Role
The main battle tank fulfills the role the British had once called the 'universal tank', filling almost all battlefield roles. They were originally designed in the Cold War to combat other MBTs. The modern light tank supplements the MBT in expeditionary roles and situations where all major threats have been neutralized and excess weight in armor and armament would only hinder mobility and cost more money to operate.
Reconnaissance by MBTs is performed in high-intensity conflicts where reconnaissance by light vehicles would be insufficient due to the necessity to 'fight' for information.
In asymmetric warfare, main battle tanks are deployed in small highly concentrated units. MBTs fire only at targets at close range and instead rely on external support such as unmanned aircraft for long range combat.
Main battle tanks have significantly varied characteristics. Procuring too many varieties can place a burden on tactics, training, support and maintenance.
The MBT has a positive morale effect on the infantry it accompanies. It also instills fear in the opposing force who can often hear and even feel their arrival.
Read more about this topic: Main Battle Tank
Famous quotes containing the word role:
“The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“The trouble is that the expression ‘material thing’ is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for ‘sense-datum’; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he ‘perceives.’”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)
“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)