M1 Abrams MBT Replacement

lasers & radar...beleiver in FLIR & UV personally-- radar is home on jamm bait.
 
Probably a bit too large of a system for the roof of the Abrams. That's a full sized 30mm chain gun not the lower velocity M230LF.
 
Tanks and tactics will always evolve.

From the earliest use of the word "Tank" which was an admiralty code used to describe the project as an "oil Tank" for the obvious reasons.

No military tech goes through generations without adapting to threat, budget and likely location of conflict and the tank will continue to evolve as will the apc/ifv/whatever.
 
If the current conflict is any indicator. Tanks seems to draw heat more than accomplish anything operationally. They will need significant BLOS capability and such a deep magazine in/direct fire APS, that we might as well be talking about a DEW APS to survive.
 
WARREN, Mich. – U.S. armored combat vehicles experts are reaching out to industry to find companies able to use machine-learning algorithms to reduce the time it takes to detect, recognize, and attack enemy targets.
Officials of the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive & Armaments Command (TACOM) in Warren, Mich., released a request for information (W56HZV_AiDTR_RFI) this week for the Aided Target Detection and Recognition (AiTDR) project.
AiTDR seeks to shorten sensor-to-shooter engagement time with machine learning algorithms. The RFI seeks to understand the state of aided target recognition technology to detect trained and untrained new targets.

www.militaryaerospace.com

Army wants target recognition and detection algorithms with machine learning for armored combat vehicles

AiTDR seeks to shorten sensor-to-shooter engagement time with machine learning algorithms, and better understand today's target-recognition technology.
www.militaryaerospace.com www.militaryaerospace.com
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jsport said:
If the current conflict is any indicator. Tanks seems to draw heat more than accomplish anything operationally. They will need significant BLOS capability and such a deep magazine in/direct fire APS, that we might as well be talking about a DEW APS to survive.
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We probably are talking about a HPM APS to deal with drones, toast the control link and you defeat the drone. Missiles and main gun rounds will need physical APS and/or armor.
 
jsport said:
If the current conflict is any indicator. Tanks seems to draw heat more than accomplish anything operationally. They will need significant BLOS capability and such a deep magazine in/direct fire APS, that we might as well be talking about a DEW APS to survive.
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To paraphrase To Hell and Back, “how’s the APS on an infantryman’s uniform?”
 
A workable exoskeleton will likely be so expensive that it will, yes, need its own APS.. Some sort of projectile launcher firing unfolding nano carbon nets which deflect.,... something cuokie.

Utility fog
en.wikipedia.org

Utility fog - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Scott Kenny said:
We probably are talking about a HPM APS to deal with drones, toast the control link and you defeat the drone. Missiles and main gun rounds will need physical APS and/or armor.
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Why would the drone have a "control link" and not just be a loitering attack missile that uses optical target recognition?

ZALA Lancet-3 can be given a targeting box, and attacks anything it identifies as a threat in that box, without the intervention of a human operator. It's not dissimilar to an anti-shipping missile, but for tanks instead of cruisers. That seems to be the direction that assault drones are moving, since things that require datalinks back to operators are not very useful for long range anti-tank work. FPV drones and such will probably become extinct in the coming years due to increasing REC capabilities of ground armies at low levels.

HPM is okay for a large installation (like a warship or a theater airbase), but some sort of radar guided airburst grenade launcher, or Quick Kill at the top end, is way more practical for a mobile vehicle.

We might see such a APS as QuickKill appearing on the M1 in about 20 years at the pace the U.S. Army moves.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Why would the drone have a "control link" and not just be a loitering attack missile that uses optical target recognition?

ZALA Lancet-3 can be given a targeting box, and attacks anything it identifies as a threat in that box, without the intervention of a human operator. It's not dissimilar to an anti-shipping missile, but for tanks instead of cruisers. That seems to be the direction that assault drones are moving, since things that require datalinks back to operators are not very useful for long range anti-tank work. FPV drones and such will probably become extinct in the coming years due to increasing REC capabilities of ground armies at low levels.

HPM is okay for a large installation (like a warship or a theater airbase), but some sort of radar guided airburst grenade launcher, or Quick Kill at the top end, is way more practical for a mobile vehicle.

We might see such a APS as QuickKill appearing on the M1 in about 20 years at the pace the U.S. Army moves.
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How do you tell the Lancet-3 where it's kill box is? If that's a wireless connection, it is still a vulnerability.

What happens when an antenna that is designed to receive 0.5 watts or less gets hit with 1500 watts? That 1500 watts goes into the receiver and burns things out. Is there a fuse between the antenna and receiver? Not usually. Is there a fuse between the receiver and the guidance package? Again, not usually. Fuses are normally only put between the power supply and the rest of the components.

And that's assuming that hitting the drone with 1500 watts of power doesn't induce voltages in places that aren't set up to handle them in the chips or on the circuit boards.


Bruno Anthony said:
Winner of today’s Ghoul award
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We're talking about some pretty damn ghoulish things as-is, and as a veteran I reserve the right to ghoul.
 
Note that electrical propulsion missiles like lancet is just another type of missile but optimized for range over velocity.

It is strange why people think the problem of missiles can be solved by shotguns, robotic shotguns (APS), jammers and microwaves on a 70 ton platform dedicating 10% of tonnage at the problem.

When we know 15,000 ton platforms with 100,000 hp powerplants and hundreds of crew actively maintaining systems can not reach immunity or even economic resistance against "missiles."

Sure, against jammers you need target recognition or home on jam. Sure, against microwaves you need hardened parts, with shielding and isolation and perhaps redundancy built into the munition. Sure against interception you need some combination of speed, saturation, stealth, anti-interception countermeasures to work. All of it is just engineering and manufacturing.

It is an arms race, and increased defenses can induced increased costs on the attacker.

However, as we know from the naval domain, at no scale from 50 ton boat to 100,000 ton capital ship is the platform so resistant to missile attack that alternative attack methods (gun fire, ramming, etc) is preferred to missile attack and at no point where the cost of munitions needed to defeat defenses remotely come close to the defense itself.

The attack defense equilibrium is maintained by the problem of sheer range: sensors, battle networks, and munitions restrictions result in problems defeating defenses in extended range engagements. If you close the range to "unload entire VLS of short range SAMs in anti-ship mode", ships would neutralize each in one salvo as defenses is imperfect. It is the weakness of defense that warships are designed with long range anti-ship missiles with hundred of kilometers of range as opposed to saturation attack by faster, shorter ranged munitions, because even a few long range missiles work well enough and defense defeating characteristics of larger salvo size, higher velocity munitions is not needed.
--------
Looking at how missile warfare have shaped naval war, it is easy to use its lessons on land warfare, now that "missiles" are becoming dominant.

With offense overwhelming defense at equal cost, the first thing for any formation that intends to have staying power needs to allocation of large amounts of resources to defense and tactical force superiority. 10,000 ton warships with large amount of payload allocated to anti-air is used to defeat forces with less than dozen subsonic AShM throw weight. The said warship have would little survivability against a force with 100 missile throw weight while such a force is still much cheaper than the ship.

Translating that to warfare, it would be entire formations of CRAM, DEW, EW, multi-layer AA with air force top cover and counter battery suppressing enemy long range fires would be thrown at enemy weak point and defeat the throw weight of defending light forces and overrun them at low cost.

If two well stocked heavy forces clash, much of casualties would be inflicted at artillery and drone ranges. The better the offense, the more damage gets inflicted at range. As range shorten, higher volume, higher velocity, less guidance dependent cheaper munitions defeats defenses easier.
 
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Scott Kenny said:
How do you tell the Lancet-3 where it's kill box is? If that's a wireless connection, it is still a vulnerability.
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You can load preset GPS data into the round before launch, like cruise missiles.
Scott Kenny said:
What happens when an antenna that is designed to receive 0.5 watts or less gets hit with 1500 watts? That 1500 watts goes into the receiver and burns things out. Is there a fuse between the antenna and receiver? Not usually. Is there a fuse between the receiver and the guidance package? Again, not usually. Fuses are normally only put between the power supply and the rest of the components.

And that's assuming that hitting the drone with 1500 watts of power doesn't induce voltages in places that aren't set up to handle them in the chips or on the circuit boards.
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Lancet use Chinese commercial chip, so you can probably burn the entire thing's flight control system down with an Epirus HPM.
The problem is when your opponent brings EM hardened drones, more drones, or MALE UAVs directing artillery to strike your tank with unjammable rounds.

Tbh I still thinks HPM jammers on tanks is a really poor use of resource. MBTs lack the ESM/recon capability to accurately direct jammers, while omnidirectional systems have a habit of being either really low on range, or having an awful power-to-size ratio; all while being expensive and takes up real estate for more important systems like more antennas for basic EW, masted sensors and APS.

Giving tanks a basic ESM suite to detect incoming munitions coupled to a C-UAS gun on a stabilized mount, an APS system, new multispectral camo, new RWR/LWR and new smokes are what I consider the absolute minimum survivability upgrade. It can adequately deal with current and future MPATGMs, lightweight loitering munitions, and guided mortar rounds. Anything heavier ( HERO-120 class drones, STUAS, large throw weight CRAM) would be dealt with by local defense systems like the platoon's MADIS, or MSHORAD once it moves from brigade assets to battalions'. DE-centric platforms like HEL lasers or large aperture HPM should be place at the battalion's HQ or slightly higher, as their main roles ( mobile swarm defeat/ TBMD) would be best enabled at that level of command.
 
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Scott Kenny said:
How do you tell the Lancet-3 where it's kill box is? If that's a wireless connection, it is still a vulnerability.
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There is no wireless connection necessary. It has everything it needs internally, provided you're willing to accept friendly tanks getting smacked, and not being able to attack targets of opportunity as they appear on the operators' consoles.

At worst, it uses an inertial reference system and dead reckoning based on a map plot. Just don't be bad at land nav? Lancet has a lifespan of about 40 minutes in combat before it falls out of the sky, maybe being fired from 20 miles away under control of a tactical battalion's artillery sub-unit, and has a IIR seeker and autonomous target recognition. It's not like it's a strategic bomber. It's best thought of as a loitering minefield or long range ATGW.

Scott Kenny said:
What happens when an antenna that is designed to receive 0.5 watts or less gets hit with 1500 watts?
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What happens when you need power a kilowatt class HPM on a main battle tank? What happens to your platoon radios? To friendly UAS? To your radio signature as viewed by strategic reconnaissance platforms? Besides that, the installations for combat HPMs take up multiple 20 foot ISO containers. That's not going to get any smaller, at least for any useful range, and they don't provide any real value to a tank unit anyway.

A tank literally just needs to be able to kill top attack missiles like Javelin and the occasional Lancet that are attacking literally that single tank. Platoon- or company-level air defense would be handled by something like M-SHORAD. All the pieces exist today and require no significant tests or anything, but they will get them anyway, because how else are you going to drag out a fairly basic modernization scheme over the next 20 years.

If another world war happens in the meantime, they will happen in 20 months as opposed to 20 years, because that's how it always works.
 
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Tank survivability is dependent on situational awareness, first shot, mobility, and stealth; no different than modern fighters and ships. Its not just one trait.
 
Army Futures held a conference yesterday (Vertex) in which some notional images of M1E3 concepts were presented -- one was a fully unmanned turret, and the other a 2-man turret with autoloader. The TTB-style concept even looked like it may have CRTs, indicating significant weight reduction.
 
asVAL said:
Lancet use Chinese commercial chip, so you can probably burn the entire thing's flight control system down with an Epirus HPM.
The problem is when your opponent brings EM hardened drones, more drones, or MALE UAVs directing artillery to strike your tank with unjammable rounds.

Tbh I still thinks HPM jammers on tanks is a really poor use of resource. MBTs lack the ESM/recon capability to accurately direct jammers, while omnidirectional systems have a habit of being either really low on range, or having an awful power-to-size ratio; all while being expensive and takes up real estate for more important systems like more antennas for basic EW, masted sensors and APS.

Giving tanks a basic ESM suite to detect incoming munitions coupled to a C-UAS gun on a stabilized mount, an APS system, new multispectral camo, new RWR/LWR and new smokes are what I consider the absolute minimum survivability upgrade. It can adequately deal with current and future MPATGMs, lightweight loitering munitions, and guided mortar rounds. Anything heavier ( HERO-120 class drones, STUAS, large throw weight CRAM) would be dealt with by local defense systems like the platoon's MADIS, or MSHORAD once it moves from brigade assets to battalions'. DE-centric platforms like HEL lasers or large aperture HPM should be place at the battalion's HQ or slightly higher, as their main roles ( mobile swarm defeat/ TBMD) would be best enabled at that level of command.
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I can make a 1600watt microwave emitter for $300. Most of that cost is the waveguide, those are amazingly expensive for a piece of extruded aluminum, then the 24vDC/120vAC inverter. A Walmart special $35 microwave oven provides the magnetron and power supply. PVC pipe over the outside to protect the waveguide and emitter horn. Whole package ends up with a form factor of a Blowpipe SAM due to the emitter horn on the end of the waveguide, and weighs about 25lbs/10kg. More if you decide to armor it, of course.

And the ESM suite is just as important to the HPM, as that means you can only use the HPM when you detect drones instead of just blaring static 24/7 and lighting up your position that way.


Kat Tsun said:
What happens when you need power a kilowatt class HPM on a main battle tank? What happens to your platoon radios? To friendly UAS? To your radio signature as viewed by strategic reconnaissance platforms? Besides that, the installations for combat HPMs take up multiple 20 foot ISO containers. That's not going to get any smaller, at least for any useful range, and they don't provide any real value to a tank unit anyway.
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A typical tank has pretty big battery packs. Your HPM emitter is pulsing, not constantly blaring static into the atmosphere.

A tank self defense HPM unit is about the size of your alarm clock/radio for the actual power supply and magnetron. The whole package goes into a tube no bigger than a Blowpipe SAM missile tube.


Kat Tsun said:
A tank literally just needs to be able to kill top attack missiles like Javelin and the occasional Lancet that are attacking literally that single tank. Platoon- or company-level air defense would be handled by something like M-SHORAD. All the pieces exist today and require no significant tests or anything, but they will get them anyway, because how else are you going to drag out a fairly basic modernization scheme over the next 20 years.
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Yes, and modern tanks are going to need multiple, cross connected defensive systems. Long range APS like Quick Kill, short range APS like Arena, last ditch APS like Iron Curtain, all hard kill, plus soft kill systems like jammers and decoys. Just like a ship. And yes, you're probably talking about 7-10 tons of APS all told.

Cost of playing the game at this level.
 
CaswellOfficial said:
Army Futures held a conference yesterday (Vertex) in which some notional images of M1E3 concepts were presented -- one was a fully unmanned turret, and the other a 2-man turret with autoloader. The TTB-style concept even looked like it may have CRTs, indicating significant weight reduction.
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Apologies for such poor image quality - this is quite literally a crop of a screenshot of a video of a PowerPoint, and as far as I know DoD hasn't published the slide deck publicly yet.
 

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CaswellOfficial said:
Army Futures held a conference yesterday (Vertex) in which some notional images of M1E3 concepts were presented -- one was a fully unmanned turret, and the other a 2-man turret with autoloader. The TTB-style concept even looked like it may have CRTs, indicating significant weight reduction.
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I really hope they go with the TTB turret. 48 rounds, all ready to fire, and 40krounds without a failure of the loader. Despite the awkward moves the loader needs to do from pulling a round up vertically and turning it 90deg to stuff into the breech. Trying to fit 48 rounds into a bustle autoloader makes a ginormous bustle.
 
The TTB layout is what they need to do, but I have my doubts that leadership is ready to give up having at least a TC in the turret for visibility purposes. Hope I’m wrong
 
CaswellOfficial said:
The TTB layout is what they need to do, but I have my doubts that leadership is ready to give up having at least a TC in the turret for visibility purposes. Hope I’m wrong
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At least now we have good enough cameras for visibility. 4k or even 8k cameras and displays. Though I shudder to think about how much an 8k thermal imager costs...

Back when the TTB was first proposed, the cameras were nowhere near good enough.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I can make a 1600watt microwave emitter for $300. Most of that cost is the waveguide, those are amazingly expensive for a piece of extruded aluminum, then the 24vDC/120vAC inverter. A Walmart special $35 microwave oven provides the magnetron and power supply. PVC pipe over the outside to protect the waveguide and emitter horn. Whole package ends up with a form factor of a Blowpipe SAM due to the emitter horn on the end of the waveguide, and weighs about 25lbs/10kg. More if you decide to armor it, of course.

And the ESM suite is just as important to the HPM, as that means you can only use the HPM when you detect drones instead of just blaring static 24/7 and lighting up your position that way.



A typical tank has pretty big battery packs. Your HPM emitter is pulsing, not constantly blaring static into the atmosphere.

A tank self defense HPM unit is about the size of your alarm clock/radio for the actual power supply and magnetron. The whole package goes into a tube no bigger than a Blowpipe SAM missile tube.



Yes, and modern tanks are going to need multiple, cross connected defensive systems. Long range APS like Quick Kill, short range APS like Arena, last ditch APS like Iron Curtain, all hard kill, plus soft kill systems like jammers and decoys. Just like a ship. And yes, you're probably talking about 7-10 tons of APS all told.

Cost of playing the game at this level.
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It will be a single APS, if any, as the optimal solution may in fact just be more tanks and sufficient BDAR capacity to keep them working. Then, following a grinding series of bite and hold attacks until the enemy's manpower and materiel reserves are exhausted, you merely need to outlast the enemy until he runs out of troops. If you can't win at that game, you can either hold what you have, or you lose.

This is how the game is played at that level. It's how the Entente beat the Germans, the Allies the Nazis, and whoever else the next guys.

America's next war is most likely going to be an aero-naval war, where it actually enjoys a significant materiel advantage over its largest competitor, but it doesn't change that the guy with more manpower, more materiel, and more munitions will win.
 
Scott Kenny said:
How do you tell the Lancet-3 where it's kill box is? If that's a wireless connection, it is still a vulnerability.

What happens when an antenna that is designed to receive 0.5 watts or less gets hit with 1500 watts? That 1500 watts goes into the receiver and burns things out. Is there a fuse between the antenna and receiver? Not usually. Is there a fuse between the receiver and the guidance package? Again, not usually. Fuses are normally only put between the power supply and the rest of the components.

And that's assuming that hitting the drone with 1500 watts of power doesn't induce voltages in places that aren't set up to handle them in the chips or on the circuit boards.



We're talking about some pretty damn ghoulish things as-is, and as a veteran I reserve the right to ghoul.
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That’s great. But the US won’t tolerate high infantry casualties or any casualties without some attempt at technological solutions. We’re not the Russians.
 
BDF said:
Apologies if this was shared before:

M1E3 Concept

View attachment 714270
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While the overall concept is sound, I'm struck by how much more practical space for gear/sensors/etc AbramsX's turret has than this. It's all fine and good to desire a slimmed down turret, but stuff still has to go somewhere and you don't want the crew hanging their crap over an important sensor.
 
Bruno Anthony said:
That’s great. But the US won’t tolerate high infantry casualties or any casualties without some attempt at technological solutions. We’re not the Russians.
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APS will continue to weigh too much for a soldier to carry until soldiers get exoskeletons or full blown power armor. At least for the next 50ish years.
 
Bruno Anthony said:
That’s great. But the US won’t tolerate high infantry casualties or any casualties without some attempt at technological solutions. We’re not the Russians.
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If it won't tolerate high casualties, it will lose. It's that simple.

There's no real getting around that. Even if it's willing to absorb high casualties, it might still lose, but the PRC isn't the Soviet Union and it barely spends any of extensive industrial outputs on armored vehicles by comparison. Relative to each other, the only world superpowers have much more equal mass and materiel reserves, although the PRC has a far greater fraction of global industrial output and potential bodies.

The U.S. has never actually shied away from casualties either. That's a myth, and a particularly pernicious one, brought about by America's inability to win in Korea because it never brought back its war veterans (unlike the People's Volunteer Army, which was nothing but war veterans). Besides, said "technological solutions" are highly unlikely to be found at any point in history, for at least for several more decades. Perhaps never, actually, given how slowly the U.S. moves in terms of technology compared to its hypothetical opponents.

M1 tanks will probably be rolling into WW3 without APS, aside from a select few brigades, and those brigades will have Trophy, which is not very effective against top attack missiles. They will probably die a lot for the first year or two, the troops will adapt after a few thousand of casualties, and a few tens of thousands of casualties later, and maybe another year or two, the U.S. will either enter a stalemate and sign an armistice, or win the war.

That's the present trajectory and there's very little reason to think anything otherwise will happen. The U.S. has too many powerful regional allies to be completely defeated in any hypothetical world war, and it is rightfully stubborn enough to not just surrender everything. Likewise, it's too slow to move on adopting new equipment, but this is nothing unique to it, although such slowness in "peacetime" may only be shared by democracies, rather than Leninist-descended societies which assume that "wartime" is the natural state of the world.

The U.S. will tolerate high casualties simply because it will probably suffer them, because it's out of practice, like all the major powers.
 
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Kat Tsun said:
If it won't tolerate high casualties, it will lose. It's that simple.

There's no real getting around that. Even if it's willing to absorb high casualties, it might still lose, but the PRC isn't the Soviet Union and it barely spends any of extensive industrial outputs on armored vehicles by comparison. Relative to each other, the only world superpowers have much more equal mass and materiel reserves, although the PRC has a far greater fraction of global industrial output and potential bodies.

The U.S. has never actually shied away from casualties either. That's a myth, and a particularly pernicious one, brought about by America's inability to win in Korea because it never brought back its war veterans (unlike the People's Volunteer Army, which was nothing but war veterans). Besides, said "technological solutions" are highly unlikely to be found at any point in history, for at least for several more decades. Perhaps never, actually, given how slowly the U.S. moves in terms of technology compared to its hypothetical opponents.

M1 tanks will probably be rolling into WW3 without APS, aside from a select few brigades, and those brigades will have Trophy, which is not very effective against top attack missiles. They will probably die a lot for the first year or two, the troops will adapt after a few thousand of casualties, and a few tens of thousands of casualties later, and maybe another year or two, the U.S. will either enter a stalemate and sign an armistice, or win the war.

That's the present trajectory and there's very little reason to think anything otherwise will happen. The U.S. has too many powerful regional allies to be completely defeated in any hypothetical world war, and it is rightfully stubborn enough to not just surrender everything. Likewise, it's too slow to move on adopting new equipment, but this is nothing unique to it, although such slowness in "peacetime" may only be shared by democracies, rather than Leninist-descended societies which assume that "wartime" is the natural state of the world.

The U.S. will tolerate high casualties simply because it will probably suffer them, because it's out of practice, like all the major powers.
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He didn't say that the US wouldn't accept high casualty rates, he said that they'd attempt to minimize those rates through technological solutions.
 
Kat Tsun said:
If it won't tolerate high casualties, it will lose. It's that simple.

There's no real getting around that. Even if it's willing to absorb high casualties, it might still lose, but the PRC isn't the Soviet Union and it barely spends any of extensive industrial outputs on armored vehicles by comparison. Relative to each other, the only world superpowers have much more equal mass and materiel reserves, although the PRC has a far greater fraction of global industrial output and potential bodies.

The U.S. has never actually shied away from casualties either. That's a myth, and a particularly pernicious one, brought about by America's inability to win in Korea because it never brought back its war veterans (unlike the People's Volunteer Army, which was nothing but war veterans). Besides, said "technological solutions" are highly unlikely to be found at any point in history, for at least for several more decades. Perhaps never, actually, given how slowly the U.S. moves in terms of technology compared to its hypothetical opponents.

M1 tanks will probably be rolling into WW3 without APS, aside from a select few brigades, and those brigades will have Trophy, which is not very effective against top attack missiles. They will probably die a lot for the first year or two, the troops will adapt after a few thousand of casualties, and a few tens of thousands of casualties later, and maybe another year or two, the U.S. will either enter a stalemate and sign an armistice, or win the war.

That's the present trajectory and there's very little reason to think anything otherwise will happen. The U.S. has too many powerful regional allies to be completely defeated in any hypothetical world war, and it is rightfully stubborn enough to not just surrender everything. Likewise, it's too slow to move on adopting new equipment, but this is nothing unique to it, although such slowness in "peacetime" may only be shared by democracies, rather than Leninist-descended societies which assume that "wartime" is the natural state of the world.

The U.S. will tolerate high casualties simply because it will probably suffer them, because it's out of practice, like all the major powers.
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You really think that the US would’ve tolerated Soviet level casualties in WW2 or Chinese level ones from Korea?? Casualty aversion is relative. And the belief that Leninist descended societies have an endless willingness to endure endless casuallies is another pernicious belief. They just haven’t been squeezed hard enough. Even Superman screams in pain if you squeeze long enough and hard enough.
You‘re pushing a defeatist view or hope the US turns into one of those Leninist societies.
 
Scott Kenny said:
APS will continue to weigh too much for a soldier to carry until soldiers get exoskeletons or full blown power armor. At least for the next 50ish years.
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My original post was in response to “hands in despair” view that the tank is”dead”. My reply meant that the US will not deploy hordes of light infantry. And no, Iron Man or the powered armor from Starship Troopers (the nove) won’t be in our lifetimes.
 
Bruno Anthony said:
My original post was in response to “hands in despair” view that the tank is”dead”. My reply meant that the US will not deploy hordes of light infantry. And no, Iron Man or the powered armor from Starship Troopers (the nove) won’t be in our lifetimes.
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Might be able to get those Edge of Tomorrow exoskeletons, though.
 

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