this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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You could marginally increase the survivability of one tank (say, by 20%)... Or you could build another tank and increase the survivability of someone that would otherwise be infantry by an order of magnitude.
Tanks take bags of flesh off the battleground and that's extremely advantageous.
The US operates under the assumption that they will be fighting a war on the other side of the world, so designing a more robust tank is important both in terms of PR (because dead bodies coming home is bad), in terms of logistics (because shipping twice the number of tanks around the world isn't that great), and in terms of who they're fighting (mostly insurgents without advanced anti-tank munitions, so survivability is far higher when hit).