When prime minister Harold Wilson told a union chief in the 1970s to ’get your tanks off my lawn’, nobody doubted what he meant.īAE’s FPV project is, in part, a reaction to the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) ’Capability Vision’ for armoured vehicles, designed to spur development along different paths from the MoD’s previous research. That means that, to develop new protected vehicles, we have to take a conceptual leap sideways.’
’But we’re now coming to the limit of what can be done with that unless there are major advances in technology, such as improvements in railguns. ’Tank design is about getting the right combination of protection, manoeuvrability and firepower the Americans call it the “Iron Triangle”,’ said Hisham Awad, who heads up the Future Protected Vehicles (FPV) project at BAE Systems Global Combat’s Emerging Programme Unit. They generally use large diesel engines, and the crew inside, although protected, have limited visibility, using periscopes or camera systems to see outside.īut the tank is changing.
When prime minister Harold Wilson told a union chief in the 1970s to ’get your tanks off my lawn’, nobody doubted what he meant.Ĭonceived in the mid-19th century as a way of combining the functions of horse cavalry and mobile artillery pieces, the tank has had a familiar form and role since the 1940s – a lozenge-shaped body, protected by thick armour plate, running on tracked wheels and with a large gun on a rotating turret. From its first appearance in the First World War, to the images of massed tank battles in the Second World War and beyond, the tank has become as much a metaphor for implacable military superiority as a force in itself. None of them, however, has become as potent a symbol as the tank.
The 20th century saw the mechanisation of transport, and warfare was the cradle and the laboratory for many vehicles.
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