The Army wants the IFV to be capable of being remotely manned. Which would be a long-term change. In the medium term I imagine my idea in Infantry magazine of using reachback for remote weapon stations on the IFV would be a good goal.
I noted the robot partners as an aside in this (failed) entry to an Army future warfare contest. I called the system Main Battle Tandems, moving away from the platform of the main battle tank to one of a manned-unmanned team. The future MBT would really be a platoon of vehicles with only one manned.
As for the new tank that could replace the Abrams, according to the Next Generation Combat Vehicles Cross Functional Team (CFT)?
This may be the CFT’s most difficult task. As one senior CFT official observed, a complete replacement for the Abrams would only make sense if a breakthrough is achieved in one of three critical technologies: lightweight armor materials, active protection against solid shot anti-tank rounds or AI good enough to take humans out of the vehicle.
The Army still wants to break the iron triangle of lethality, protection, and (strategic) mobility. You just can't have them all and get the wonder tank, as I wrote long ago in Military Review (starting on page 28). We would like to make it easier to deploy our tanks from North America to Eurasia to face enemies who have the advantage of being right there and who can use roads and rails to move their armor without the same need to restrict weight that we would like in our wildest dreams.
Unless lightweight armor is so good that no increase in firepower can kill it, continental enemies will just use more of the lightweight armor than our tanks. So the weight of our tank will creep up as we counter the enemy increase in killing power.
And unless active protection systems can't be overwhelmed, we will need passive armor to backstop the APS. So again, the weight or our tank will creep up.
There is also the issue that if the Army solves the protection problem against solid shot anti-tank rounds, there may be more than one way to skin a cat, eh?
Of course, if there is AI (artificial intelligence) and no crew, perhaps the system can be lethal and strategically mobile because there is no need to protect the crew. But then we'd need to replace lots of losses and so our industrial capacity to mass produce and mass ship the new tank overseas as we did with Sherman tanks in World War II becomes key. If we can't do that, then we'd still need to protect the system with protection. Because lack of protection on a modern battlefield is suicide. And so weight goes up.
And speaking of which, the Army is improving artillery to do to the enemy what we must guard against. Which is vital.
The Army is also upgrading the Stryker for conventional combat in Europe. That's nice but I'm of the opinion that when you start to build an armored cavalry regiment, build an armored cavalry regiment.
Anyway, in an age of great power competition, Army heavy systems become more important to pursue. I'm really keeping my fingers crossed on the tank issue.
