Some say that tanks are obsolete in modern battlefield. One example is a recent total destruction of Leopard tanks in Ukraine by Russian Lancet drones. On the other hand, it may be just because Leopards were not prepared for such a kind of weapon, and tank designs will adapt for the use of drones. I hope tanks will survive of course :) What do you think?
Ever since the Russo-Japanese War artillery has been the main cause of death in conventional wars. There are exceptions but those are often under conditions of a guerrila war or between combatants unable to sustain enough forces to maintain an unbroken front line. In the face of artillery, armored vehicles are required to maneuver and the tank remains the only ground-based platform able to survive artillery shrapnel and simultaneously deliver firepower. IFVs, APCs, and the various fire support vehicles can survive shrapnel relatively better than their unarmored counterparts but are vulnerable to the many anti-tank munitions from all angles including their frontal arc. Contemporary main battle tanks still force their opponents to wait for better opportunities to fire into less armored sides, rears, and tops with the wrinkle being that the much more available FPV drones can easier find those opportunities. Tanks and their support arms will evolve in the future to take into account the work of enemy drones such as electronic warfare units becoming more involved and active protection systems being incorporated into new designs and retrofitted onto existing tank fleets.
What is most definitively dead however is the legend of Western tank supremacy. It used to be that because of battles like 73 Easting, Medina Ridge, and Norfolk that Soviet tanks are qualitatively inferior in all aspects for the common layman. Losses incurred during the Global War On Terror era can always be brushed off to exceptional circumstances or the weakness of auxiliaries. If anything, the deficiency in anti-tank weaponry among the guerilla forces during this era only reinforced the stasis of Western tank development because the existing tank fleet is good enough despite the criticisms of sustainability leveled against it. But by failing to create victory out of thin air in Ukraine, the legend of Western tank supremacy is forced back into reality that it is not just firepower, armor, and speed that matter but also their numbers.
The propagandists will be hard at work to stop common layman from drifting off into this reality by blaming Ukraine's inadequacy and "Soviet-style thinking" while denigrating bean counting as a measure of military strength by invoking the first Gulf War. For the generals and designers however, they can either accept reality and silently make concessions to it or pay the cost in blood by reaching for the comfort of myth and propaganda.
Seems that western individualistic thinking (supposed supremacy of strong individual) is transfered by westerners also to battlefields.
Thank you for this knowledgeable and interesting answer Comrade.
It was less the tendency for liberals to be drawn towards ubermensch sentimentality and more the material conditions the Western tanks were created under. The Soviet T-64/72/80 series would end up with about ~43.5k produced. The production run for Western tanks are around ~16k total. Add in the vast amount of T-55s/62s and various BMPs and that would create some pressure on them to somehow cope with fighting the Soviet and Warsaw Pact where being outnumbered 3:1 is to be expected.
Combined with the fact that Western procurement has to factor in the profit motive for armaments production and having missed out on the weight-saving technological solutions of autoloaders and ERA at the time, Western tank development would inevitably be drawn to weight busting, costly tanks.
Even for an esthetics, Soviet solutions, where only necessary parts are present, looks much more elegant, at least for me.