I hate to say this but Tanks are obsolete.

[michaelwhittmann]

Tanks have become a relic of a past age.

The Ukrainian Russian war shows that armored formations are easy to take out
with a drone with explosives attached. A multimillion dollar tank can be easily
destroyed by a 4 or 5 hundred dollar drone. There's zero defense. If the tank can be
seen, it's dead.

As with all warfare, the tactics haven't caught up with the technology. Tanks needs the Klingon cloaking
device.

[STHV]

Not even remotely.

Absolutely nothing can provide the protected direct fire support that a tank can.
Even now there are both existing and in development technologies that are already defeating these drones. Electronic warfare and signal jamming systems are being deployed on vehicles at this very moment.
Hard kill Active protection systems are still being actively developed and deployed and things as simple as ERA can often stop a kamikaze drone.

There have been countless supposed deaths of the tank from the Tankgewehr, field guns and artillery to the Panzerfaust and Cold War HEAT munitions and guided missiles.
The tank has never been and will never be the unkillable behemoth that most people think of when they hear the word tank just like every other piece of military equipment is vulnerable but the benefits it provides vastly outweigh any negatives.

Saying the tank is dead is like saying infantry are obsolete because bullets kill them, there is no difference and there never will be.

Lastly even if the tank was truly dead, why is every nation still developing, procuring and deploying new ones?

[BarryC]

[Kaczor]

The death of tanks has been predicted since 1916 First they were to be finished by guns, then other tanks, then hand grenade launchers, then rockets, then helicopters, then drones...

[tankme]

We will just start using unmanned tanks so that if a drone takes it out, no people are lost. Drone on drone violence... I just wonder how long it will be before the US has an entire drone Navy, Air Force, and armored force. I didn't mention Marines as they are just a Department of the Navy anyway...

[michaelwhittmann]

I don't know. Looks like a turkey shoot to me.
I hope you were right about new technology for
our soldier's sake.

Abrams tank $9,000,000 + crew
Drone $500 at Best Buy + RPG round

As for why they are still being built, Eisenhower
called it the military industrial complex. I call it political inertia
AKA jobs in congressional districts.

[STHV]

There is a massive bias in combat footage, you think either side will rush to show their failures? This is the exact same nonsense that lead to the book Death Traps by Belton Y. Cooper obliterating the reputation of the M4 Sherman for decades that is only now more recently being reversed. Cooper only saw the destroyed vehicles and this gave him the opinion the M4 was useless, this completely missed the fact that the M4 had one of the highest crew survival rates of any tank of the war, a whopping 80% and served in every theatre of the war to great success!

As for the cost argument it is again misleading, a bullet is far cheaper than the life, training and equipment of a soldier.
The same applied throughout the history of the tank, a MKIV and its crew etc was far more expensive than a field gun with its ammo and crew.
9M isn't even that much all things considered. People often forget the US military budget is only 3.5% of their GDP, the US economy is just simply massive.

And lastly tanks, just like most other pieces military equipment are designed and built to requirements for new capabilities from the military or to respond to new threats, just look at the M10 Booker, a brand new lightweight fire support vehicle designed to allow for mobile direct fire support to follow the infantry in areas the larger and heavier M1 Abrams cannot go, its lower weight also allows it to be rapidly transported by a wider array of cargo aircraft too. This clearly fills a hole, it's not some frivolous example of government spending for the sake of enriching their friends.
It would also be worth mentioning that if you do not continue developing and building systems you will lose that ability, just look at the UK, we have almost completely lost our indigenous tank development due to a complete stagnation of design and development. All new developments and upgrades such as AJAX and Challenger 3 are being outsourced to foreign companies albeit with some production in the UK which I sincerely hope leads to a restart of British tank design. We built the first tanks and now we can't even design and build a new turret for an existing hull without help from the Germans!

[michaelwhittmann]

I'm pretty angry with you STHV.

You've shown me that even with 100 more posts; I'll remain a Lance Corporal.

What does the WIP mean after your tanks?

[STHV]

lol, I don't doubt you will overtake me in short order! You've only been here a few months and you're already only 100 posts behind and I have been here since 2018!

WIP stands for Work In Progress as none of them are even close to finished.
My only runner is the Ausf G.

Some day I will be able to start a build thread...some day!

[Son of a gun-ner]

Please be mindful when talking about current tank warfare, to keep ones opinions about current political issues and current political leaders to oneself.
Remember, it is through past experiences, why we remove opinions sooner rather than later.