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To: servantoftheservant
There's always a back and forth between armor development and defeating it....I remember when the sabot round supposedly meant the the end of the tank!

This is a fallacious argument though. It is like saying a horse will always be faster than a car because one can always breed a faster horse. Eventually, it just doesn't work any more. System limits.

Military engineering is limited almost entirely by the limits of materials science. We have come to the point where one can design anti-armor weapons such that no physical material has the strength to prevent penetration and that it takes meters of the best composite materials known to science available for any price to dissipate the energy.

The military R&D effort in the '90s has spent much effort on the engineering of various anti-armor systems that are capable of breaching the fundamental physical limits of armor, and these efforts are bearing a lot of fruit. The US will be deploying new anti-armor weapons shortly that, in the words of the military, "can defeat all existing and future projected armor systems". How do they know this for uninvented "future" armor systems? Because short of discovering new laws of physics and Star Trek technology, there is no known material in existence that is capable of withstanding these weapons. They breach the physical limits of normal molecular materials.

What the US can do now technologically will start showing up in the hands of our enemies in a decade or two. The permanent obsolesence of armor is no more than a decade or two off and the US military knows it, unless we develop a new exotic type of armor/shielding that is not dependent on molecular bonds. As a consequence, future systems are being designed without provisions for protecting against anti-armor weapon systems that can't be practically defeated anyway.

44 posted on 11/29/2003 11:05:28 AM PST by tortoise (All these moments lost in time, like tears in the rain.)
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To: tortoise
The Stryker is NOT the answer.
It cannot protect from even minor MG fire.
It cannot manuever worth beans.
The turning radius is that of a greyhound bus.
An Abrams can out turn that thing.

Armor development will ALWAYS progress.
Your argument is that the tank is finished, and you are wrong for the same reason that the argument that artillery is finished is wrong.
But, I doubt you'll get it.
I've heard too many Shinseki apologists and Strykerphilic zombies saying the same thing.
And they are wrong to the point that it will kill people.
That is irresponsible and reprehensible.
Having less armor and wheels doesn't make a soldier anymore elite than wearing a beret makes him a better soldier and improves morale.
If we're going to field soldiers, we better darn well give him the best equipment we can produce, not a horse designed by a commitee to do the work of a jackdaw.
"If you send a soldier to battle with nothing but a pile of rocks, you owe him every rock in the pile"
Have a nice day.
49 posted on 11/29/2003 11:12:30 AM PST by Darksheare (Even as we speak, my 100,000 killer wombat army marches forth)
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