Leading up to the invasion and knowing the tanks would be heading north to Baghdad , did tank maintenance crews change their maintenance schedule to ensure that the tanks would not have any major maintenance to perform once the war started or did they keep their preventative and reactive maintenance the same?

Reason I ask is I change the oil regardless of how much life is left on the last oil change, when I know I will be gone from home for a longer hitch at the rigs and I won't have ability to change oil on my own etc and when I know I ill drive round trip well over the 3k-5k mile interval I change oil at.

Asking here for more eyes to see and the wonderment of GD responses

It's a tanker thang, you wouldn't understand.

Very GDish response

I have no clue...
Im going to guess those tanks were services beforehand...and then they hit that sand....and then third shop was so busy those guys didnt sleep for weeks on end.

I would HOPE they did a pretty thorough check on all their systems before jumping off.



I mean...we at least did all the -10 stuff we could as infantry before we left to head north from Kuwait ('04 and '06). If I was a tanker going north to possibly take on other tanks for a push into Iraq, I'd want to at least do that.

*yawn* Yeah, I wasn't even a Tanker, thought I might feed your amazingly knucklehead post.

Accurate model of a WW1 tank, including the tank machine gunner employing the auto-reducing cyclic rate used back then to keep barrels cool during sustained fire. not too many people know about that.

I was never a real 19K just an honorary one.  From what the guys I known who were tankers in Vietnam, Desert Storm and OIF said was they did all their checks before hand, moved, shot the shit out of anything that looked dangerous, stopped, fueled, serviced the tank, ate, shit, slept, pulled guard and repeated this until operations were done.

One thing thats universal with tanks is they need tons of maintenance.  My friend who spent over 23 years as a tanker said they fixed the damn things more than they ever fought in them.  I'm sure they took care of things they knew would be an issue well before jumping off into Iraq.  If the tanks took a major shit they would be left behind to wait for the maintenance teams to catch up and get them back in order.  If it looked bad enough and they couldn't leave a crew to wait they just blew the tanks in place.  They did that in Desert Storm when an Abrams got stuck and the unit didn't have time to wait for more M88's to pull it out.  Two other M-1's pulled up and slung some rounds at it thinking that was good enough and they pressed on.  After the fighting, the tank recovery crews went back to the M1 and found all the tank needed was a new turret and engine.  Sure enough the tank went back to Lima and was back in service a few weeks later.

I'm sure more than one kid who went in the Army thinking he was going to tear ass all over in an M1 was quite dismayed at the amount of time he spent maintaining his track.

Although I was not on a tank but on a Bradley during OIF 1, all we did was are normal maintenance schedule for the invasion, it was another story once we got to Bagdad, and running them 24/7, replaced full sets of tracks 3 times, some brads got short tracked until road  wheels and other parts became avail.

The army does not change oil on intervals on engines and transmission, oil samples are taken and sent out, kind of like a piss test, if it comes back with metal particles etc in it, the oil and filter gets changed and another sample taken.

You came to the right place son.  I was in the 1st armored division during operation Desert storm.  

No, there was no special maintenance.  When we got called to go to theatre we had 24 hours notice.  We maintained the vehicles at our bases in Germany beforehand.  once in the desert the machines mostly sat until the ground war began.  Which was at 2:00 am.  We then drove north for close to 6 Hours before needing refueling, which came via fuel trucks.  Then we entered Iraq and encountered the republican guard.  

I will say, I was in air defense but was assigned to a tanker unit and our chapparalls Turbo ate it before the ground war started it.  It was repaired on spot.  Our weapons launching system also ate it.  We were given a stinger in place of the 4 Sidewinder missiles we would normally shoot.  The turbines of the Abrams seemed to handle the sand better than Turbo engines.  But they were able to remove the filters and use the turbines to  blow them out - you should have seen that dust cloud.

Bradley's seemed to function normally also.  Replacing or cleaning air filters was a daily occurrence, if you drove the vehicle anywhere.

I dunno about tanks..but with helichoppers, I can tell you that we did all of our -10 inspections that were 0-90 days out prior to deploying to Iraq and did the same thing on the way back so that none of them would pop up during the moving process.

2/59ADA  ????  I was on chaparals until 92

Pretty much all there was to do before Desert Storm was do vehicle maintenance and burn barrels of shit for months.  So yeah, the vehicles were well maintained before we rolled North.

<----  19D 3rd ACR

6th battalion, 3rd regiment, 1st armored division out of Schwabach Germany.  If you do an image search for chapparal air defense system in Google you will see me driving mine in Saudi Arabia.  I have the green helmet.  My helmet was missing the protective outer shelland it only had the foam padding.  The radio was in the helmet so I needed to wear it to hear my squad leader.

6/3 use to be 2/59 I was in 2/59 in 85,  partied in Nurnberg

Discipline to follow the prescribe maint works... You don't do anything specials, you just maintain a certain level.
It works.

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Me cleaning my Vee-Pac filters. My Platoon cleaned them every day.. was it fun??? fuck no. It was Africa hot (Pic was in Idaho). Did my guys like pulling out the Bitch plate and pulling those heavy ass filters? and hooking up the Cleaning wand and blowing them out (all three per tank)??
No,

but the greatest compliment I got was from a couple of retired guys who were working the civilian contract for MILES (Loran). Every day they would come by our Assembly area to assist with any MILES issues , swap out and test detector belts, swap out laser transmitters,etc... and they told me that every day we come over here, your guys are always pulling Maint, and never seem to have any issues with any of our MILES....

but when they go over to our other Platoon, they noticed they are never doing Maint, and there always having issues with getting there MILES to work.

My guys knew how I felt about walking.... That's why I became a Tanker... So I didn't have to. Just like in the Cavalry days, you take care of your horse first, then the men, it's pretty simple.

And if you maintain the correct level of Maintenance, then you have time to do this
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To include having the time to heat it up vs, eat it cold.....makes all the difference ...

Prior to our deployments to Iraq, we had a normal services on all our Bradleys.  Once in country, everything that could go wrong, did, to include turret driv failures, ISUs going tits up, track adjuster gaskets leaking resulting in thrown track.  Usually had our tracks back up within a week or so, and just borrowed vice from other platoons or supplemented with HMMWVs or MRAPs.


1/6 inf. 2 BDE, 1AD, Baumholder