Hearted Youtube comments on Ryan McBeth (@RyanMcBethProgramming) channel.
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What do tanks offer? High caliber direct fire which cannot be countered without armor (you can't shoot down a 120mm depleted uranium round at 1500m/s reliably in combat) and an armored vehicle that is impervious to most ballistic weapons. How necessary is this on a modern battlefield? Against asymmetric fighting it doesn't offer all that much which cannot be offered by other more versatile and often cheaper vehicles such as IFV's and APC's. Against a non nuclear peer it holds value in its ability to engage other tanks as well as fortifications if there is air parity or better.
With that out of the way I look at cost/benefit. Modern tanks run anywhere from $500,000 to $10,000,000. This isn't including the support vehicles, fuel, training, and ammunition. In the past 10 years we have seen modern tanks with reactive armor get disabled by $600 RPG 7's. Not destroyed but disabled and rendered combat ineffective sometimes leading to abandonment. We have seen them get destroyed by ATGM's that cost as little as $20,000. Thus I would argue that reactive armor is moderately effective at protecting the tank and crew from low cost weapons that a peer would not be reliant on. This leaves Active protection Systems which can cost millions per vehicle to upgrade the current stockpiles of tanks with. They are proving somewhat effective against one or two missiles however more advanced ATGM's are breaking through relatively often. We are basically looking at a simple question of "How much value does a tank bring to the battlefield and could it be better spent elsewhere?". Are these tanks doing a massive amount of damage before getting destroyed or are they mostly acting as a canary? It's difficult to say right now as data is influenced heavily by social media. We also do not know what percentage of tanks in Ukraine are being destroyed by ATGM's compared to other weapons. A very conservative number might be you spending $3 million per tank which forces your enemy into arming their infantry with $200,000 worth of equipment to be capable of neutralizing the threat.
I actually avoided watching this when it popped up in my recommends as I assumed it would be another "tanks are not obsolete because you will always need tanks" argument. I think Ryan McBeth hit the nail on the head when he says "We might see armies moving towards IFV's" along with APC's. Yes I recognize that this is mission creep. I am not a fan of remotely piloted vehicles as they can be hacked, and have been, with examples of this occurring as far back as WW2. They also do not address the primary issue of cost/benefit as a remotely piloted tank would cost about as much as a crewed tank and are no more resistant to ATGM's. Obviously countries shouldn't abruptly scrap their armored corps right now but I feel that cutting back on acquisition of tanks and spending that money elsewhere may be more efficient in the immediate future.
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