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I remember when I was working on the FCS pre-contract efforts. Some egghead told us how they had a deterent that would stop a long-rod penetrator from destroying a 25-ton FCS combat vehicle. We asked what Sir Issac Newton had to say about it, other than the energy had to go somewhere, other than putting the intact vehicle upside down in the ditch, with the crew turned to jelly.

Dead silence.

“would stop a long-rod penetrator from destroying a 25-ton FCS combat vehicle. “

When I asked how the vehicle would survive I was told that they planned on keeping them behind the battle lines and that the Army would have “total control of the air.” Nothing would get close enough to kill them. (Fire and forget munitions have now been around for 20 years.) But shortly after we went into Iraq and, lo-and-behold, there were no “battle lines.”

They had decreed that the vehicles would all be transportable by air, so they were all narrow and fairly short and LIGHT weight. Because they wanted them to have insanely impossible capabilities, they were all upright square boxes with slab sides. One thing they learned from WWII is that the sides need to be inclined at 30 degrees to bounce off shells. Oh, and they have to be massive enough that the shells do bounce off.

The whole concept was crazy. But it did make lots of people rich. (Don’t get me started on TWO integrators of integrators. It ended up that way because neither SAIC or Boeing had sufficient pocket senators by themselves. They had to combine their pocket senators to get it funded. So, 50 cents of every dollar went to the integrators of integrators who had not a clue what was going on.)

I remember when I was working on the FCS pre-contract efforts. Some egghead told us how they had a deterent that would stop a long-rod penetrator from destroying a 25-ton FCS combat vehicle. We asked what Sir Issac Newton had to say about it, other than the energy had to go somewhere, other than putting the intact vehicle upside down in the ditch, with the crew turned to jelly.

Dead silence.

I do believe they got the Saudi's to buy into a bunch of these.... That could be a small plus.