Yes, but in my very first post I made clear they would need to be accompanied by friendly infantry to refuel and rearm them. Its a lot simpler to train whichever locals we’re trying to help out to refuel, rearm and fix a thrown track than it is to give them tanks and train them as tank squads. And you don’t run the risk of them deciding to defect and take the tank with them.
Theres no reason that drone tanks can’t also have their comms routed up to a satellite to make jamming harder, or even better use a short distance directional local link to a portable comms sat dish thats behind the enemy lines and out of the line of fire. Get the local friendly infantry to advance it as the front moves forward.
I can’t think of an advantage a tank has over something that can move much faster in the air. We probably develop drones that fly instead of drone tanks for the same reason drones have guns and missiles instead of swords and saw blades. They’re just objectively better.
Before getting that far, we should use that proposed technology to make it difficult and seriously hazardous to do against manned tanks.
A tank, Bradley or Stryker driving slowly through a city is notoriously easy to get close to without being detected. The "solution" has been to have more soldiers exposed out of the hatches in order to look around and keep an eye out. I suppose this could be accomplished with a lot of extra cameras. But there would also need to be weapons pointed in every direction as well. What about kids or villagers running up just to steal valuable components off of the vehicle. Can we make the drone tank shoot them? The current solution to prevent villagers from stealing equipment and food off of tanks is to catch them before they do it, and get physical if necessary. We can't shoot them for theft. What options will the drone tank have?
The same as any other thank, because it would always be accompanied by friendly infantry. Especially in urban environments, you never ever send in armoured vehicles without infantry close behind.
And if its advancing across the the open desert you don’t to worry too much about that.
What is the benefit, then? What you are suggesting is a way to support foreign fighters with tank support without risking our soldiers’ lives, but still risking theirs??
There is a much simpler and cheaper way to do this: lend our allies some tanks. If they are going to have to support them with ground troops anyway, just give them normal tanks to use. What actual benefit do you expect to get from drone tanks?
Mainly because armor and field artillery are a lot less relevant than they used to be. As a generalization, everything worth automating is already being done by drone aircraft.
I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned yet but there’s a Geneva convention requiring a human to at least be in the Firing Loop of any drone or automated system…
The thinking that first justified the development of pilotless aircraft does not apply in the same degree to tanks.
Unmanned aircraft do not require the heavy, resource sapping equipment necessary to maintain human life. In addition, they would not be subject to the physical limitations of humans, such as G-force, long or frequent flights.
This all brings potential benefits in weight reductions, far greater manoeuvrability and completely different protection schemes for vital parts. You have the ability to have a far smaller machine. Operational decisions can be made by a team, instead of overloading a single or dual pilot with masses of information from multiple sources.
It is so much easier to ensure a survivable enclosure for a ground based weapons system such as a tank, weight is not nearly so much a problem, and taking humans out does not increase mobility, speed or manoeuvrability.
The potential gains of unmanned tanks do not yet mitigate the benefit of removing the crew, and may well reduce its effectiveness.
According to articles I’ve read about the life & times of drone pilots, when the aerial drones lose communications, they just go on autopilot and circle until comms come back. This happens more often than you’d think, so they don’t have them set to return to base.
Thinking about it, I guess if you can scale up a drone quad-copter to be able to carry an anti-tank missile then its a better way to go. Can land anywhere and be refuelled and re-armed by local friendlies.
This would seem to indicate its possible:
Guess we also might see drone ground effect vehicles as well.
How much more mobile/faster could it get than an MBT while still being a land vehicle? Wiki says the M1A1 is controllable at 72km/h on-road and 48km/h off-road; I’m wondering how much a UGV could improve on that.
Once you replace dumb shells with guided missiles, wouldn’t the “direct” part of direct artillery tend to largely disappear?
Also, wouldn’t the missiles be more diverse than just ATGMs, given that MBTs do more than just anti-armor duty?
Seems that UAVs would have the advantage for high mobility & distant horizon whereas UGVs would have the advantage of low observability, high payload and long time on station.
Aside from breaking up its visible spectrum and IR silhouette and emitting little noise, how could UGVs lower their observability?
1: Tanks, even modern ones, need a LOT of care and maintenance in the field
2: Tank crews are not nearly as expensive to select for and train compared to airplane pilots so the real world cost and expendability issues are not as pressing as they are for flying drones
3: While protecting humans makes tanks heavier they would need to be pretty large and beefy anyway to have the firepower they do, so making a protected interior space for a human crew is less of big deal in tanks compared to airplanes.
I would expect that’s it - its must be easier to get closer, with interfering equipment, to a slower moving, ground-based tank then a higher-speed in-air craft.
