Car enthusiasts milling around the floor at the Detroit auto show this week will get the first public glimpse of the Army’s new main battle tank, as the service prepares to roll out its M1A1 Abrams replacement five years ahead of its original timeline.
Rather than wait to field the vehicles until every last sensor and radio is determined, the Army cut the tank’s development time way down by getting the physical vehicle built and allowing the bells and whistles to be installed and upgraded as the technology evolves.
“The way we used to look at all these boxes…we used to take that box and install the computer,” Col. Ryan Howell, the Abrams’ project manager, told reporters Wednesday. “Today, it’s computer first, and it happens to be hardware second. So the box doesn’t matter.”
I’m curious how much tanks will hold up on the modern battlefield. It’s the land version of the battleship, a big slow powerful target, that will likely get picked apart by cheap tiny drones if its not supported by a drone defense system, that itself could do more damage than the tank at a longer range.
Literally anything can be picked off by a drone in the same way any bullet can kill any person. At some point we have to start acting like drones are apart of the battlefield and not something that is in the near future going to make all conventional weapons obsolete.
They’ve proven to be a game changer so far. And honestly Ukraine is still in the brute force stage of a new weapon. They’re advancing stupid fast though. The swarm systems they’re using for long range drones are going to get a lot more potent as they improve them. It’s going to make chip manufacturing capacity a top national security issue.