I love tanks, but I think their day has passed. The only thing they’re good for now is running over unarmed civilians, and we don’t do that. Tanks will continue to be used by many regimes who do like running down civilians.
A $10,000 drone can take out a $10,000,000 tank.
Expect the same thing with piloted attack aircraft. Eventually all devices will be remote or robotic.
The real pisser is that the colonization of space will be done by remote/robotic control! How’s that for crazy?
The military doesn't do that, but DHS still needs them.
It is odd you are saying tanks are obsolete so soon after a Brigade of heavy tanks and mech drove all the way to Baghdad taking so few casualties.
And yes, even in World War II a cheap bazooka could (and sometimes did) take out a Tiger or even a King Tiger tank. Yet the German tanks could still cause us lots of problems and casualties. Our best weapon against them remained our own tanks.
Not saying you are wrong, exactly, but we aren’t quite there yet.
The drones that shoot the Hellfires don’t go for $10K.
We are talking pretty expensive drones. The Predators go for $4M each.
And in a “real” war, where the other side actually has effective air defense systems, the relatively simple Predator won’t do. An anti-tank missile-shooting drone that could survive long enough to be effective would be an order of magnitude more expensive.
On the other hand, there are many other ways of delivering an overhead attack with a “smart” missile. Many such potential systems are unimplemented ideas at this point. And of course there are countermeasures also. Active defense systems (which have been in use for some years now) and even, maybe, just a simple armored “umbrella” could complicate things enough to foil the best laid plans.
We are in one of those times where there hasn’t been a high-tech cutting edge war recently enough to show us through experience where the technological balance actually is.
Not yet................
People said the same thing just before Desert Storm. Then they said the same thing before GWII.
I still remember graduating from Jump School in '88 and some *military thinkers* were talking about how the days of the mass tactical parachute jumps were long since over...some of those articles appeared a week or so before Operation Just Cause.
They are bringing the tanks home...