Perhaps infantry could replace tanks. By adopting powered suits of armor, like Iron Man, or the Mobile Infantry troops in Starship Troopers. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=279802
Cool as powered armor might be, I’m guessing that it would be impractical…cost alone would be pretty high. Not to mention all the technological hurdles that would need to be overcome to even make it possible.
If we were going to have power armor I’d rather it be like ACS in John Ringo’s Legacy of the Aldenata saga than the MI of Starship Troopers. 
-XT
The OGRE game provides a more valuable concept–the Cybertank.
By eliminating the crew, & replacing it with a computer, tanks free up space. This results in a lower profile, better sloping for the armor, more ammo, alternative defensive systems, & a smaller engine to drive it. The Cybertank is therefore more air-deployable (big plus), more fuel efficient, & best of all, politically expendable.
If Predator Drones can be controlled by encyphered remore digital systems, a Cybertank can be run by one, with the tank capable of limited autonomic functions—antimissile defence, for example.
Just saw a show yeserday on the Discovery Channel on the new “Javelin” missel. To be deployed by the U.S. very soon. Anti-tank missle, 50 lbs , shoulder fired ( the harness rests on both shoulders, missle over right shoulder). It can take out any modern tank. It is fire and forget, flys up 100 ft or so and comes down on top of the target, where the armour is thinnest. Has a double blast sequence. Frist blast goes off on contact, whis is desinged to set off any blast armour the tank may have; second, and main blast takes care of the main armour.
So it’s like the Stinger only for tanks. Great for infentery, and as with the Stinger, you fire, and get the hell out of there very quick. $ 40g a pop though. I belive the Stinger was one of the main reasons Russia had such a bad time in Afganistan.
These weapons could have an impact on large mechanize armys. But only increaces the need for smaller, highly trained , well equiped ground forces. And they are very expencive, so only some countries will be able to field them in larg numbers.
Lol , my bad, it entered service in 1996
The comparison to the “predator” is completely inappropriate. A fighter aircraft generally stays in the air for a few hours, and may come under fire for a few minutes at worst. After which it returns to a huge, well equipped base where a battalion of maintainers put in 10x the number of flying hours to make it ready for action again. A tank unit can generally be expected to fight continuously for at least a week, as seen in the drive to Bagdhad, with only occasional resupply of fuel and ammunition. The tank’s crew is expected to sleep with the vehicle, secure it, perform regular maintainance (track maintainance is a big one), repair light battle damage, extract the tank from ditches or swamps, interact with civillians, shoot them when they try to climp on top of the tank, and a million other things. Modern western tanks have a crew of 4 because 4 men is the absolute minimum number of people needed to maintain and secure the vehicle during battle and still remain effective. Your idea may be feasable for some kind of limited base defence vehicle, like a pillbox with wheels that wont stray more than a few hundred meters from base, but not for an armoured brigade hurtling through hundreds of kms of enemy territory.
[ol]
[li]If it can work for airplanes, it can work on the ground.[/li][li]All aircraft are more maintainence-demanding than cars. Cessnas vs Fords is a good example.[/li][li]The Cybertank could return to a rear area for maintainence. Possibly unguided.[/li][li]interaction with civvies can be done via camera/mike/loudspeaker. No prob.[/li][li]Antipersonnel mines can be attached to the tank to keep people off.[/li][li]Use wheels, say 6 of them, instead of treads.[/li][li]Tank recovery vehicles are needed to get larger tanks out of ditches anyway. Big whoop.[/li][/ol]
The trouble with cybertanks is that tanks need vast tons of supplies to keep functioning. They break down, they need constant maintainence, they gobble fuel, ammo, and spare parts like popcorn.
As we saw in the invasion phase of the Iraq war, you need constant convoys of trucks hauling supplies just to keep the tanks running. And those trucks need protecting. And the tanks can’t just plow forward, smashing everything, the minute they are separated from their supply chain they start to break down. The cybertank that operates behind enemy lines is impossible, unless it’s powered by a nuclear reactor and has some sort of weapon that doesn’t consume ammunition.
So for the forseeable future you’ll need humans out there servicing the tanks. And if the tank needs to carry it’s own maintenence crew with it, you might as well put them to work fighting the tank as well. Nothing like a human eyeball and human visual processing and human judgement to make your tank more effective.
But maybe that tank won’t be heavily armored any more. If one shot destroys the tank there’s no point in armoring it except against small arms.
What exactly is a tank? It’s a platform for the weapons it carries. The armor protects the weapon, the treads or wheels get the weapon where it needs to go, the crew aims the weapon. If there are cheaper, easier, and more reliable ways of getting that weapon where you need it, then the tank is obsolete.
The original tanks were designed to transport a cannon across the trenches, through the barbed wire and machine gun fire and artillery fragments, and destroy the machine guns that were preventing the infantry from advancing. If the infantry had a way of blasting machine gun nests there wouldn’t have been any need for tanks. And then of course a tank’s main job soon became destroying other tanks, which means they had to add more armor, which means the main gun became bigger, and so on.
But the tanks is still a delivery system for that gun. And you might as well mount the gun on a truck if one shot from an enemy gun will destroy your tank regardless of armor. Or have an infantryman carry it. Or mount it on a pilotless drone. I don’t see an autonomous tank ever being much of an asset, because the nature of a tank means a tank can’t function autonomously anyway, so why bother?
Is it not the case that Chadian irregulars armed with Jeeps and missiles defeated Libyan tanks?
The Cybertank could be utterly invaluable in supporting an Airborne operation. Smaller & more transportable by air, with the same or greater punch. Fewer people at risk.
Or a Marine amphibious assault, if it can swim.
Is any nation even developing a next generation of MBT? I don’t think the US is even in the planning stage for a successor to the Abrams. Afaik we are developing lighter armored vehicles that are easier to rapidly deploy (like the Striker vehicles).
-XT
If the “Tank” is just a big gun on wheels, it might be fairly expendable. Just make it tough enough to withstand small arms fire, and it’s cheap. So you lose a few to RPGs or whatever. So what? Heck, a lot of recon UAV’s are completely disposable. They can’t even land. So, maybe you don’t need this massive, heavily-armed vehicle with a gun sticking out of it if you don’t need to protect a multi-person crew inside. You can take risks with a rolling gun you never would with a human crew, and if you lose a few trying, it’s still less expensive, and far less tragic.
This was basically the philosophy behind the WWII Sherman tanks built by the US…something fairly cheap, easy to make in vast numbers, and ultimately expendable at the individual level.
I don’t think we are ready yet for Remotely Operated Tanks (ROT’s 
) quite yet…there are too many technical details that would need to be worked out before something like that is even ready for evaluation. Correct me if I’m wrong here of course, but I’d say we are decades away from something like that.
-XT
Well a certain amount of armor is still prudent since a hefty portion of combat injuries are shrapnel and fragmentation of solid objects subjected to weaponfire, not just direct fire injuries. Basic body armor will stop alot of those scraps of bullets, stucco, brick, glass, etc flying around an urban firefight that would otherwise cause a debilitating injury.
MI style powered armor of some sort despite being less than impervious to direct fire could easily make many common battlefeild perils much easier to deal with.
Reduced injuries from fragmentation
Minimal if any threat from things like barbed wire and sharp edges
Better able to deal with concussive effects.
Basically you eliminate all of the little stuff and something has to hit you straight on to seriously injure or kill you. Armor isn’t always about a single event but shifting the odds.
drachillix is correct; one of the real-world advantages of powered armor is that it would make the infantryman into a hard target. Sure, a direct hit by a missle or a tank gun will still kill him, but he’ll survive any number of things that will shred someone unprotected.
Powered armor would also increase endurance ( because the suit does most of the work ) and the size/power of the weapons it can carry. The cost just means that you’d have a limited number of them.
Oh, and to clairify; by “real world advantages”, I meant the advantages that would accrue in the real world, as opposed to scifi soldiers with powered armor who ignore heavy weapons fire. I did not mean I thought we actually had people running around in powered armor in the real world.
I read an article on powered armor a while ago, and as these things change quickly, maybe some of the objections are no longer relevant. Anyway, in this article the view expressed was that the power-source was a showstopper until something with a much higher energy:weight could be found. The best fuel presently available, so they said, was gasoline or some similar petroleum product. The problems are obvious: A suit powered by a two-stroke engine or something like it won’t exactly be stealthy, and being strapped to a tank of highly combustible fuel isn’t exactly safe in combat.
Which means until Egon gets those backpacks perfected, we are SOL when it comes to power armor, because nothing short of a nuke will do as a power source.
Ever consider reading a thread before posting in it?