How much force are large aircraft brakes able to exert? In a comment left on my answer here Jan Hudec says:


  Note that usually on dry surface the brakes exert much less force than the tires could handle.


This got me wondering how much force large aircraft brakes can provide. 

The limiting factor in brake force for a vehicle is the friction between the tire and the surface. On my car, even on dry pavement, the brake force available is always greater than the tire/ground friction, so I can always lock the brakes and set off the ABS. I may be misunderstanding it, but Jan’s comment makes me think that maybe large aircraft don’t have that much brake force available. If you commanded maximum braking on a dry runway would the brakes try to lock? Is the ABS really only necessary on a contaminated runway?
This has been answered before, but in a different context. Therefore, I copied the essential part here:

Emergency procedures at take-off weight will produce the biggest braking loads. I will calculate the highest possible braking loads for a Boeing 747-400 that weighs up to 400 tons on take-off. For this I need this plot of a polynominal for the braking coefficient, which is the ratio between vertical and horizontal forces before the tire skids. I do not know the source; I collected it somewhere in the past and never found a reason to doubt its validity.


Shortly before the aircraft comes to a stop, the highest friction coefficient is reached, and then little lift is produced by the wings, so the vertical tire loads are those of the static case. The braked wheels are the 16 main wheels; I assume that the unbraked noswheels carry 4% of the total weight. At 96% of 400 tons acting on those 16 wheels, this is 24 tons = 235,344 N = 52,907 lbs of downward force per wheel. Since the friction coefficient is 1 at low speed, the same load is transferred horizontally from each wheel to the ground and into the gear struts.

And, yes, brakes will lock on a dry runway if the disk brakes are fully engaged.