So the smart DARPA tanklets instead drive around it, down the valley and back up the sides again, avoiding the enemy entirely, or at least approaching the fight from a more favorable position. It’s what the military refers to as a “technical,” and while it’s not the deadliest vehicle, the guys inside could still have anti-tank missiles, and the bridge is a vulnerable place to cross. The foe appears to be a pickup truck with weapons attached.
In a video of the concept released earlier this week, a pair of vehicles in the clumsily named Ground X-Vehicle Technology program spot an enemy across a bridge. One way to compensate for light armor is to simply avoid the enemy. Which means less armor, which creates a design problem for the tank maker: how can a vehicle still survive as well as a tank, if it can’t withstand direct hits as well?
But now DARPA wants tanks that can go anywhere a helicopter can go. For decades during the Cold War, NATO planned for massive tank battle in Germany’s Fulda Gap. That’s fine if there’s time to put tanks in the area in advance, and to scout in advance the terrain where the fight will happen. Armor makes them heavy, which limits how they can fight and where they can fight. DARPA wants a tank that can find the enemy, and then route around it like it’s damage.Īs powerful as tanks are, the have major flaws. Modern tanks, thick with armor and sporting power cannons, functionally perform the same service: go where the enemy is, and make them gone.ĭARPA, the Pentagon’s future-forward projects agency, wants a new, smarter, tank-like vehicle that does something different. First designed to crash through trenches and survive machine guns in World War I, the heavy, armored vehicles are machines of headlong destruction.
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