The Army’s new tank will roll out a decade early. Here’s how they did it.

It’s been about 30 years since the Army welded a new Abrams tank, and it was going to be 10 more years until they built a new one, as the service sat down to hammer out the requirements for the combat vehicle’s next generation .

But when the Army awarded the M1E3 contract to General Dynamics last year, the service’s acquisitions leaders said that wasn’t good enough.

“That just isn't going to cut it,” Danny Deep, the company’s executive vice president for global operations, told an audience Wednesday at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C. “The requirements are going to change 100 times between now and then.”

Rather than pick out every single communications system and sensor that would go into the next Abrams for the rest of its service life, the Army is opting for an open syste