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I've been reading the tank comments with interest.
Here's my 3 cents worth.
It's wonderful to be able to build your defense equipment around what you
want to do with it. We can make it cheap, or deployable, or pretty or
whatever. Sadly though those evil guys known as the enemy rarely cooperate.
At last check, the rest of the world is still making heavily armored tanks
for both domestic and international use/sale. The Russians are building the
T-94!
The classical three criteria for armored vehicles are mobility,
survivability, and lethality.
Mobility has two parts, strategic and tactical. Obviously the vehicles have
to be in the theater where we fight. C-5B aircraft can carry two M1 tanks.
The C-17 can carry one. Strategic pre-positioning helps too. When we send
soldiers to Saudi right now, we just have to send soldiers. Tactical
mobility insures that the vehicle can move around. For the weight and the
gun system, traditionally the tracked vehicle can handle more.
Survivability is what I see most of you ignoring. Warfare is rarely one
person shooting against one person. Combined arms is the reality most of the
time. Even very unsophisticated enemies have indirect fire support, be they
mortars or artillery. Those uniforms worn by those AT guys on foot or in
HMMWV's don't stop much shrapnel. If we have to send Americans up against an
armored equipped enemy, then I want them to have a very survivable platform
to fight from.
Lethality can be accomplished with many platforms, as pointed out. The
current 120 mm gun and round can defeat any armor out there right now and for
the foreseen future. I would hope though that development continue with the
rail gun and other methods.
The bottom line folks:
We will never replace one medium tank with five light. More likely, we will
be replace five mediums with one light.
I would like to hope that the planners involved in these decisions are
looking at many and varied options, and I believe that they are. This
decision is far from over.
Doc
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 02 2000 - 22:30:22 PST