Army Buys New Highly Lethal, Fast, air deployable “Light Tank”

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

As the Army’s new Mobile Protected Firepower “Light Tank” blasts onto the scene into Low Rate Initial Production, Army weapons developers are further preparing for new kinds of ultra high-speed, expeditionary, fast-attack tactics which are already informing new, emerging concepts of Combined Arms Maneuver.

Light Tank

A faster, lighter, yet highly lethal armored “Light Tank” able to air deploy and keep pace with fast-moving dismounted infantry is precisely the kind of vehicle which will be needed in future wars, conflicts expected to be much faster, more dispersed and heavily reliant upon AI-enabled information flow. A window of opportunity with which to find, target and “close” with an enemy will continue to become much shorter, a circumstance requiring the need for an armored vehicle to bring fast and closer-in armored fire support to attacking forces.

“The rapid pace that the MPF will bring to our light formations will change the pace and expand the battlefield for those commanders giving them time and space to make decisions, much faster,” Maj. Gen. Ross Coffman, Director, Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team, Army Futures Command, told Warrior at a press event.

High speed, AI-enabled armored vehicles will increasingly be needed to keep pace with the kind of breakthrough information flow now being achieved by the Army. 

Project Convergence, for example, has shown that the Army can now do what it has long envisioned, and that is share real-time, organized, combat-relevant sensitive combat and war information across the force much faster and more efficiently than ever before. 

The breakthroughs are paradigm changing, and inspiring new concepts of operation for Army futurists refining notions of Combined Arms Maneuver, because sensor to shooter time has now been massively “truncated” .. from minutes to seconds. Unmanned systems, helicopters and even armored ground vehicles can gather incoming sensor information, bounce it off an AI-enabled computer and perform near instant data analysis and organization to identify the optimal weapon or “effector” with which to attack an enemy. It is called warfare at the speed of relevance, and it is a concept which has been driving weapons development toward new platforms such as its Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle.

In a late June announcement, the Army announced it was awarding a Mobile Protected Firepower production contract to General Dynamics Land Systems, maker of the Abrams tank. Developers say that while fire-control, armor and some electronics expertise from the upgraded Abrams were used or drawn from to engineer the MPF, the vehicle is entirely new, built with new innovative technologies and designed for higher-speed, yet protected warfare missions.