Voor wie zich afvraagt of tanks nog wel zo handig zijn tegenwoordig, kwam ik het volgende stukje tegen. Het lijkt er op dat Rusland niet zo heel slim bezig is en weinig heeft geleerd, of de verliezen maken ze niet uit.
Yes but no. The short answer is "in extremely limited capacities."
The long answer I read in an economics of war study I read a few years ago in an economics review. In that it talked about how DARPA about 10 years ago put together a purpose built supercomputer for battle simulations, and then they proceeded to run thousands of scenarios in it. And they found that when the battlefield has asymmetric technology between the aggressor and defender, tanks have a decisive edge of projected power. However once the battlefield starts becoming saturated with technology like drones, heavy armor rapidly looses it's edge and eventually passes out of the positives into being a liability.
Drones have become exceedingly cheap. A Bayraktar costs between $1 to $2 million USD. A modern M1 Abrams costs about $8.5 million plus four soldiers inside. Conversely a single ATGM missile costs about $175,000 apiece. And once you strap something like TROPHY tank protection system onto an M1A3 to protect it about 85% of the time from missiles, it now costs roughly $10 million dollars. Even if it takes 50+ ATGM's to take it out, that's still cheaper than the tank itself, not to mention the loss of those 4 soldiers. There is no math that puts that loss in the economic positives.
DARPA's simulations predicted that if a nation state is fighting against a technologically deficient adversary, then tanks have an advantage. As soon as that adversary gains access to tech weapons like drones and fire-and-forget anti-tank weapons like NLAW's, tanks rapidly become deathtraps even out in the open, and even more deadly once you enter uneven terrain like Ukraine that can hide assailants everywhere. The only place heavy armor still has an edge is running at speed in open terrain rapidly taking territory, such as open desert, and even then they have to have specialized air cover to defeat small low flying drones now. DARPA predicted it, and shortly thereafter the US Marine Core started quietly restructuring it's doctrine, reorganizing tactics, and purging itself of M1 Abrams. All of the tanks went into storage in Arizona, or were sold, or were transferred to the US Army - and I think they completed that in early 2020. And ultimately we saw the reality of those simulations played out in the Syrian conflict, a theater full of ATGM's and drones, heavy armor losses were horrific. Russia as a supposed superpower, now obviously a paper tiger, should have learned that lesson from Syria and it is apparent that they did not, or that they don't care. That was an extremely decisive conflict that really solidified the global reality that tanks are a relic warfare machine that we will likely look at in the very near future as antiquated technology.
Tanks have been on the way out for awhile now, and likely the opening days of Desert Storm in 1991 will be heralded as the last great battle of tanks.