Main battle tanks reinforce their role as a vital tool in the box

摘要

Tanks fall in and out of favour in cyclical fashion, military soothsay ers seemingly having written them out of their 'vision for the future' roughly every 20 years since the tank's combat debut in the First World War. A sense of irrelevance or at least of disfavour was most recently visited upon the tank in the late 1990s when US Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki articulated his 'me dium force' vision, whose only remaining tangible legacy is the Stryker Brigade Combat Team, constructed around a ver sion of the LAV Ⅲ8×8 wheeled carrier.