Two years on from the last one of these posts, we have a new edition of what's what in the world of tanks. Even numbered years tend to be the big years for new developments in AFV and tank tech, driven by the fact these are the years that have the huge and land-focused Eurosatory Show in Paris.
This post focuses on the exciting future oriented concept vehicles, and not on the many upgrade options we have seen (Leopard 2A8 etc.). Perhaps one for another blog post. Following an overview of the new concepts, some discussion on what these indicate about the direction of tank design.
Too impatient? Quick links for the post:
Note: Written in June, I saved this until October so I could include the latest version of the AbramsX and any other Abrams successor concepts, but it turns out AUSA is not remotely tank focused this year, so the delay was for naught - never mind!
1. KNDS France EMBT
EMBT this year is a totally different beast to EMBT of 2022, which has been transplanted essentially directly onto Leclerc (see Leclerc Evolution below). New EMBT is the monster of the new tank concepts, and presents a view of the high end of what the next crop of MBT could look like. As with all of these tanks, it is a Leopard 2 hull with a very different take on turret design and crew compartment designs, but the core layout of the hull remains the same and nothing has been touched in the mobility area.
Headline features:
140 mm main gun. The hardest bit to miss is the main weapon, the 140 mm version of Nexter's ASCALON weapon. ASCALON is stated to be swappable between 120 and 140 mm in under an hour (then you have to swap your autoloader and lord knows what else, so don't consider it a modular in the field swap so much as rapid and low risk upgrade potential). Certainly exploring a major step up in technology and potential performance over contemporary 120 mm guns.
EMBT-ADT 140 turret. Not a surprise as the enormous gun means it is impossible to manually load anyway, and is adding a lot of weight to the turret. Pulling the crew down into a protected compartment in the hull and removing much of the armour in the turret takes a lot of the weight out of the turret - 10 to 12 tonnes typically - and so allows not just an accommodation of the heavier main weapon, but an overall reduction in vehicle weight from the unsustainable ~65 tonnes that most MBT are these days.
30 mm secondary weapons. As well as its main gun, EMBT also shows that there is an appetite to going much larger on secondary weapons too. The coaxial gun is a 20 mm gun, and the remote weapon station (RWS) is the Nexter ARX30 mounting a 30 mm cannon. And there is a 7.62 mm gun knocking around too. "Well armed" could safely be placed on the brochure.
SAFE FCS. The vehicle's FCS, called "SAFE" features much higher levels of automation than turrets we have seen to date, assisting in automated detection, identification and prioritisation of targets and threats up to the queuing of the most appropriate weapon system to a notional fire solution awaiting human approval. The SAFE system is a developmental pathway that notionally would be a part of the Franco-German MGCS 'next-gen' tank, so is very much one to watch as EMBT goes into further tests.
Layered hard-kill APS. EMBT mounted the Prometeus distributed hard kill APS system (akin to the better known StrikeShield in terms of function). We've seen Prometeus of the French Army's Griffon APC a few times for tests, it's good to see it on something bigger now. Expect it to be integrated with a further soft kill acting beyond the Trophy for layered of protection.
EMBT reflects a good example of how the core tenets of what is looking a fairly safe blueprint of the next round of successor tanks - namely uncrewed turrets, larger autoloaded main guns, and integrated and layered active protection - might look like. It stands out as going the biggest on the gun, which makes sense as Nexter are pushing their 140 to Rheinmetall's 130, but time will tell which calibre solidifies as the new 120.
2. KNDS Germany Leopard 2 A-RC 3.0
A-RC 3.0 came as something of a pre-Eurosatory surprise, and a welcome one that shows a different take on the near-term successor tank design concepts. It is a fairly bold design, offering a very capable new build option or a very deep mid/late-life upgrade for existing Leopard 2 users. Unlike the other two, there is even a video of it out and about and firing (although they look like low-power test rounds, but a comprehensive firing programme is said to be underway in the second half of this year).
Headline features:
Fully unmanned turret. The turret design is quite an interesting one, making some bold design decisions in pursuit of minimising size and volume in order to maximise weight savings. The main gun is mounted in a so-called double trunnion mounting that allows a much lower position but retaining good elevation and depression, as produces quite a unique profile around the mantlet at gun. I covered a basic overview of what a double trunnion mount is on Twitter here.
3-person crew. The tank has a zero-penetration turret, meaning what you see is the whole turret, nothing goes down into the hull. That results in an unusual crew compartment with a driver front centre, and the gunner/commander sat behind them under the forward edge of the turret ring. The whole hull has been raised by 100 mm (notice the hull doesn't step down from the engine deck like a normal Leopard 2 does) to give a little more space for them, and the protection around the crew area has been improved, compensated by the weight savings in the far less armoured turret. The vehicle has a core commitment to redundancy, with each crew station said to be able to operate any system.
120, 130 or 140 mm main gun. As presented, A-RC 3.0 had the latest L55A1 120 mm smoothbore gun. However, they stress that it could have either of the "next-gen" larger calibres installed. The German side of KNDS continue to favour the German next-gen tank gun - Rheinmetall's L/51 130 mm. The gun is maturing technologically very well since we first saw it in 2015. Though not as massive as 140 mm guns, 130 mm is still very big and requires an autoloader, removing the human loader from the required crew. In exchange, it offers a substantial increase in performance, with Rheinmetall claiming a 50% increase in penetration and an increase in range over the latest 120 mm guns.
30 mm RWS. Like the other tanks, A-RC 3.0 has a medium calibre cannon for a RWS, providing a powerful round for engaging softer targets than are necessary for main gun engagement, and providing a CUAS capability against drones.
All-synthetic vision. In a very unexpected move, the A-RC 3.0 proposes that crew vision could be all-synthetic, that meaning there are no periscopes or physical vision paths at all, with all sight being provided by cameras. This is pretty inevitable as crew relocate to the hull and electro-optics continue to be very small and capable, but actually showing it on a real vehicle is a fairly bold design statement to be applauded.
Integrated launcher. At the rear left of the turret is a launcher, notionally a long range ATGM launcher but could equally be equipped to launch loitering munitions or small anti-aircraft missiles. The key thing is the indication that users appear to feel a need to mount these sorts of systems into their tanks rather than keep them on dedicated vehicles. It comes at a cost (fewer main gun rounds mainly), so there is a definite risk that trying to be a jack of all trades is eroding the core capability of the tank.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about A-RC 3.0 is the crew arrangement and the choices around it. The crew compartment, where two out of three don't have a hatch above them, is radical and will result in some doubters, but the other side of that coin is they are as safe as can be, buried deep in the core of the vehicle with more space than previous side-by-side crew citadels have been. The upshot of that, fully synthetic vision, is a fairly inevitable course for future AFV but nobody has made a committed statement to endorse it until now. How the turret will hold a useful round count whilst having no intrusion into the hull remains a bit of a mystery, but certainly drives high survivability for the crew by keeping all energetic material short of fuel out of the hull.
3. Rheinmetall KF51U
KF51 debuted at the last Eurosatory show in 2022, and presented Rheinmetall's pitch for a successor MBT design. Though it was, and remains, based on a Leopard 2 hull, the company has said it could be on an all-new hull should they find someone to fund designing it (and that will be a LOT of money).
Where the new KF51U departs from 2022's Panther is that U suffix - the turret is now uncrewed! It is essentially a completely different turret to KF51 and so is really a KF51 in name only, being a distinct concept using KF-51 as a bit of a brand name for Rheinmetall's tech demonstrator efforts in this weight class.
Headline features:
Concept Uncrewed Turret (CUT). The new turret is fully uncrewed, though unlike the other two big new concept tanks, has not become any smaller for removing the crew and in fact looks (without the benefit of a dimensioned drawing) to be quite an enormous turret, in part to hold the carousels for the 130 mm autoloader.
L/51 130 mm main gun. As Rheinmetall's flagship concept demonstrator, it unsurprisingly mounts their next-gen 130 mm cannon, as did the original KF51. The gun is entering into a development effort to bring it to production readiness with an undisclosed customer, which then opens it up to anyone to look at as a viable mid/late-life upgrade package, with the likelihood that fitting it into existing Leopard 2 turrets will be a well-designed off the shelf design that can be offered to the Leopard 2 community.
12.7 mm coax. Not quite hitting the dramatic cannon calibres of EMBT, but another example of coaxial weapons creeping up in size alongside the main gun.
Layered APS. Until this year the most APS fits tended to be the addition of a single system, which in almost all cases was a Trophy or an Iron Fist. KF51U bucks this by fitting a more comprehensive suite that includes both the Hensoldt MUSS 2.0 for soft kill obscuration and jamming as an initial outer layer, followed by a Iron Fist hard kill system when soft kill fails or isn't suitable. Interesting to see a Western tank not mounting Trophy as its primary hard kill APS, KF51U selected Elbit's Iron Fist with a launcher on each side of the turret between banks of smoke grenade launchers. Bear in mind it’s a tech demonstrator, so it is no statement about Trophy or Iron Fist, just that this is what they showed on the concept on this occasion.
A development of the KF51, the KF51 EVO, is being developed by Hungary with a 120 mm L55A1 gun and based on a Bergepanzer hull, and Italy has announced an MoU for a joint venture of Rheinmetall and Leonardo with the intent of developing and building versions of KF51 and KF41 (Panther and Lynx, respectively) as successors to the Ariete MBT and Dardo IFV. It is unclear if Italy will pursue the KF51U path or not, and whether Italy will be the first country to take a punt on 130 mm as a calibre.
4. KNDS France Leclerc Evolution
Slightly unexpectedly, the EMBT turret from 2022 reappeared not on EMBT, but on a Leclerc hull (doing a neat circle, given the original EMBT in 2020 was a Leclerc hull and Leopard 2 turret), now branded the Leclerc Evolution and pitched as a potential high-end new build standard for Leclerc, should someone want to restart the lines and buy a few.
Headline features:
EMBT turret. The EMBT turret has crewed or uncrewed options with crew relocated to the hull in the case of the latter. When we first saw it in 2022, KNDS spoke about two, three and four person crew configurations depending on user requirements and maturity of supporting technologies (namely automation and 'AI' to augment smaller crew numbers). Leclerc Evolution is stated to be a four-person configuration, two in the turret and two in the hull, with the second hull crew being a systems operator. Amusing that as other tanks all reduce to three person crews, the Leclerc goes up from three to four!
ASCALON 120 gun. When we last saw the EMBT turret in 2022 (on a Leopard 2 hull) it had a Nexter 120 mm L52 CN120-26/52 gun, but in this Leclerc Evolution configuration it has Nexter's ASCALON in 120 mm. The company said the gun can be swapped to the 140 mm version in around an hour, though like the EMBT above, there is a rather huge additional piece of work around the ammunition handling and additional practicalities that would also be needed - think of it as a low risk upgrade path than a modular capability.
Launchers. The vehicle was shown with some launchers at the rear centre of the turret, which as with all these concept vehicles are more illustrative than literal, and could readily be configured for firing ATGM, Loitering Munition or unmanned aircraft. I would again reiterate that adding bespoke add-on capabilities like these launchers is a cost in terms of space to fit things the tank is supposed to have (like main gun rounds) and risks jack-of-all-master-of-none territory, but it is a compelling capability to have access to.
30mm RWS. The RWS remains the Nexter ARX30 RWS from 2022, fitted with a 30x113mm 30M781MPG cannon, the same as on EMBT and again offering an option for counter UAS capabilities.
Leclerc Evolution is a bit of an odd proposition as a new build tank offering, but does seem like it would be a hugely impressive late-life overhaul of Leclerc in a Challenger 3 fashion where you replace the turret and internals but save money by retaining your hull. Given the core of it is a further development of the 2022 EMBT turret, it unsurprisingly demonstrates well the core tenets of this latest batch of successor tank designs.
Some trends and observations
On the whole, the points made in my previous look at concept tanks in 2022 are still valid today. A few specific thoughts on this year's developments:
Unmanned turrets are here to stay
Only a few years ago commentators were forecasting that unmanned turrets were coming, but there was still not a great deal of interest or tangible evidence of them in a tank domain and an appearance they might be more of a concept vehicle fad with a few production exceptions than a rule for future designs.
Yet a few short years later, we have four concept tanks at a single show, three of which had fully unmanned turrets.
The simple fact is that without the unmanned turret, you can't achieve radical weight loss needed (see next point), and the choice of weapons means that autoloaders are unavoidable, so why not go a bit more radical and get the benefits of unmanned turrets too.
The A-RC 3.0 was the one that made an overt statement about the challenges unmanned turrets will bring, showing an all-synthetic vision approach to the crew stations (note in the image above that there are no periscopes anywhere on the hull).
There will be arguments about this, especially on redundancy, but this is true regardless of the approach. Vision blocks can be damaged and obscured too. Cameras are much smaller, can be given multiple redundancy with armoured protection, and the reliability of modern electronics is incredibly high. With a highly digitised system with automated weapon systems the redundancy is a very different debate for another day.
Meaningful weight loss might be viable
AFV have been on a relentless weight gain for decades, with the tank designs that entered service in the 1980s at around 60 tonnes all now weigh ~70 to 80 tonnes in their latest guises.
Making a turret unmanned is the single biggest means to lose weight and adjust this trend. Going unmanned allows a smaller overall structure, and for the vast majority of that structure to be unarmoured beyond basic ballistic steel for small arms. In real terms, that can save 8-12 tonnes on a typical MBT, pulling the c.65 tonne monsters down to 50-55 tonnes.
However, there is always the temptation to use that weight saving for something else. 140 mm guns and ammunition are very heavy. Multi-round ATGM/LM/UAS launchers are heavy. Complex protection suites using soft and hard kill APS with reactive armour arrays are very heavy. It will be interesting to see if users can resist the temptation to pile on exotic capabilities and instead bank the weight savings.
Propulsion remains conventional
Though there are a lot of quite dramatic, clever, and transformational ideas being presented, nobody is making much of a step in the direction of novel propulsion systems. In part that reflects that whilst there is a lot of hybrid and alternative propulsion tech in the commercial passenger car sector, none of it is suitably mature for adoption in heavy defence applications, nor is the far larger challenge of the logistical implications of adopting these technologies.
There are bigger picture questions though on the path to electrification of military vehicles (especially combat vehicles) on how to operate and support partial- or all-electric fleets in military deployed environments. There are interesting developments in civilian industries, particularly mining and forestry, that may show us a pathway to how defence could adopt these technologies and operate them in deployed austere environments.
Guns: Big or Bigger
Though there were some 120 mm guns on show, including the ASCALON 120 on the Leclerc Evolution, the clear indication is that the future will be a larger calibre - but will it be 130 or 140 mm?
130 is perhaps the most sensible choice, as it brings a substantial uplift in performance at the least problematic increase in physical size and thus problems with storage, handling, capacities etc. The fact it is Rheinmetall's choice of calibre, who are the manufacturer of the vast majority of 120 mm tank guns (even the US M256 is a derivative of the German gun) is itself a statement that needs to be taken seriously.
140 mm is a tremendously powerful calibre though, with the new 140 mm rounds claimed to offer the potential for 100% or greater increase in penetration over existing 120 mm rounds. In the first implementation like those seen on Leclerc last year and EMBT this year it is likely to be more like 50% increase to start, but it is a new calibre and weapon system that represents the start of a development path where 120 mm is very much at the end of its potential and eking out modest efficiencies rather than significant steps up. Look at how 120 mm grew in performance from the early DM23 to the latest DM73 and consider what a similar growth path would look like for 140 mm.
Complex active protection
Where only a few years ago the forecast was that it looked likely people might fit a single APS system as a best case, we now see several vehicles mounting multiple hard kill APS as well as one or more soft kill too.
EMBT and A-RC both fitted a combination of both deployed and distributed hard kill systems (Trophy and Prometeus/StrikeShield, respectively) on top of soft kill, and of course all of these vehicles generically pointed to novel/upgraded armour (passive and reactive) technologies that will be boosting their protection once a round impacts too.
All of these systems add a lot of weight, cost and complexity, but are the fairly inevitable path to being usefully protected in the complex threat landscape of a modern battlefield.
No new hulls
Noteworthy is that amongst all these exciting new tanks were precisely zero brand new hulls. All of them were Leopard 2 hulls except the Leclerc Evolution which was self-evidently a Leclerc. 2022's AbramsX similarly was also an existing Abrams hull.
What does this tell us? Well, making a new turret is much easier than making an all-new hull. But also, why bother with a new hull when there is nothing really to change there - none of these vehicles had a need for a radically different shape or configuration of hull, running gear or engine than a conventional tank, so why run the enormous cost and risk of designing a new one when there are a half dozen very mature tank hulls in the market?
What would be needed to get a new hull to be necessary? If electric powertrains matured to be viable, they would remove the need to keep the engine and transmission co-located at the rear of the tank, so that might prompt some more radical design concepts, but until then a simple reorganising of the front half (ish) of the tank doesn't warrant the risk and cost of redesigning perfectly functional hulls that are already available.
3-person crews may be a reality
To all of those in the 4-person crew world (especially Abrams and Leopard users, typically) who instinctively recoil at the 3-person crew concept - start learning to accept it, because it's going to be very common, potentially even the outright norm.
Those who have operated 4-person crews for a very long time, consider that whilst Ukraine has thinned out the numbers, 3-person tanks have been at least 50% of all tanks globally for many decades now. Even if you ignore the Russian/Chinese examples, Western or Western-like users have long operated 3-person tanks successfully including Leclerc, Type 10 and K2.
The objections around fewer crew for maintenance and administrative/security tasks are entirely valid but almost always presented in a flawed manner that seems to assume a reduction of crew is done with no change to structures or procedures and means one less person per tank in the unit.
All 3-person tank operators have evolved their formations to accommodate the change, with additional personnel or crews accompanying the tanks as part of the normal structure, like the French example below.
If an Army bought a new tank with reduced crew and did nothing to adopt it effectively then the concerns are valid, but assuming a grown up professional is anywhere in the process, the changes are well understood and there are several models available to base the adjusted formation, processes and operating model on.
What does it all mean?
Most of my commentary from 2022 endures. Tanks remain a significant capability that is absolutely still central to land warfare, and there is a lot of industry and user activity to push the technological baseline forwards.
It is interesting to see some broad agreement around core tenets of these designs - uncrewed turrets, larger guns (main and coax), layered APS, lighter overall weights. We are yet to see much of anything to counter the relentless "drone has killed the tank" naysayers, it would be good to get some indication of how these vehicles would be equipped to fight in a UAS saturated environment.
As with the 2022 post, we continue to lack anything tangible on true "next-gen" successor programmes like MGCS/DLP/NGMBT etc. As with the comments about hulls above, it is difficult to imagine what these blank slate programmes will do that isn't achievable with lower risk on proven hulls, but it will be exciting to see some brand new designs soon.
i do not have an armoured background, so excuse me if this is silly question. As the progress to more powerful weapons, more armour and APS, how would an IFV with APS and multiple missiles go against a modern tank???
May I pose the Question
Why are the UK building Challender 3 in light of war in Ukraine.
And what has the UK done on the development of non crew tanks for the next generation Or are we once again lagging behind ??