By David Axe
Forbes
Oct 8, 2024
After fighting in many of the bloodiest battles in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine for 15 months straight, the Ukrainian army’s elite 47th Mechanized Brigade finally rotated off the eastern front line early last month for a well-earned period of rest and reset.
The brigade took with it the survivors of 31 American-made M-1 Abrams tanks that equipped the unit’s sole tank battalion. Those tanks have gotten some badly needed upgrades.
A video the 47th Mechanized Brigade posted on or around Monday depicts some of the unit’s surviving tanks in training. The 69-ton, four-person M-1s sport U.S.-made reactive armor blocks on their sides and Ukrainian-made reactive armor blocks on their turrets as locally-crafted anti-drone cage armor and drone-grounding radio jammers.
Ukraine’s 2000s-vintage M-1A1 Situational Awareness models aren’t the best-protected Abrams—that honorific belongs to the latest U.S. Army M-1A2s—but the Ukrainian Abrams might be the most modified. The modifications are tailored for defeating two main threats: anti-tank missiles and explosive drones. The reactive armor explodes outward to deflect the missiles’ warheads. The cage armor and jammer disable and block explosive drones.
In piling mods onto its Abrams, the 47th Mechanized Brigade is doing its best to preserve the tanks it has left for as long as it can. The United States has obligingly shipped hundreds of surplus M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles in order to keep the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s assault battalions fully equipped with modern vehicles despite those battalions suffering heavy losses.
Weirdly, the United States has not shipped replacement M-1s. Those first 31 Abrams, which arrived in Ukraine a year ago, are the only Abrams the Americans have pledged, despite there being literally thousands of the tanks in storage in the United States.
How many M-1s the 47th Mechanized Brigade has left is unclear. The analysts at the intelligence collective Oryx have tallied six destroyed Abrams and eight damaged or abandoned ones. It’s typical for tank units to try to tow away and repair immobilized vehicles, but it’s hard to say how many of its abandoned Abrams the 47th Mechanized Brigade managed to recover as it fought mostly rearguard actions in eastern Ukraine from last winter through the early fall.
At most, the 47th Mechanized Brigade has 25 M-1s left. At a minimum, it might have just 17. But it’s a safe bet all the survivors now have the add-on armor and jammers. They’ll roll back into battle better-protected than ever—potentially delaying the day when the brigade has too few tanks to form a cohesive fighting force.
If the 47th Mechanized Brigade gets more Abrams, they might not come from the United States—but from Australia. While the Americans haven’t signaled a willingness to transfer more tanks, the Australians are reportedly considering donating 59 surplus M-1A1SAs that recently retired from the Australian army.
With 59 fresh Abrams, the 47th Mechanized could replenish its existing tank battalion—and possibly form a second battalion, too. Unless and until that happens, those 17 to 25 survivors of the original 31 Ukrainian M-1s will have to soldier on alone.