The Army Wants to Destroy a Tank (Without Destroying a City)

By Michael Peck,The National Interest

The U.S. Army has a problem. If its dismounted soldiers encounter enemy armored vehicles during a fight in a city, those vehicles will need to be neutralized. The problem is that any explosive powerful enough to destroy an enemy tank—for example, a Russian T-14 Armata tank—will likely devastate the surrounding buildings and their civilian inhabitants.

Therefore, the Army wants a soft-kill weapon that can knock out a tank without obliterating a city block. As the Army research solicitation [3] puts it with understatement, “the sociopolitical ramifications of collateral damage, especially the type of damage that can be inflicted with traditional anti-armor assets have made it increasingly difficult for the dismounted soldier to engage light armor vehicles.”

But the Army has another idea: instead of blowing up hostile armored vehicles and the surrounding city block, why not disable them by using, say, some kind of nonlethal microwave weapon?

Interestingly, the Army sees armored vehicles’ Remote Weapons Stations (RWS) as their Achilles’ heel. RWS enable crews of vehicles, such as the U.S. Stryker, to fire external weapons while remaining safely inside the armored hull. In the case of Russia’s Armata, the crew operates the turret while staying inside the hull.

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