but its not simple to turn a properly commanded modern tank force in to a useless asset.
Once smart vision guidance is added to shoulder fired anti-tank weapons, and or mortar rounds, tanks will be useless. All the pieces for this technology already exit, but they have (to my knowledge) not been integrated into a deployed weapon system. Once they are, the world will change...
It is not a large engineering task to do so either. We should be happy that Iran & the like spend $billions on nukes which require massive facilities, rather than such weapons which could be manufactured by the millions and result in their country being immune to foreign force, except for ballistic missiles.
For another example, there was a recent EE Times (IIRC) article on what to me looks like a very cheap and very scary advance in radar design, using ultra wide band coupled with band hopping based on a random bit pattern. This allowed the transmitter and receiver to operate continously, but be virtually undetectable. I'm no radar expert at all, but it sounds like both a stealth killer AND immune to detection, so I see a great leap in anti-aircraft abilities there. Some grad or undergrad built the thing for it was claimed, $100.
I have friends who are into the 3rd World pop bottle comms type networks for remote villages. That sort of tech diffusion will start popping up in weapons systems for insurgents at some point, unless we solve the worlds flash points. So far, I have not seen reports of such (saving for IED trigger systems, but that is strill pretty crude). |
