Armoured Warfare - Future

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.