Time for shifting gears? Had anyone dared predict, only a few years ago, that the main battle tank would no longer be regarded as the focal point of the mechanised armed forces in the Western World, that very same person would have been looked upon as a serious psychiatric case. The facts are clear today, though: the main battle tank market has simple plummeted.

Indeed, back in 1989, no one would have been able to fathom the extent to which the fall of the Berlin Wall would change the world. Apart from a few exceptions, main battle tank manufacturers are now focusing all their efforts on medium and long-term solutions to keep recently sold models up to the job for at least another 20- or even 40-years. In a strange twist of events, a number of those solutions are also being trimmed to equip what have become their business rivals on the market, the light armoured vehicles. Good thing for some of the main battle tank manufacturers if they are also into the light armoured vehicle business. Yet, the established armoured vehicle manufacturers now have to carry out heavy lobbying campaigns to prevent their respective governments from looking too closely at alternative foreign solutions.

However, one should never forget the errors of the past. <<It'll never happen again>> can always happen again, as indeed it repeatedly has. So the dilemma for both manufacturers and governments is to work out how technologies can be kept alive on the backburner, <<just in case>>. The golden years of state-owned arsenals are gone and buried, and manufacturers need to make a profit to survive. On the other hand, governments have this pernicious tendency to believe that private manufacturers can invest ad infinitum in future technologies and theoretical concept studies. The ideal solution, of course, would be for individual governments to finance such research work and order only a few limited batches of such vehicles that could be ushered into mass production should an urgent need arise. But just by reading those lines, no doubt some will immediately hear the sound of <<subsidies in disguise!>> wringing their ears. A modus vivendi should, and could, be found. As usual, the solution is in the hands of the politicians, but the latter are seldom present to stick the pieces back together when trouble eventually hits the fan.