Further to my nostalgia for Armor 21, here's a brief but enlightening blurb from an email sent to Wayne's Books about what GDW were thinking of.
Quote taken from here (the last entry for the page, right at the bottom)
http://www.waynesbooks.com/2ndedaccessories.html
"Satellite-beamed power down to mobile converters that recharged light, mobile AFVs with active, electro-static armor and ETCs and/or rail guns as the top tier for national Army intervention/rapid-deployment forces, advanced "conventional" vehicles for second-tier and mercenaries, and lots of M1, Challenger II, Leclerc-class vehicles in the "Third World."
One of the wrinkles was going to turn the tables on environmentalism, that preserving rain forests and biodiversity was huge business for big pharmaeutical and bio-tech companies, and they would be defending them via merc armies against the usual Twilight/DarkCon marauders. So it was going to have a lot of Merc 2000/Dark Con "areas of chaos" zones.
Oh, and Frank wanted Africa to be depopulated by AIDS, but I suggested it might be a little more sensitive, and more SF if we went with all of the flesh-eating bacteria stuff that everyone loves so much.
And that way we wouldn't have to talk to kids about STDs, which would save us some arguments.
There would have been tri-hulls like the LCS 2 Independence in the navies. Tilt-rotor carriers to bring the mobile electrically-powered AFVs into battle, big solar-powered battle management and power-relay vehicles circling for weeks at umpteen thousand feet."