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High Tech Tanks (The Future of Battle Tanks)

Battle Tank Technology highlights the fact that much of the high tech in this century has not been electronic. Tanks are, by weight, mostly metal, and vast improvements have been made in metallurgy technology. This has also been the case with aircraft, although even there, more attention is paid to the electronics improvements and less to the critical enhancements in metal tech.

Even during World War II, new methods of making and fabricating metals made a big difference in improving armor, engines, guns, and ammunition. Progress in this area continued after World War II and only gained some attention during the 1991 GulfWar. There, the latest U.S. M-1A1 tank was noted as being practically invulnerable to enemy weapons. The M-1A1 was using a new composite armor. The British had invented composite armor (layers of different metal, plastic, and ceramic material) some twenty years earlier American scientists had improved the idea to the point where the M-1A1 armor was almost impossible to penetrate by any current weapon. At the same time, some of the same technology (using very dense depleted uranium) was applied to the "penetrators" of U.S. tank shells. This produced a projectile that
not only penetrated enemy tanks at long ranges, but often came out the other side and kept on going.

Engine technology also reached something of a peak in the M-l tanks, giving U.S. vehicles a mobility advantage not seen since World War II, when Soviet T-34s often ran rings around less peppy German tanks. Finally, U.S.scientists had perfected the heat sensors and combined them with laser range finders and fire-control systems to produce the easiest to use and most effective tank weapons system ever.

What happened in 1991 was not the result of any sudden technological breakthroughs, but came after over half a century of minor improvements. The media like to play up "breakthroughs," but these rarely happen and then only sometimes in wartime. This can be seen from the fact that there were dramatic changes in tank technology during World War II, a period of only six years. After that, progress was gradual for over forty years, culminating in the
Kuwait battles of 1991.

The United States demonstrated a lead in tank design that was decisive, and that lead appears to be holding for a while. The M-1 tank was built to take advantage of upgrades, and American tanks are in the process of getting more, and better main guns, armor, computers and communications gear. It is this computerization and communications capability that makes the U.S. Army optimistic about creating a "digital battlefield" in which their M-1 tanks can play
the same role as the air force's high-tech jets overhead. Indeed, the army wants to put its tanks into regular communication with the warplanes. This was a
combination that was achieved during World War II, when the present U.S. Air Force was still a part of the U.S. Army. Such unity was lost after World War II and has taken nearly half a century to reestablish.