Lasers, robot tanks, hypersonic missiles, and more.
Here s What You Need to Remember: These future weapons should begin to be used within the next few years.
The U.S. Army already fields an impressive array of weapons. But as the U.S. Army prepares itself for potential conflicts against high-tech Russian and Chinese armies, the Army is working on a slew of new systems ranging from tanks to missiles.
The result will be the gradual disappearance of the familiar weapons born during the Cold War the Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters that symbolize America s arsenal. In their place will be a new generation of weapons.
Hypersonics and Autonomy: How Russian Tanks are Going Futuristic
There are reports that a new tank will be armed with lasers, hypersonic weapons and “vertical take-off homing missiles with an operating range of up to 12 km.”
Here s What You Need To Remember: This means lethality and weapons functionality can be managed by humans performing command and control at safe standoff distances while armored combat vehicles surge forward into combat. The concern with such a technical possibility, which is already possible, is that Russia’s military may not follow any ethical guidelines and enable the weapon to fire upon targets without human intervention.
Why reinvent the wheel when an old weapons system will do?
Here s What You Need to Know: The U.S. Army is in a pinch.
Recent conflicts in Armenia, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine have demonstrated the widespread adoption of drones by state actors as well as rebel and terrorist groups for reconnaissance purposes and as improvised attack platforms carrying grenades or explosive charges. Most recently, Russian air-defense vehicles and electronic-warfare assets in Syria reportedly defeated a simultaneous rebel attack by thirteen kamikaze drones.
To counter such threats, ground forces needed fast-reacting Short-Range Air Defense systems, or SHORADS and better yet, they need it come in a package that can move with frontline units on the battlefield, which the Army dubs “Maneuver SHORADS”.
By
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on April 23, 2021 at 2:36 PM
Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (MSHORAD) Stryker in Germany.
WASHINGTON: Army frontline air defenses ended decades of neglect this week when it delivered the first four operational Stryker anti-aircraft vehicles to Germany. The Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (MSHORAD) Strykers are armored 8×8 vehicles fitted with an autocannon and a missile launcher capable of firing Hellfires or Stingers. They will replace the less well-armed, less mobile, and more vulnerable Avengers, a 1980s-vintage variant of the 4×4 Humvee that can only fire Stingers.
“There’s really no comparison to anything I’ve operated in my career,” a battalion NCO, Sgt. Andrew Veres, said in an Army release. “Everything in these systems is an improvement – the survivability, mobility, dependability, off road ability.”
Combining both powerful Javelin and Stinger systems is creating a potent anti-drone defense.
A recent feat shows how networking threat-detecting radar technologies can help win on the battlefield. Army ground gunners recently destroyed a drone target with a Stinger missile fired from a new Raytheon-built sensor-targeting unit. One of the impressive things is that the sensor-targeting unit was initially designed for the Javelin anti-tank weapon, not the Stinger.
The Stinger missile, which has a long history of hitting enemy helicopters and airborne threats, was shot out of the Javelin’s Lightweight Command Launch Unit (LWCLU) at Eglin Air Force Base, bringing new tactical dimensions to ground-based drone defense. It was a first, as it introduces the ability to leverage the new sensor, range and targeting technologies built into the LWCLU.