If the Army keeps trying to replace the Abrams tank with something that isn't a tank but does what a tank does, the Army may be hanging on to the Abrams a lot longer than it hopes to.
Though the current main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, is expected to hum along in the center of the armored formation for decades to come, some kind replacement is on its way.
But rather than swapping a tank for a tank, most experts in the field are looking to a family of vehicles option that will take tank-like capabilities and spread them across crewed and crewless platforms for better survivability.
“If you think of a tank, you’re thinking in the wrong direction. Think of what a tank provides,” Jeff Zabinski, the Army Research Lab’s director of weapons and material research, told Army Times. “We can’t just think in terms of, ‘oh, I’m just going to put a chunk of armor out there.’”...
But protection can also mean not being seen, or even being seen as something else. That’s where electronic warfare, masking and hiding in plain sight of sensors can play a role.
Humans will still be in a protected tank-like vehicle. That's good. So I'm a little more open to "protecting" the robotic wing men differently.
But I'm getting worried that the Army still doesn't want to build a new tank. A couple decades ago when the Future Combat System (FCS) was the rage, in the pages of Military Review (pages 28-33) I warned against trying to build a wonder tank that combines lethality, protection, and strategic mobility:
Barring successfully fielding exotic technologies to make the FCS work, the Army must consider how it will defeat future heavy systems if fighting actual enemies and not merely suppressing disorder becomes its mission once again. The tentative assumptions of 2001 will change by 2025. When they do, the Army will rue its failure today to accept that the wonder tank will not be built.
I guess now we are trying to build the wonder "tank" system of separate vehicles. Which is fine as a concept. And maybe the Abrams will the core of that first system.
But if the Army wants to phase out the still lethal but aging Abrams, let's look at the basic requirements of a tank that I go over in that article and see if we can do it with a single vehicle rather than reaching for a generational leap in technology.
2025 is much closer now and the Abrams is still in the field.
