Under Commandant Berger, the United States Marine Corps has embarked on a once-in-a-generation reinvention to prepare it for the next few decades of conflict. Notice at the one-minute mark the effect on the pavement when the first tank leaves the garage, then stops and turns.Forcing Design or Designing Force? The Reinvention of the Marine Corps The video below was embedded along with the blog. Too many pilots have died flying military bombers that someone tried to convert into an air tanker, flying low and slow into canyons, something completely different from, for example, maritime patrol, the designated mission of the P2V. With enough force it can be done, but both the peg and the hole will be compromised. It’s trying to force a round peg into a square hole. This is another example of trying to fight fire on the cheap, taking equipment designed for a completely different mission and attempting to use it for a critical emergency services function where efficiency and safety are critical and lives could be at stake. And a Caterpillar D6 dozer weighs 36,000 pounds, about 100,000 pounds less than an M1 tank. You probably have seen the large divots left when a dozer operating off the road turns. And how are you going to get it to a fire? There will also be some land managers who will not agree to having a 100,000 pound tracked vehicle driving on their property. How much lighter, who knows, but where are you going to use it if it is lightened to 110,000, or 100,000 pounds. Much like trying to convert an airliner or war plane into a usable air tanker, a military tank could undergo a conversion process and be made lighter by removing the weapons and some of the depleted uranium armor. The weight limit on semi trucks on interstate highways is 80,000 pounds.

The US Army’s M1 tanks (M1A1 and M1A2) weigh 135,200 pounds.

Such vehicles could go anywhere, pump fire suppression products in any direction, get out of trouble as quickly as it can get into it. With the theaters of war winding down, we must have hundreds if not thousands of these machines sitting in inventories that could be retrofitted for this purpose. …What I am referring to specifically is some type of all-terrain track-driven platform: a battle tank. An electrician wrote a column for Fire Chief Magazine’s blog suggesting that military battle tanks be converted to armored fire trucks.

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