Current Battlefield Systems Doomed in 20 Years

Asian Aerospace 2000 -- By the year 2020 many of the battlefield systems which are a standard part of today's military inventories will be unable to survive in a major conflict. So concludes a team of analysts at Forecast International, of Newton, Connecticut, following an intensive review of the outlook for the first two decades of the Millennium.

The team's report focuses on three areas: smart weapons, directed-energy weapons, and unmanned battlefield systems. Examining the pinpoint destruction of battlefield targets through use of precision guided weapons, Forecast International's analysts noted that technologies used in the recent Kosovo conflict have already been substantially improved, and said "further quantum jumps" may be expected in the early years of this century.

"Not only will future precision guided weapons be far more accurate, they will be deployed from far greater ranges," notes the report, which predicts the development of smart sense-and-destroy anti-armor submunitions able to detect targets already under attack and change direction to hit a different target.

Directed-energy weapons currently in testing, such as laser and particle-beam systems, will "literally heat incoming aircraft, missiles and artillery shells to instant destruction and be able to melt a hole in even the heaviest main battle tanks with any thickness or type of armor," say Forecast International's experts.

Increased utilization of unmanned ground and airborne fighting systems is predicted, raising the prospect of future combat operations between opposing forces of unmanned weapons remotely controlled from distant bunkers -- the long forecast "Cybernetic Wars."

All told, concludes one analyst, "The revolution in military technology today is equivalent to that caused by the invention of gunpowder 500 years ago!"