Romania is pushing to buy 54 Abrams main battle tanks and related equipment from the United States in a deal worth at least a billion dollars, the defense ministry said Friday.
The ministry said the latest-model tanks would help its military meet regional security challenges. Romania, a NATO member since 2004, shares a long border with war-torn Ukraine.
The sale would include ammunition and training simulators, the ministry said. It said Romania has estimated the contract as worth about $1 billion, but that Congress was notified of a higher value of $2.5 billion after it was approved by the U.S. State Department on Thursday. No timeframe for the purchase was specified.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Romania is pushing to buy 54 Abrams main battle tanks and related equipment from the United States in a deal worth at least a billion dollars, the defense ministry said Friday.
The ministry said the latest-model tanks would help its military meet regional security challenges.
Romania, a NATO member since 2004, shares a long border with war-torn Ukraine.
Romanian Minister of Defense Angel Tilvar said the strategic partnership between his country and the U.S. “represents one of the pillars of national security and an essential contribution to strengthening the defense of the allied eastern flank in the Black Sea region.”
On Friday, Romania’s defense ministry also announced the inauguration next week of a long-planned training hub for F-16 fighter jet pilots from NATO countries and other partners, including Ukraine.
After Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Romania boosted it defense spending, while NATO bolstered its presence on Europe’s eastern flank by sending additional multinational battlegroups to alliance members Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia.
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I’d buy one, but where would I park it?
This is one of the dumbest decisions Romania could ever make. Abrams aren’t built for Romania’s terrain. Besides that, Abrams have JET ENGINES. Those require insane logistics. And qualified staff to work on them and repair them. Which we don’t have. We barely have staff to run our old af Soviet tanks which are ten times easier to repair. And Abrams consume A LOT of fuel. Romania could do so much better with German tanks, or French tanks, or British tanks for all I care. Romania doesn’t have the means to sustain and continuously operate these tanks. And god forbid go to war with them. We barely have a functioning army. I guess there has to be some kind of bribery or something behind it because it makes absolutely no sense to buy these things. We are not the US army to operate these things.
Yours truly, a Romanian citizen.
What? Abrams uses a multifuel engine, it runs on a multitude of fuels.
US is not the only country operating Abrams, they’re used in multiple countries around the world.
They use Honeywell AGT1500 multi-fuel turbine engines, which are literally jet engines. Romania doesn’t have the capabilities to operate these at their full extent. Let alone go to war with these. Our logistics are barely suited for our soviet diesel tanks. If we had to go to war with Abrams our logisitcs would literally crumble. These tanks are good only for PR reasons.
I agree with the logistics part, as they’d need to build and maintain additional facilities but
Abrams aren’t built for Romania’s terrain.
What do you mean by that? Why would they be incompatible with our terrain? Indeed, they’ll most likely never be used in the Carpathians, as you’d need more compact and mobile vehicles to go through there. But given our current threat vector - which comes from the East, so basically only Moldovan low-rise hills, Dobrudja and the Romanian Plains where Bucharest is located being the parts under threat - why would they be not fit for that type of terrain?
