Tanks are stylish again.

via Vice.

"In Europe, with the tension with Russia, there is a very growing fear that to tackle that you need top-end armored vehicles, and you see the Germans reacting to that with their Leopard 2 tanks by buying back from the industry what they sold a number of years ago and preparing for new tanks and buying new heavy infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers," Wezeman told VICE News. "You can't go in there with a light armored vehicle, light helicopters. You need big things, heavy things, well-protected things."
The US, Wezeman added, will not be left out. "Heavy armored vehicles, tanks, a successor to the M1, and certainly new infantry fighting vehicles are things we need to invest in, because what we have is just not good enough for potentially fighting against an enemy that is very heavily armed or at least is very strong and capable at tank weapons," he said.
And yet, the US doesn't currently have a new MBT planned; the upgraded M1A3 model of the Abrams tank, originally slated to be combat-ready by 2017, has been pushed back, with research and development now set to start sometime in the 2020s.

Story here.

Interesting...but lets rotate back to the Marine Corps.

Which way does it go?  Simply stay the course and keep the M1A1 in service until 2050?  Move to a Mobile Gun System based on the ACV?  Dump armor all together and move to a 101st from the Sea...depending on airpower to deal with enemy armor?

The word "risk" is currently fashionable in the Pentagon for anyone paying attention.  At what point does it become too risky to take on so much risk?