During and immediately following CANSEC 2026 in late May, Airbus demonstrated the ability of the H145M and H175M for all three phases on nTACS, including for the special operations forces. Leonardo, too, would likely propose one or both of its AW249 and AW149 platforms if an open competition were held.
During a recent media briefing in France, Airbus Helicopters said its H175M could be manufactured in Canada if it was selected for nTACS.
“We think we have the perfect products to [replace the Griffon], and we have the capacity in Airbus — and with the supply chain, the aerospace capability in Canada — to do major developments in Canada,” Matthieu Louvot, president and CEO of Airbus Helicopters, told journalists.
Again, a partial truth. The problem I was getting at is that an Abrams serves many functions, but is a very expensive platform. Your example shows how drones can extend tanks functionality, not be replaced by it. True. I fully conceed your point.
I just wanted to speak to expense of an abrams as non line of sight mobile artillery enabled by drone vs just two drones, or a drone and a mobile missile system etc, or a pickup truck based technical etc…
Drones complement an Abrams in one sense, but the expensive few vs the many cheap mantra needs to be reevaluated across the combined arms philosophy.
You do not understand what a Main Battle Tank is at a fundamental level, and again are falling into the thinking trap that war is like Advance Wars and a Tank is a specific unit you buy with an associated cost to be abstractly compared against performance and a discrete rock paper scissors relationship to the other singular units on the map.
Everybodies’ plan is to flank, surround and overwhelm the expensive, powerful few of the enemy through cleverness, extensive planning, coordination, valuing of human lives on both sides and through the leveraging of mass waves of cheap tools that have uses outside of war unlike Main Battle Tanks which are unbelievably expensive and an absolute pain in the ass while being useless during peacetime.
So yeah lets do that… or rather Ukraine has already done that at certain sections of the front up to a point of saturation and diminishing returns and now it has become clear to the Ukrainian forces that the russians must be struck at a specific weak point and smashed with absolute force there in order to cascade a set of larger failures that result in large scale collapse and surrender of russian forces.
There are two options for motivating who is ever given the job to be the spearhead of that attack, either you do the fascist/German/russian/dictator/whatever strategy of demanding that nothing else will work but human bodies as armor while distracting your troops with a worship of war machines… this endless obsession with light armor or no armor with fascists is so boring and stupid…
https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/leaked-report-details-failure-to-get-armored-vehicles-to-marines-in-iraq/
or you field trained battalions of Abrams-like and Bradley-like mechanized armor (that know they are genuinely supported) that can hit those points of decisiveness like a force of nature and do it in a way that has the best chance of keeping the people doing it who are asked to carry out the will of an abstract entity such as a country alive and able to go home.
You are mistaking the drill bit for the entire drill rig. You keep drill bits around for when you need to drill through solid rock, not as general use tools like shovels or buckets.