I would point out that the modern nature of the specific tanks being requested by Ukraine should make a significant difference.
T-72 vs. Abrams is HUGE.
I've been trying to go into the specifics of what models of what, from what era are involved (well, as much as I can piece together from encyclopedic sources). By age of creation, alone, the M1A2 could be from '92 (good 'Merkin stock, etc, except that it is already known to come from the
export manifest; and I didn't read that as freshly manufactured on demand, but assumed indirectly from what's already been exported out there just maybe not yet been too shop-soiled yet) whilst the other the T-72B3M that's a line of the T-72 product that should be no more ancient than 2016, and supposedly quite the bee's knees amongst it's fellows. Also that's potentially hundreds of the Russian model vs 31 of the US one. Not that it'd be pitted directly. (And one total of T-72s of 'any kind' that I established, my prior "but they won't all be there" aside, is just over 2000...
not seemingly including the 8k in 'storage'). So we also need the current bias in tactical brilliance to be maintained.
OTOH, I was already getting not a little interested about the possibilities of up to 200 PT-91s arriving from Poland (or perhaps the places Poland had already passed such models on to. And, interesting, enough, the PT-91 is a custom Pole version (1991+) of the T-72M export range. The first part of the submodal differential gap involves losing the nice composite armour, but one of the things the Poles added back (at least in
some versions of the tale) in their national personalisation of the model was reactive armour so... would seem like a decent switch.
And on the balance of some of the other stats, and the inherent cultural familiarity with most of it, and that whole delivery-delay... I'm beginning to wonder if the PT-91 is a better fit than the Abrams?
Not that we can be sure what'll be the best choice to come out on top against what until we get to see what actual match-brackets are drawn for real. And now I'm closing my spreadsheet on the matter, because I just couldn't get all the details I wanted to do the actual comparisons I had intended to do with it. This is the point at which I leave this to those analyst guys who I already said are the ones that need to make such judgement calls, not me.