Why, in the advent of militarized drones, are tanks still in use?
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Because it’s still a valid capability that counters measures which are effective against infantry and necessitates dedicated resources on your enemy’s part to handle.
Russian tank design and doctrine is decades out of date, and their performance and vulnerabilities should not be taken as representative of how it would go for any given other force.
You WILL see changes to the general shape and defensive measures of tanks, but there very much is and shall remain a role for armored and heavily armed vehicles which can bust open hard points which threaten infantry with light arms and light fortifications.
MBTs may give way to a greater number of things closer to the IFV concept or you may see greater focus on low cost drone deterrents. Radar guided gun based counters, directed energy weapons, dedicated armored EWar platforms to escort armor and infantry, counter-drone drones. All sorts of things will be and are being explored. But you’ll still need to be able to blow up a guy with a machine gun surrounded by sandbags without worrying about the machine-gun yourself in the process. The general idea of a tank is good at that and assorted others.
Why, with the advent of bullets, are humans still in use? Humans are the squishiest, easiest thing to damage on the battlefield, but they perform a function that nothing else can.
In short, there is currently nothing on the battlefield that can perform the duties of a tank better than a tank. Drones are a new threat profile, but that’s warfare. The tank will exist until either the job it performs is unnecessary or there is something new that does its job better.
An abrahms tank has a 120mm cannon that can put 2-7kg of explosives with pretty high accuracy anywhere it can see within 4-6km. It can proceed to do that around 40 times before needing to resupply.
A cheap FPV does not have that capacity and can deliver a grenades worth of explosive a similiar range. A more expensive drone is also much larger, and thus just as susceptible to anti-air fire as a jet.
As others have pointed out, drones also don’t capture location. People do, and people need to get where they want to capture safely. Infantry fighting vehicles like the bradley, and full sized tanks like the abrahms help accomplish this.
And additionally, keep in mind the drone strikes were seeing in ukraine against russian tanks, and vice versa, are largely against tanks which are around 30+ years old. Newer tanks do have defenses.
Because a high tech nation like the USA can jam drones, GPS, and so forth for miles and make them near useless.
Drones in a major war would also require building, and those places that make them would be prime targets for air strikes and not last long. Hard, though not impossible, to make them in a garage.
But mostly because drones are still very new in warfare. I do not think anybody expected them to be used like the Ukraine has done. They got innovative as shit, strapped hand grenades to cheap off the shelf launchers, then played basketball with said grenades in tank hatches. Crazy effective, like crazy as in revolutionary in warfare. We now have million dollar pieces of equipment that can be trashed, very easily, by a $200 simple drone with no risk to the operator.
There haven’t been many revolutions like this in warfare, and it really has been.
I think the near future will see simple and small lasers or small caliber computer controlled miniature gun turrets on most armored vehicle to protect against such things. The tech isn’t really far out, and some has even been tested. Given enough money, time, and technology, I think these smaller super effective drones can be rendered near useless, even in swarms.
I think submarine type drones will be super effective and become more prevalent though. Using a $1m submarine drone that has no crew and only a range of a few hundred miles could easy take down ships worth billions each. Those would be much harder to counter.
As if the military industrial complex could’ve forseen how big drones would be in the Ukraine War. There hasn’t been a relatively peer-to-peer conflict in forever.
Also, most (competant) western militaries have countermeasures to drones, and new ones will be developed in reaction to what we’re seeing here.
Drones have been around for decades. The newer ones are more mobile but they don’t replace ground armament. Why would we assume there’s some reason to drop tanks all of a sudden just because one other thing is better than it used to be but not a decisive battle winner? Technology isn’t better for being ‘newer’.
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