Please make a NOD stealth tank, please make a NOD stealth tank, please make a NOD stealth tank, please make a NOD stealth tank, please make a NOD stealth tank, please make a NOD stealth tank, please make a NOD stealth tank, please make a NOD stealth tank, please make a NOD stealth tank, please make a NOD stealth tank...

I bet the police departments can't wait to get their hands on them.

You mean something like this?

The US Army has been wanting to do this with tanks since the mid 1990s.

Unfortunately, every attempt so far to put 70 tons worth of armour protection into a 40, 50 or 60 ton design has turned out to be expensive exercises in futility. FCS was an overcomplicated nightmare of a programme that suffered from technological overreach even before it was formally started and should have been stuck with more realistic objectives. Five years on the US Army has learned nothing from spending $15-20 billion and getting nothing bar a few small UAVs for their money.

I'm not dissing the core idea though. There's a lot you can do with tanks/armoured vehicles in the future. Apart from the significant advances being made with materials technology for physical, passive armour, you've got explosive reactive armour, active armour (electromagnetic reactive armour), active defences (soft-kill like Arena or hard-kill like Trophy), signature minimisation and active/passive countermeasures.

Then you've got stuff that reduces the overall size/weight of the vehicle, like ETC cannon (same bang in smaller/lighter package), electric and hybrid engines, autoloaders, remote weapons stations and suchlike.

The day of the 70 ton tank being the best thing on the ground for ground forces isn't over - having witnessed some in person, there are few things as scary as seeing that much mass and that big a cannon rolling towards you at high speed. But, it will be replaced by smaller wheeled/tracked vehicles, manned and unmanned, at some point in my lifetime.

The US procurement system is broke though, and I've got a feeling that this is going to be another of those DARPA thought exercises that produces some lovely technology in 15 years, but does little for anyone right now, apart from the big US defence companies.