Future
While tanks are seen as being integral to armoured warfare, in forces with a remit of power projection deployability has always been a consideration, which conventional main battle tanks cannot provide.
It takes a few weeks to transfer tanks and their supporting equipment by air or sea. Some tanks and armoured vehicles are transportable by helicopter, dropped by parachute, or carried by air transport. The largest transports can only carry one or two main battle tanks. Smaller transports can only carry or air drop light tanks and APCs such as the M113.
The desire to create air portable armoured vehicles that can still take on conventional MBTs has usually resulted ATGM armed light vehicles or in protected/armoured/mobile gun system style vehicles in which a lack of armour protection being in part offset by the provision of a first look/first hit/first kill capability through the mating of a powerful gun to superior targeting electronics, a concept similar in operation to that of the US tank destroyers of WWII.
Vehicles which have put such considerations into practice include the Stingray light tank, AMX 10 RC and B1 Centauro. Most such US projects to create such vehicles have been abortive, e.g. the M8 Armored Gun System, the most successful, being the flawed M551 Sheridan light tank. This tried to produce an air-portable tank capable of destroying conventional tanks by the inclusion of a revolutionary (for the time) 152 mm CLGP launcher. Being able to afford the sea-basing conventional MBTs in possible trouble spots and being able to fly crews to meet pre-positioned equipment the US had a less pressing need of such vehicles than some other nations.
Though the experience of limited conflicts such as the insurgency in Iraq rarely involves combat between armoured vehicles, the lack of security has resulted in the application of armour to light vehicles, and the continued use of armoured transports, fighting vehicles and tanks to protect against ambushes and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Its latest experience of expeditionary warfare has seen the US return to the armoured gun system type vehicle in the form of the Stryker Mobile Gun System.
Read more about this topic: Armoured Warfare
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“You have too much of a life yet before you, and have shown too much of promise as an officer, for your future to be lightly surrendered.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one’s future must be hewn.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)