lastdingo said:
Whether a tank is good at cold start at -20°C, can have its powerpack changed in less than 45 minutes or go farther than 200 km with battlefield manoeuvres on soft soil is much more relevant than whether its munitions reach past 3 km range.
If that were true tanks would have nothing but machine guns. ALL of a tanks capabilities are important, there is no one to rule them all. A tank with no engine is a glorified pillbox. A tank with no gun is a glorified bulldozer.
The article is indeed bad but it hits on an important point: Long range guided weapons, especially if they can be remotely targeted, can in certain engagement scenarios inflict highly disproportionate casualties in tank engagements. The tank that fires usually wins. The US military has every reason to be concerned about this because it was their own work which demonstrated it. Hence the decades-long investigation of the concept through RAKE, X-ROD, STAFF, TERM and MRM.
Since US Army tankers have poor camouflage skills, US armored vehicles lack any meaningful top attack protection, the US Army lacks EW systems capable of interfering with their opponents communications, and the military has been unable to bring an APS system into service, the US military is in many ways particularly vulnerable to a weapon like this.
US adversaries are realizing that America has an asymmetric vulnerability to new weapons technologies because the glacial pace of US procurement bureaucracy makes it impossible for the US to bring genuinely new equipment into service on a reasonable timescale.
