Part of the reason for this post is my intense dislike for the Abrams due to the logistic support it requires. If you think about it a platoon of 4 Abrams uses 550 liters of fuel (say JP4) every 4 hours, given 12 hours of operation per day that’s (3 x 4 x 550) 6600 liters of fuel per day. So, to stay active each platoon basically needs 1 Tanker truck of fuel per day.
No matter how thick the Abrams armor or how powerful the gun, if the tanks can’t move then they are useless as tanks. Seems like the Abrams is darn near indestructible, but any one of those 7 fuel trucks per week could be taken out fairly easily. Given a logistic support base like we have had in the middle east the Abrams is just about perfect. But in central Europe with Russian FA all over its supply lines the Abrams would be a sitting duck.
I Love the Centurion, but for a T2K campaign I would think the T34 or T-55 would be Ideal. First off , neither one would be as conspicuous as an M-1 so the Russians (or poles or whatever) would actually need to identify who is in that tank before opening fire. Second is the fuel thing, a T-55 will operate on ½ the Fuel as an M-1 and will operate for a longer period if its external tanks are used. The T-34 is even more of a gas miser. As for the armor and gun combo, both the T-55 and the T-34 will withstand small arms and auto cannon fire rather well and would be effective against an M-1’s side or rear armor. Given that the M-1 will probably be out of gas, it shouldn’t be that hard to out maneuver.
If you take an example from history, the Panthers and Tigers of WW2 were clearly superior to allied tanks of the time. Problem was that they required a lot of regular maintenance, were thirsty and were out produced 10:1; coincidently that’s about the ratio of T-55s to M1s in the early 90’s.
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