What Might a Fourth-Generation Main Battle Tank Look Like?

Third-generation main battle tanks emerged in the 1970s, and are still what the world's armies field--as the respect commanded by tanks like the M1 Abrams, the Leopard 2, the British Challenger, the Soviet T-80 all demonstrate.

Of course, they have all seen numerous upgrades--sharper sensors, more computers, and most conspicuously, "active protection systems" that respond to incoming projectiles by detecting and shooting a projectile back at them.

Such a detail as the last can seem next-generation-ish. Yet a full-blown next-generation tank would be something else. Thus far the best claimant to that title would seem to be the Russian T-14, with its crew riding in a capsule inside a very thickly armored hull, leaving an unmanned turret up top, while that crew is aided in its work not only by advanced sensors but a high level of automation extending beyond the now-familiar auto-loaded gun to a computerized control system supposed to monitor the vehicle's systems, assess the combat situation, and recommend action to the crew (like a tank equivalent of KITT, I suppose). The vehicle is also supposed to incorporate stealth technology.

Of course, given that production T-14s have yet to actually be seen it is uncertain just how much of this they will actually have--how much of this has been claimed prematurely, and even if it does appear, how much it would matter. (It is one thing to make a fighter plane stealthy at beyond visual range, another to make a 50-ton tank stealthy at the ranges at which armor actually engages its opponents, especially with its engine running and its gun firing.) Meanwhile, even if the T-14 incorporates all the changes discussed in the commentary so far there would still be a great deal that would not have changed. The T-14 has a crew of three, performing the same functions as their counterparts in other Russian tanks. Powered by yet another diesel engine it presents no great improvement in speed or range over its predecessors. Where we heard once of 140 mm Soviet tank guns (this was, in fact, the reason for the depleted uranium armor of the M1A1 version of the Abrams), the T-14 still uses a 125 mm gun, the same caliber Soviet and Russian tanks have been using for a half century now.

In a previous item I remarked the slightness of changes in tank design--but did not discuss its causes. One argument I think worth raising is that, given the existing technology, and the technology that appeared plausible and was actually developed, the tank has not had much further to go for long a time with respect to becoming more mobile, better-protected, or more powerfully gunned. The active protection system would seem to testify to that--simply keeping them viable on a battlefield ever-denser with man-portable anti-tank weapons, tank-killing aircraft and other such threats to the point that tank designers think it worthwhile to equip each tank with the equivalent of its own tiny Ballistic Missile Defense system, which has helped raise the cost of the latest upgrade for these current-generation tanks to more than the cost of the original purchase of the vehicle.

Of course, we have seen speculation about a shift to radical alternatives--like the tank as a network of manned and unmanned vehicles; or even the replacement of armor by "armored infantry" of the Starship Troopers-type. Still, all of this seems hardly less fantastic now than it did a generation ago in yet another reminder of the tendency of hype to outrun reality in military technology as well as technology of other kinds. The result is that I now suspect we will see the continued, incremental, modification of heavy armor, perhaps ever more costly and even wasteful--as if the navies that quickly shifted away from battleships in the wake of the experience of World War II just went on building dreadnoughts instead for lack of confidence that anything else could fill their niche.