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imaginenore

Russians have had it for a while. It's called Arena:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpmcmKwWzYo&t=1m36s

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Yup, and Israel has had Rafael's Trophy system deployed since 09 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtMgnRMIspQ

Iron Curtain and Quick Kill (not mentioned in the article) have been in development since 2006.

The idea and the capability is nowhere near as new as the article implies. The slow adoption my the US and Israel is motivated more by the collateral damage concerns that caused the Russians to scrap the Drozd system in 1980. As far as I know, Arena has similar issues, just not nearly as badly as Drozd (which basically shot a 107mm fragmentation grenade at the incoming round).

This is just the extreme miniaturization of counter battery fire. CIWS for tanks.

My mind immediately thinks of the poor dismounted infantry near this thing when its engaged.

We'll quickly be approaching the debate similar to the self driving car. Does it crash and kill the driver to protect pedestrians. or vice versa. Protect the men or the tank?

The military is better at resolving these sorts of issues. Tanks are a force multiplier, Keeping them in the fight is important (worth the collateral?). But cheap options work aswell. Plenty of men alive and LAVs still rolling along thanks to bar armour.

It's not exactly safe standing next to a tank hit by a rocket anyway. So, active defenses are kind of a wash in terms of infantry.

But you really want to avoid discouraging your infantry from being in the vicinity of your tanks, they are a key part of a combined arms team, critical in the field to keeping the tanks alive with their better viewpoints. In cities, where the infantry play the key role and use tanks as mobile pillboxes, you certainly don't want to discourage them from calling up tanks as needed....

It's not safe standing anywhere near a 60ton vehicle with a 120mm cannon that has huge muzzle blast. Throw in shitty visibility for the driver, so dismounts end up being a bit crunchy. The ironic thing is dismounts are necessary for protecting tanks from hunter/killer teams.

It's not m safe standing by a tank anyway. Integrated light/heavy tactics have changed since Full Metal Jacket.

Except they haven't, really. One of the modifications added to the M1s after experiences in Iraq were infantry phones. The Marines bolted infantry phones on to their M1s almost immediately after the war started.

Grunt phones were a thing long before GWOT, it isn't even a case of reinvention - an old timer noticed the missing phones and corrected the problem. I don't know if the capability was intentionally dropped and then reversed, but if it was then this exact same thing happened in Vietnam with cannonless F-4s - because dogfighting was dead...

It was an F-4 cannon deal with the grunt phones. When the M1 was designed the phone was seen as superfluous, so it wasn't added. The Army thought it was obsolete.

I'm actually surprised the Marines didn't fit the phones as soon as they transitioned to the M1. I'm guessing they didn't have budget, since they were getting post-Cold-War Army hand-me-downs.

The problem could have been headed off if one of two things happened on the USMC end: consideration given to the fact that the Army doesn't use the M1 the way the Corps does, or if armor played a bigger part in combined arms exercises. The first case is a glaring oversight, the second is understandable - tanks are expensive and dangerous, the more time you spend around them the higher your peace time training death toll will be. I don't remember ever training with any armor outside of LAVs (or the humvee that would notionally be a tank before transforming into a notional CH-46).

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