Since our light armor can't be armored up enough to withstand this range of attacks and even our heavy armor can't be strong everywhere, we have looked to active protection systems (APS) that destroy incoming rounds before they hit. With active protection, we don't need heavy armor. Our new Future Combat Systems, weighing in at less than half the tonnage of our Abrams main battle tanks, need this active protection to meet weight restrictions and still be survivable.
This is surely impressive technology in the struggle to balance weight and protection:
"Think of [it] as Star Wars for Soldiers," said Time magazine in its Nov. 10 edition. The APS "will automatically detect an incoming round and then launch a missile to destroy it, all within a split second."
That's a lovely theory. The battle between offense and defense has swung to and fro with thicker and more complex armor competing over the decades with bigger cannons and more lethal missiles and hand-held rockets.
We have decided to think outside the box and simply make thicker armor irrelevant to those bigger cannons and more lethal shaped-charge warheads on missiles and rockets. The enemy can improve their warheads and increase cannon size all they want and our active system will make it unnecessary to increase our passive armor protection. And to meet strategic mobility needs, we can get rid of all but the most basic armor protection to guard against small arms and shell fragments.
Nice theory. I don't buy it. No more than I buy that electric armor can't be beaten with simple kinetic penetrators. No, with all these expensive defensive systems, I suspect the enemy can keep it simple and make our high-tech devices look stupid.
So what if the enemy just volley fires cannon shells, missiles, or rockets at single vehicles? The old Soviet army trained their units to volley fire rather than engage individually. Can APS handle multiple, nearly simultaneous rounds coming in?
Heck, what if the enemy sprays our lightly-armored, APS-equipped vehicles with 25mm or 30mm armor piercing rounds? Rounds big enough to penetrate thin armor and numerous enough to swamp the capabilities of an APS? Even infantry could carry around these with ease. Heck, large tank rounds might dispense sub-munitions like a high velocity shot gun, giving a single tank round effective volley capacity.
I'm still skeptical that we can build the wonder tank.
UPDATE: The Russians have developed (tip to Strategypage emails, I think) a new anti-tank rocket, the RPG-30, that appears to tackle the problem of APS by firing two rounds at the target vehicle. This is a variant of my idea of swamping the defense with too many incoming rounds to stop. The RPG-30 appears to fire a smaller decoy round that reaches the target before the primary armor-piercing round reaches the target, triggering the APS to fire at the decoy. This certainly assumes that an APS cannot handle multiple rounds fired at it with small time intervals. Of course, this raises the issue of whether raking a target armored vehicle with machine gun fire will trigger the APS to empty its magazine trying to intercept rounds that can't even penetrate the vehicle, but paving the way for a clean shot by a weapon that can destroy the target. And I still worry, as I did to the linked article I wrote for Military Review, about friendly dismounts nearby when our own tanks are firing off explosive defensive systems left and right. How far away from our own "tanks" do our crunchies have to be to avoid being casualties from friendly defensive fire?
