Posted on 10/16/2013 10:00:02 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Antonov designed a biplane that would deliver a tank by air.
I don’t know why we even spend on our military anymore; if we are going to live as Euro-weenies can we have a Canadian-style military? We pretend Red China is a threat as we build them into a superpower (still training their cadres in our universities and funding their economic rise with our purchases); we will never fight a large-scale conventional war again. This is just a workfare charade; I understand the need for a strong military in days gone by, but we aren’t even taking this seriously anymore.
I worked for GD. The Army begged us for a light tank. GD said, “Well, give us, oh, say $10,000,000 and we’ll do a design study. But we only do heavy armor and you only want heavy armor.” The Stryker is 26 tons (Abrams is 70 tons). The army wanted lighter but couldn’t get the money for a design study. The trend has been that companies invest their own money and then present their product to the military.
AM General, Oshkosh and Force Protection each invested about 1.5 billion of their own money and produced a “tank” based on a 6 ton chassis. The army loved it and took GD’s Abrams upgrade money and the Stryker money and bought lots of them. My guess is this will be the next “light” tank.
The army has attempted to get rid of the Abrams as they have several flaws that will make them unusable on future battlefields. Perhaps the biggest problem is the logistics stream of tankers required to keep the moving. Those will be vulnerable to RPV’s and other weapons. The next problem is there are now man carried weapons that can take them out from the rear. But the worst problem will be getting them to where they are needed.
So far Congress has prevented the army from dumping Abrams.
Light in the loafers tanks.
Next they will return stateside to be “donated” to local LEO
I thought airborne as in parachutes was dead. As a general rule, the airborne assaults in WW II were not really successful.
Bring back the Sheridan! :-)
Alternately, robot tanks could take point.
Growing up in the early-70s, a friend’s dad was an O-6 armor expert, West Point grad plus MSME from GA Tech. He said exactly that about the Sheridan.
>>Main gun was the Shillelagh TOW missile.
Shillelagh and TOW missiles were very different animals. Shillelagh used an infrared link back to the launch optics, while TOW uses wires (Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided).
TOW was a much more successful system than Shillelagh. The infrared command link of Shillelagh was high among its many problems.
Treadhead ping.
You don’t understand, the military will be inward facing now....
“You don’t understand, the military will be inward facing now...”
If people believe that (and it is a real possibility) then we should slash them to the bone.
This takes me back. The Sheridan was a fun little tank to run around in. I wouldn’t have wanted to go to war in it, though.
I have over 5000 hours as a C-130 loadmaster and our -9 at one time had loading instructions for the Sherman tank.
Time to eat crow...it was the Sheridan, not the Sherman tank, that we could carry in the C-130.
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