The U.S. occupation of Iraq is over. The Afghanistan war is winding down. Today America faces “emerging threats in an increasingly sophisticated technological environment,” according to Gen. John Campbell, the Army vice chief of staff.

For the U.S. ground combat branches that means a renewed emphasis on fast-moving armored warfare. The Army and Marines are dusting off heavy vehicles that played a minor role in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this series, we spotlight some of the more obscure, weird and lamented armored behemoths. The battle wagons of a new era of warfare. The focus of this volume — the Army’s latest M-1 tank … with all the bells and whistles.

The U.S. military’s practices for naming its weaponry are pretty silly at times. Officials just can’t seem to agree how to describe a drone, for example—or when top-to-bottom upgrades warrant a new name for an old piece of gear.

Hence the surprising obscurity of America’s most advanced tank. The first M-1 Abrams entered service with the Army in 1980. The latest version of the M-1 is nothing like its 34-year-old progenitor—it essentially is a brand-new tank … and arguably the best in the world.

But the Army still calls it an M-1, and just tacks a bunch of extra letters on the end of the designation to specify a wide range of important enhancements to the basic tank. Thus the world’s most fearsome fighting vehicle is an M-1A2SEPv2. Which is confusing and makes it seem like it, too, is three decades old.

As if that weren’t enough, the latest model of the main M-1A2SEPv2 also has additions the Army calls TUSK and CROWS, which themselves both are in their second iterations.

So the planet’s most modern tank is an M-1A2SEPv2 with TUSK 2 and CROWS 2. Oh—and the M-1A2SEPv2/CROWS 2/TUSK 2 might also get brand-new cannon ammunition that will further distance the new vehicle from the original M-1.

Maybe the Army should just come up with a new designation to describe what is, in reality, a new tank.

The 1980-vintage M-1 packed a 105-millimeter gun. The Army bought 3,300 of them from General Dynamics. In 1984 the Army added thicker armor to a batch of new M-1s and called these 900 tanks M-1IPs. The U.S. military no longer uses these early M-1s.

A major upgrade in 1986 added a new 120-millimeter gun. This is the M-1A1. The Army and Marines bought 5,200 copies through 1992. Roughly a thousand M-1A1s still are in service with the Marines and Army National Guard, with another 3,000 in storage in case Godzilla attacks.

There are bewildering number of subvariants of the M-1A1, each boasting incremental improvements in drive-train, armor and electronics. The latest upgrade, the M-1A1SA—which, confusingly, the Army enhanced as part of a program it calls the M-1A1AIMv2—has a factory-fresh engine, digital electronics and a top-secret armor blend that includes a thin layer of uranium.