The Republic of China Army has launched a reside stream of its first reside hearth drills involving M1A2T Abrams, which had been first delivered to the service in December 2024. Though greater than six months of integration and coaching have handed, Abrams tanks have but to be commissioned into formal fight items, and as such couldn’t formally take part within the Han Kuang workouts geared toward testing fight readiness. The Army nonetheless used the event of the workouts to check the autos underneath reside hearth circumstances. President of the Republic of China William Lai Ching-te oversaw the workouts at a brand new tank coaching floor in Hsinchu, and praised each the autos and the crews that manned them. “These tanks reside as much as their repute as probably the most highly effective on earth,” he acknowledged, including that they’d play a key function within the Republic of China’s defence technique alongside drones and different fashionable techniques.
The adoption of the Abrams marks a serious shift for the Republic of China Army’s armoured warfare capabilities, because the service beforehand relied on out of date M48 and M60 primary battle tanks as its most succesful fight autos. The U.S. Army started to part out the M60 and fee the Abrams 45 years earlier in 1980. The Army has struggled to obtain new tools because of the Republic of China authorities’s standing as an efficient non-state actor, because the worldwide group together with the USA and the United Nations recognise the rival Folks’s Republic of China authorities based mostly in Beijing as the only official Chinese language authorities. The 2 Chinese language governments are at the moment in a state of civil struggle, and every declare to be the only official governments of the Chinese language nation. The unwillingness of the overwhelming majority of worldwide suppliers to equip the Republic of China Armed Forces has been a major issue impeding modernisation, with the forces’ prioritisation of modernising aerial warfare capabilities being one other signifiant issue guaranteeing floor forces are left behind.
Commenting on the efficiency of the brand new Abrams tanks, Captain Cheng Yu-chun noticed that it was a “main leap ahead in firepower, mobility and safety” in comparison with the ageing M60A3 tank beforehand fielded in elite items. Commander of the 584th Armoured Brigade Main Common Chou Kuang-i highlighted the tank’s superior “hunter-killer” system, observing: “It permits the gunner to have interaction a goal whereas the commander makes use of an unbiased thermal sight to find the following one.” “This drastically will increase engagement effectivity and situational consciousness in comparison with older-generation tanks.” The Abrams tanks are anticipated to beassigned to the sixth Army Corps, which is answerable for defending northern territories on the island of Taiwan, and the Republic of China’s non permanent capital of Taipei. The Republic of China authorities continues to say town of Nanjing on the mainland as its capital, though it’s at the moment underneath the management of the Folks’s Republic.
The Republic of China Army is scheduled to obtain 108 M1A2T tanks, though they notably lack the depleted uranium armour utilized by the U.S. Army, with FMS export armour utilized in its stead. This considerably reduces safety ranges, with Abrams tanks missing depleted uranium armour having confirmed extremely susceptible to assaults utilizing even comparatively primary anti-tank weapons when deployed by the Iraqi Army and the Ukrainian Army. The tanks notably additionally lack the Trophy Lively Safety System which is being built-in onto fashionable Abrams variants within the U.S. Army, that means they can not intercept incoming projectiles in a comparable solution to fashionable tanks produced on the Chinese language mainland such because the Sort 99A. The viability of the Abrams for top depth fight with mainland forces has repeatedly been questioned, with the speedy depletion of the Ukrainian Army’s personal fleet setting an unfavourable precedent regardless of Russia’s much less refined anti-armour capabilities. By early June 2025 the Ukrainian Army was assessed to have misplaced 87 % of the American sourced tanks, with 27 of the 31 autos destroyed or captured.
