The future of military tanks

The 20th century saw the mechanisation of transport, and warfare was the cradle and the laboratory for many vehicles. None of them, however, has become as potent a symbol as the tank. From its first appearance in the First World War, to the images of massed tank battles in the Second World War and beyond, the tank has become as much a metaphor for implacable military superiority as a force in itself. When prime minister Harold Wilson told a union chief in the 1970s to ’get your tanks off my lawn’, nobody doubted what he meant.

Conceived in the mid-19th century as a way of combining the functions of horse cavalry and mobile artillery pieces, the tank has had a familiar form and role since the 1940s – a lozenge-shaped body, protected by thick armour plate, running on tracked wheels and with a large gun on a rotating turret. They generally use large diesel engines, and the crew inside, although protected, have limited visibility, using periscopes or camera systems to see outside.