To date, I don’t think any of Japan’s post-WWII tanks have seen service outside of Japan. There is no real comparative analysis to other tanks here, except a general statement towards the end that its “advantages” over the M1 Abram and Leopard 2 are “relatively minimal.” This appears to be a classic case of Japanese understatement.
The Wikipedia description on the tank has an extended section labeled “concerns.” This is kind of unusual. For example, one states that: – Tank is claimed to “successfully downsized” from 50 tonnes to 44 tones from Type 90 with “modular armor” but how such a feat is achieved or whether the armor thickness or effectiveness is impacted or not is not mentioned.
Anyhow, Japan does maintain its independent armor design and manufacture capability, but this tank clearly does not have the armor protection of an M1 or Leopard 2.
The Remote Controlled Abrams Tank [Hammacher Schlemmer]
Over at Defense One, Patrick Tucker reports that General Dynamics Land Systems has teamed up with Kairos Autonomi to develop kits that “can turn virtually anything with wheels or tracks into a remote-controlled car.” It is part of a business strategy “to meet the U.S. Army’s expanding demand for unmanned ground vehicles”
Kairos kits costing less than $30,000 each have been installed on disposable vehicles to create moving targets for shooting practice. According to a spokesman, General Dynamics has also adapted them to LAV-25 Light Armored Vehicles and M1126 Strykers.
Tucker quotes Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (who else?), director of the U.S. Army’s Capabilities Integration Center, as saying that,
[G]etting remotely piloted and unmanned fighting vehicles out into the field is “something we really want to move forward on. What we want to do is get that kind of capability into soldiers’ hands early so we can refine the tactics, techniques and procedures, and then also consider enemy countermeasures and then build into the design of units that are autonomy enabled, build in the counter to those counters.”
According to General Dynamics Land Systems, the capability to turn any vehicle into a drone would give the U.S. an advantage over Russia, which has signaled its intent to automate versions of its T-14 Armata tank.
We did do a report over a decade ago on lighter-weight armor at the request of the Deputy Undersecretary of the Army (Operations Research), Walt Hollis.
It is “MWA-2. The Historical Combat Effectiveness of Lighter-Weight Armored Forces, 6 August 2001 (CAA) – Pages: 121″ in our publication list: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm
Note that this report, which pre-dates our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, is discussing use of armor in Small Scale Contingency Operations (SSCO) and insurgencies, in addition to conventional wars.
This effort was not discussed in my upcoming book, War by Numbers. It may be picked up in a later book.
Spotted an article today on the History New Network (HNN): Win, Lose, or Draw?
This got my attention because I have outlined a book I may start work on next year (2017) called Future American Wars: Understanding the Next Twenty Years. This book is intended to complete a trio of books, one on understanding insurgencies (American’s Modern Wars), one on understanding conventional combat (War by Numbers — release date still August 2017) and this one covering the situation going forward.
My opening chapter is called: A Losing Record.
What they are recording in this article is that:
For conventional conflict we have 3 wins, 1 loss and 1 tie.
For other conflicts (what they call the “gray zone”) there are 9 wins, 8 losses and 42 draws.
Anyhow, haven’t checked the individual cases, and in some cases it depends on how your interpret win, lose and draw; but it does bring out a fundamental problem that I was partly trying to address in America’s Modern Wars, which is our track record in these conflicts is not great. My book primarily focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, which I why I felt I needed to third book to cover all the other cases of interventions, peacekeeping operations, and so forth.
Anyhow, the SOCOM briefing chart can be blown up to large size and is definitely worth looking at.
The guy third on that list served 7 years in prison for taking $2.4 million in bribes. A pretty sad end to a career. He also supposedly shot down Col. Toon (and they made a documentary of this dog fight).
As the sub-headline notes, “ISIS fighters fleeing Iraq’s second largest city as coalition forces prepare for tough fight.” If ISIL fighters are fleeing the city….it may not be that tough of a fight.
A few notes:
U.S. Army asked for another 500 troops (I gather the real number is 615).
U.S. “authorities” say they will need at least 24,000 trained, well equipped Iraqi soldiers (this is less than the 30,000 reported in some articles).
Provides three specific accounts of recent ISIL losses in battle (from sources I don’t know). The two from air strikes that could easily be over-estimated, but the 40 lost from a counterattack in the Qayara area gets my attention. Was this a company-sized attack?
Approximately 20,000 “terrorists” are in Mosul.
There is a force of 1,000 “resistance fighters” in the city, meaning a Iraqi fifth column.
Article was written by someone named Douglas Burton who is: “…a former U.S. State Department official in Kirkuk, Iraq and writes news and commentary from Washington, D.C.”
Anyhow, unusually optimistic article. If true, Mosul could easily fall. We have seen before in Iraq and Afghanistan that some of these climatic fights are indeed anti-climatic as the defending force mostly bails out ahead of time.
In my last post, on the potential for the possible development of quantum radar to undermine the U.S. technological advantage in stealth technology, I ended by asking this question:
The basic assumption behind the Third Offset Strategy is that the U.S. can innovate and adopt technological capabilities fast enough to maintain or even expand its current military superiority. Does the U.S. really have enough of a scientific and technological development advantage over its rivals to validate this assumption?
My colleague, Chris, has suggested that I expand on the thinking behind this. Here goes:
The lead times needed for developing advanced weapons and the costs involved in fielding them make betting on technological innovation as a strategy seem terribly risky. In his 1980 study of the patterns of weapon technology development, The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare, Trevor Dupuy noted that there is a clear historical pattern of a period of 20-30 years between the invention of a new weapon and its use in combat in a tactically effective way. For example, practical armored fighting vehicles were first developed in 1915 but they were not used fully effectively in battle until the late 1930s.
The examples I had in mind when I wrote my original post were the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), both of which derive much, if not most, of their combat power from being stealthy. If that capability were to be negated even partially by a technological breakthrough or counter by a potential adversary, then 20+ years of development time and hundreds of billions of dollars would have been essentially wasted. If either or both or weapons system were rendered ineffective in the middle of a national emergency, neither could be quickly retooled nor replaced. The potential repercussions could be devastating.
I reviewed the development history of the F-35 in a previous post. Development began in 2001 and the Air Force declared the first F-35 squadron combat operational (in a limited capacity) in August 2016 (which has since been stood down for repairs). The first fully combat-capable F-35s will not be ready until 2018 at the soonest, and the entire fleet will not be ready until at least 2023. Just getting the aircraft fully operational will have taken 15-22 years, depending on how one chooses to calculate it. It will take several more years after that to fully evaluate the F-35 in operation and develop tactics, techniques, and procedures to maximize its effectiveness in combat. The lifetime cost of the F-35 has been estimated at $1.5 trillion, which is likely to be another underestimate.
The U.S. Navy anticipated the need for ships capable of operating in shallow coastal waters in the late 1990s. Development of the LCS began in 2003 the first ships of two variants were launched in 2006 and 2008, respectively. Two of each design have been built so far. Since then, cost overruns, developmental problems, disappointing performances at sea, and reconsideration of the ship’s role led the Navy to scale back a planned purchase of 53 LCSs to 40 at the end of 2015 to allow money to be spent on other priorities. As of July 2016, only 26 LCSs have been programmed and the Navy has been instructed to select one of the two designs to complete the class. Initial program procurement costs were $22 billion, which have now risen to $39 billion. Operating costs for each ship is currently estimated at $79 million, which the Navy asserts will drop when simultaneous testing and operational use ends. The Navy plans to build LCSs until the 2040s, which includes replacements for the original ten after a service life of 25 years. Even at the annual operating cost of a current U.S. Navy frigate ($59 million), a back of the envelope calculation for a lifetime cost for the LCS is around $91 billion, all told; this is also likely an underestimate. This seems like a lot of money to spend on a weapon that the Navy intends to pull out of combat should it sustain any damage.
It would not take a technological breakthrough as singular as quantum radar to degrade the effectiveness of U.S. stealth technology, either. The Russians claim that they already possess radars that can track U.S. stealth aircraft. U.S. sources essentially concede this, but point out that tracking a stealth platform does not mean that it can be attacked successfully. Obtaining a track sufficient to target involves other technological capabilities that are susceptible to U.S. electronic warfare capabilities. U.S. stealth aircraft already need to operate in conjunction with existing EW platforms to maintain their cloaked status. Even if quantum radar proves infeasible, the game over stealth is already afoot.
He put it under the more provocative title: What are Historians Supposed to Make of Quotes Reported by the Discredited Historian and Holocaust Denier David Irving?
That does nice summarize the problem. Anyhow, HNN has the trailer for the movie in the article.
![The Remote Controlled Abrams Tank [Hammacher Schlemmer]](https://i0.wp.com/dupuyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/remote-control-m1a2-abrams-tank-xl.jpg?resize=775%2C475&ssl=1)
