You've seen tanks getting hit by various weapons with various outcomes. But what actually happens inside an Abrams when something hits it? And is it any different for its crew than the tanks that seem to be competing in who can toss their turret further? To answer that, you first have to understand what's trying to get in, how it tries to get in, and what the Abrams was specifically designed to do about it.
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| A Destroyed M1 Abrams |
Where the Abrams Came From
By the early 1960s, the United States had a serious tank problem. The M60 was basically the latest in a chain of upgrades stretching back to World War II, and it was falling behind fast. The Soviets were fielding the T-62 with the first smoothbore gun ever put on a production tank, and behind it the T-64 with an autoloader and three-man crew. They were building better tanks and more of them.
The US and West Germany tried a joint project called MBT-70 to leapfrog everything the Soviets had. In practice it was a disaster. Overcomplicated, unreliable, and the two countries disagreed on virtually every decision. The program collapsed, but the lessons fed directly into what came next. For the Germans, that became the Leopard 2. For the Americans, a new program designated XM1.
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| The XM1 Tank prototype |
The philosophy was the opposite of MBT-70. No unnecessary complexity. Use proven, reliable technology. Build something that works, that you can afford to produce in numbers, and that dominates through excellence in the core features: firepower, protection, and mobility. The tank was named after General Creighton Abrams, one of the most effective tank commanders of World War II.
The Armor
The real breakthrough was the armor. The British had developed composite armor, and the Americans eventually adopted the concept. Instead of thick slabs of steel, this armor used layers of completely different materials like ceramic tiles, metal plates, and composites all sandwiched together. Each layer dealt with incoming threats differently. Ceramic tiles shatter kinetic penetrators on impact. Backing plates absorb remaining energy. Against shaped charges, the ceramics disrupt the molten copper jet before it can go all the way through.
In 1988, the M1A1 got depleted uranium mesh as an additional layer, creating the M1A1HA heavy armor variant. Frontal shaped charge protection nearly doubled. This was the version that went to Desert Storm in 1991, where it proved effectively impervious to every Iraqi weapon that hit it head-on.
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| The M1A1HA Tank Variant |
Keeping the Crew Alive
The Abrams was designed around the philosophy that the crew matters more than the tank, because a well-trained crew is harder to replace than a vehicle. The signature feature is the ammunition storage system.
In most tanks around the world, ammunition sits in the same space as the crew. In the Abrams, about 34 of its 40 rounds are stored in a dedicated armored compartment in the rear of the turret called the bustle. The remaining six are in a separate armored box near the driver. A thick steel blast door separates the ammunition from the crew. When the loader needs a round, he hits a knee switch, the door slides open, he pulls the round out, loads it, and the door closes automatically before the gun fires.
The roof of the ammunition compartment has blowout panels designed to be strong on the outside but weak on the inside. If a round penetrates the bustle and ignites the ammunition, the panels blow open and a massive column of flame shoots straight up out of the turret roof. The crew, sitting on the other side of that closed blast door just a couple of feet away, can survive. The tank can even drive away from what should have been a catastrophic kill.
The Abrams also has a Halon fire suppression system that detects fire and triggers suppression in under 200 milliseconds, faster than a human blink. It causes mild dizziness and isn't great to breathe in, but it's much better than inhaling flames.
What Happens When a Kinetic Round Hits
A modern APFSDS round is a long rod of tungsten or depleted uranium, about 2 to 3 centimeters in diameter, fired at velocities between 1,400 and 1,800 meters per second. At those speeds, both the penetrator and the armor behave like fluids. The dart erodes through, pushing armor material sideways. If it makes it through, white-hot fragments of metal and chunks of the armor's inner surface spray into the crew compartment like a shotgun blast.
Depleted uranium penetrators are also pyrophoric, meaning they ignite on contact with air. So the inside of a tank gets simultaneously sprayed with superheated fragments and set on fire.
During Desert Storm, friendly fire incidents gave the Abrams a chance to test itself against its own weapons. Front turret and hull armor stopped APFSDS rounds from other Abrams. Thinner side and rear armor was penetrated on at least two occasions, but the crew survived both times thanks to blowout panels and fire suppression.
What Happens When a Shaped Charge Hits
The most common threat in recent conflicts has been the shaped charge. A standard RPG-7 warhead can burn through over 300 millimeters of steel. When that jet makes it through, it creates a narrow hole about 10 millimeters in diameter and injects superheated metal fragments into the crew compartment. Spall scatters like shrapnel, and a violent pressure wave in the enclosed space can rupture eardrums and lungs.
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| RPG-7 Warhead |
The RPG-7 couldn't get through the Abrams' front or side turret armor. But hits to tracks, the rear engine compartment, or the gap between turret and hull could still cause serious damage. Near Karbala, an RPG hit a fuel cell and started a fire that burned the tank completely. The crew survived and got out as designed. During the Battle of Najaf in 2003, two Abrams had their ammunition ignited. Both times, blowout panels vented it upward and both crews escaped without serious injury.
Not a single Abrams crew member was killed by enemy fire during the initial 2003 invasion.
The Occupation Changed Everything
The years of counterinsurgency brought threats the Abrams was never designed for. By 2006, roughly 100 IEDs were detonating per day across Iraq. Standard buried IEDs could damage tracks and injure crews with blast shock through the hull floor, but rarely penetrated the armor itself.
The real problem was the explosively formed penetrator, the EFP. A disc-shaped copper plate deformed by the explosion into a solid slug moving at roughly 2,000 meters per second. Unlike a conventional shaped charge jet, the EFP holds its shape and energy even at 100 meters. It could penetrate the Abrams' thinner side and belly armor. They were hidden inside walls, lamp posts, and curbs along patrol routes. A declassified report recorded 195 Americans killed and close to 900 wounded by EFPs across all vehicle types.
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| IEDs Used in Iraq |
On June 6th, 2006, two crew members of an M1A2 were killed in Baghdad when an IED detonated near their tank, one of the first confirmed crew deaths from enemy action inside an Abrams.
When Iraqi Army Abrams faced ISIS from 2014 onward, roughly a third of the 140 delivered tanks were destroyed or captured. But these were downgraded export variants without depleted uranium armor, poorly maintained, and operated by crews with minimal training.
The most recent chapter is Ukraine, where 31 M1A1SA Abrams were delivered in export configuration. The first confirmed loss came just three days after they appeared in combat, hit by an FPV drone. The crew bailed out, a second drone hit the tank, and the ammunition ignited. The blowout panels worked as designed, but the tank was destroyed. A pattern repeated across Ukraine with all tanks, not just the Abrams.
The Abrams was built around one idea: the crew is harder to replace than the tank. Blowout panels, blast doors, fire suppression in under 200 milliseconds. Every system exists to give four people a chance to walk away from a hit that would kill the crew in almost any other tank. It doesn't make them invincible. But it changes the odds.
Written by Andreja Rakočević, a military history writer and co-creator of the RogerRoger YouTube channel.