waiting for an answer.
