"Just three weeks later, Gen. Eric Shinseki, President Clinton's Army chief of staff, announced a "transformation" program to replace the Army's 70-ton M1 Abrams main battle tank with vehicles weighing less than 20 tons, light enough to be flown around the world into areas with only dirt landing strips.
This "Future Combat System," as the Army termed it, would be protected not by heavy armor but by a linked computer network of sensors, robots, and precision weapons designed to find and destroy the enemy from a distance.
...The second problem is technological: By the last independent assessment, the computer network protocols, the digital radios, the armed scout robots, the system to shoot down incoming RPGs -- all told, 32 of 49 "critical technologies" that make up the Future Combat System -- have been tested only as "basic technological components" and only in a "simulated environment."
...The fourth obstacle is conceptual: The Army has crammed so many ideas into the FCS -- "18+1+1 Systems" (that is, 20 systems), including a computer network, seven kinds of robots, and eight kinds of manned vehicles, according to the latest official Pentagon white paper -- that even program officials struggle to describe what the goal of the FCS program actually is: an updated brigade, built around a light-to-medium-weight armored vehicle, which will be supported by many more computer networks, sensors, and robots than any current mechanized unit.
Yet when describing the FCS, Army spokesmen oscillate unconvincingly between impenetrable jargon such as "soldier-centric" and late-night infomercial-speak such as "see first, understand first, shoot first, and finish decisively!"
...The Army's inarticulate enthusiasm for the FCS has fostered three self-defeating myths: that the 26-ton FCS vehicles will replace 70-ton M1s in every capacity; that FCS units will deploy en masse by air to anywhere in the world; and that FCS troops will outfight every enemy, from Arab insurgents to North Korean missiles, by substituting information technology for heavy armor.
The revolutionary rhetoric was overblown from the beginning, and since 1999 the Army has quietly reinserted traditional military virtues into the program. As recently as April, for example, the Pentagon white paper depicted the FCS "reconnaissance and surveillance vehicle" as a lightly armed platform reliant on long-range sensors, but data given to National Journal in recent weeks show instead a heavily armed machine capable of fighting ambushes as it advances and sentries as it scouts ahead."
Как раз то, что нам нужно ("информация вместо брони"). Естественно, из этого ничего не вышло :). Но, как я уже говорил, "надо понимать, что они только начали постигать суть "сетецентричного пути", это всё не более, чем первые опыты". Это пока ещё мушкеты.
Из того же постинга - "нельзя ли это трактовать таким образом, что, по мере развития Сети, нам всё менее и менее важны заруливающие характеристики каждой отдельной боевой единицы?"
И с противоположного полюса, цитата из
makarovslava: "в условиях отсутствия радиосвязи эффективность общевойсковых соединений ползет вниз, вундервафли начинают решать. То есть тут проблема - танки массой тонн в 300..." Понятно, что зависимость тут не линейная, но всё-таки.