On a dusty, wind-swept field overlooking the Mediterranean, a small team of researchers is putting the final touches on what Israel says is a major game changer in tank defense: a miniature anti-missile system that detects incoming projectiles and shoots them down before they reach the armored vehicles.
It does address my long-standing concern that active defenses will endanger friendly dismounted infantry, claiming the small warhead poses only a 1% chance of harming friendly dismounts.
But it is only useful to protecting heavy armor in its vulnerable point like top armor and rear and side armor, which is far weaker than the massive protection offered in the frontal arc. I think it would be very possible to overwhelm an active protection system on a light vehicle without the passive protection we now provide:
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.
Don't get too excited. Simple counter-measures may make this nothing but a niche tool that incrementally adds to our vehicle protection rather than being a revolutionary device.
Oh, and the idea in the article that the APS will restore the balance against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is silly. Israel didn't lose because Hezbollah used modern anti-tank missiles, Israel lost because their strategy and tactics were deficient. That's what I argued at the time. And reflection has bolstered my view.
Superior weapons enhance effective strategy and tactics--they don't replace them.
