As the Army works on the Future Combat Systems family of vehicles, there is an ongoing struggle between strategic mobility (by minimizing size and weight) and protection (until now mostly provided by heavy and bulky passive armor). The Army is working on active protection systems (APS) for vehicles to provide protection without weight:
APS for light vehicles is very different than the APS needed for heavy vehicles, because the system might need to intercept a wider range of threats, GourĂ© said. The Army hopes for an earlier delivery for Quick Kill, the APS system being made for heavier vehicles. “The technology has matured faster than we thought it was going to,” said Claude Bolton, Army assistant secretary for acquisition. “When it comes to IEDs, RPGs and those type of things, it is one thing to have your armor; it is another to have your situational awareness.” Speakes said the Army, which has seen success while testing its Quick Kill APS, may seek to install the system on FCS vehicles in 2010, two years earlier than planned. “The idea that you have the ability to intercept an inbound kinetic energy or chemical energy round totally revolutionizes what up till now has been a passive concept,” Speakes said. Design verification testing to examine the entire system working simultaneously is now under way, said Paul Mehney, FCS spokesman. FCS officials are working to figure out how to make sure soldiers walking near a vehicle with APS are not injured or hit by debris when the interceptor hits the incoming round.
Killing friendly dismounts or civilians in the lne of fire of an APS is a problem, as I wrote about in Military Review, May-June 2002, (pp. 28-33). when discussing our future "tank". With bulky passive armor, you can just take the hit and keep going. Even with just some armor, you can afford to take some smaller weapon hits and so minimize the number of times you have to fire off the APS with friendlies or civilians nearby to nail the incoming stuff that can kill you.
So we are probably going to have vehicles that can take heavy machine gun fire passively and knock down incoming HEAT rounds from missiles and RPGs and high velocity tank shells.
The problem is, what if an enemy fires something too heavy to be stopped by the passive armor yet too numerous to be stopped by limited APS capacity?
What if the enemy uses 30mm chain guns firing high velocity rounds to spray the FCS with penetrating ammo? With no heavy Abrams-like armor to defeat, why would an enemy bother with 125mm cannons?
Heck, why couldn't you use a carrier round for the big cannons that detects the target as the round approaches and releases dozens of submunitions outside the range of the APS that blanket the FCS and overwhelm the APS while still packing a punch to penetrate the thin legacy armor?
Or maybe enemy infantry just fires RPGs in volleys.
Or perhaps the enemy just goes for mission kills by using weapons that only aim to shred the tracks or wheels, or knock out the vehicle's sensors, defanging the target for the duration of the battle.
I'm seriously worried about the survivability of light vehicles against enemy heavy armor equipped with APS, too.
I just don't buy that we will ever need to airlift multiple brigades of these FCS around the world at a moment's notice. Thank goodness the M-1A3 will be around for a long time. The FCS will not be the wonder tank.
NOTE: The formatting seems to have died in this post. Luckily I found a later post where I quoted this post, so used that to rebuild the paragraphs after the quoted part above. I suspect the quoted part lost its formatting, too. but the link is dead.
