Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, chief of the German army, said future tanks must evolve into “motherships” for unmanned systems.
This shift in doctrine reflects a broader struggle within modern militaries to integrate autonomous technology while managing the massive influx of battlefield intelligence. As drones and robotic systems proliferate, the role of the traditional armored vehicle is shifting from a standalone weapon to a command-and-control hub.
Speaking on the Inside Defence podcast, Freuding said the paradox of modern warfare. He said that while previous generations of soldiers struggled with a lack of intelligence, today's forces face the opposite problem. "The harder problem is data: armies once lacked information, now they are overwhelmed by it," Freuding said.
To combat this data overload, Freuding said that the tank must integrate unmanned capabilities to remain effective. By serving as a mothership, a tank can deploy and coordinate smaller, autonomous systems to scout or engage targets, reducing the risk to human crews and streamlining the flow of information.
This conceptual shift mirrors efforts in other nations to modernize heavy armor. In the U.S., the M1E3 is being tested as the first clean-sheet Abrams tank in more than four decades [1]. The project aims to create a vehicle that is lighter and smarter to survive on battlefields increasingly populated by low-cost drones.
Freuding said that the integration of these systems is not merely a technical upgrade but a necessity for survival. Without a way to filter and process the deluge of data, the speed of decision-making may lag behind the speed of automated threats.
“The tank must become a “mothership” for unmanned systems.”
The transition toward 'mothership' tanks signifies a move away from the era of the main battle tank as a primary breakthrough weapon. Instead, armored vehicles are becoming nodes in a distributed network, where the primary value is the ability to manage autonomous assets and process data in real-time to avoid being targeted by cheap, asymmetric threats like drones.
