Quote:
Originally Posted by Tnchi2a
As was this OOB. The Red Dawn timeline starts the war in 1984, as I stated the Stingray prototype was produced in August 1984. The M1 had been in production since 1980 and was supplemented at the time by the large stock of M60A4s already in service and stored in U.S. Army and NG depots.
The U.S government would not stop production of a tested and already evaluated tank to put an untested tank in to production.
The LAV-25 entered service in 1983, 1 year before the events of Red Dawn, so would not be available in the numbers need to fill out the Marine Corps orders let alone to equip the equivalent of a NG unit. To fill out the unit they would use what they had tons of in reserve, the M113 ACAVs.
P.S. the LAV-25 is in service with the US Army now as the Stryker family of vehicles.
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Ah, but it's not as straight-forward as you suggest. Yes the war kicks off in 1984 in the Red Dawn timeline, but in that alternate universe the United States' geopolitical and economic situation had diverged from the RL timeline some years, probably at least a decade, before. IIRC in the RD timeline the US was in a steep economic decline and had, for some reason, either lost many of its allies or its traditional allies were in even worse economic shape than the US.
Under those circumstances, any of those significant dates that you mentioned for the RL fielding of hardware could be completely different in the RD universe. I would suggest that in the RD timeline, the US wouldn't have the necessary funds to be developing and producing large numbers of new MBTs and APCs. They'd probably be refurbishing and upgrading existing vehicles, and in all likelihood struggling to maintain military strength anything like the RL US military did during the 1980s.