The Army has a vision for its next armored vehicles:
Soldiers must have a next generation combat vehicle that provides increased survivability, mobility and lethality at a reduced weight, to close with and destroy peer threats through maneuver, firepower, and shock-effect.
Once again, the Army wished to pretend that you don't need to have tradeoffs among survivability, mobility, and lethality. You can have it all--and at reduced weight to have strategic mobility, too.
So I will ask, let's say we get a tank with the same survivability as the Abrams--and with tactical mobility and needed lethality--on a machine that weighs just 35 tons, for example. That's better than the Abrams and strategically more mobile. In theory. If the Air Force has enough large transports. And no other missions for their transports.
But what if an enemy takes the same technology we used to get a 35-ton tank and, because they don't need to send the tank around the world, just uses a 70-ton hull. Won't that heavier tank have more lethality and more passive armor to increase survivability?
Don't we just make it more likely that the tank we hope to airlift over quickly just dies quickly against behemoths that ride the rails to battle?
I said the wonder tank can't be built back in 2002 (starting on page 15). I stand by my warning. Cut the crap about "reduced weight" and accept that our heavy armor will be either shipped by sea or prepositioned overseas.
