BlacktailFA

The only way an M113 will fly is on the inside of a transport aircraft.

They were decent tanks for their time, if a bit underwhelming compared to the monsters coming out of Europe.

However, both of them were arguably unnecessary, given prevailing trends in the technologies for tank guns and their ammunition. The US started developing what became the M26 Pershing as the result of panicking when they first encountered the Tiger I and other very heavily-armored tanks. They defaulted to what would be precedent for many subsequent US tank design blunders; the mindset that in order to kill a bigger tank, you needed a bigger gun with a bigger tank attached to it.

The success of the T-34/85 proved a bigger tank than an M4 Sherman wasn't necessary to mount a bigger gun, while the high-velocity 25pdr gun on the Sherman Firefly (which proved able to penetrate the frontal armor of a Tiger I from outside the effective range of it's 88mm gun) proved a bigger gun was never needed. The advent of APDS, HESH, and HEAT rounds later in the war also effectively eliminated the need for a *new* gun of the same size, but the Army fielded the M26 anyway.

The M46 Patton was basically a beefed-up M26 with improved hull armor, a much more powerful V12 engine replacing the original V8, and numerous minor improvements. It was arguably exactly the tank the Army needed to develop at that time, but they did the right thing for the wrong reason; the M46 was developed only to serve as a temporary stopgap until development on the T42 could be completed. The T42 had an air-cooled flat-12 gasoline engine prone to incessant overheating and breakdowns, a transmission that wasn't any better, and an overloaded suspension. The only components on the T42 that proved worth keeping were those in it's turret, which the US Army later installed in an improved second-generation M26 hull (the M46s were all rebuilt M26s), and the result was the M47 Patton... which itself was a stopgap for another tank, though this time the Army decided to "reinvent the wheel" less, and the resulting M48 Patton finally gave them an original post-war tank that was satisfactory.

Also, while the M26 and M46 were decent tanks in their heyday, it ended quite suddenly when over 7,500 M47s were built over the course of just 3 years (imagine trying to build 7,500 tanks in three years today!), and they weren't as good as the M47 avalanche that smothered the whole market. Thanks to the M47, tere just wasn't a market for the M26 and M46 by the end of the Korean War, which is why neither served longer than a decade.

The Reformers heavily stressed the importance of leadership, individual initiative, a minimal logistics footprint, and a large stockpile of spare parts for all weapons in service, just to name a few. The Russians flunked all of those tests hard.