CONTINUES….
The tank has had to play a secondary role - often operating alone or with infantry support rooting out enemy trenches and dugouts in tree lines.
When they have had the opportunity to be mobile - as has happened in Kursk lately, they’ve come as a nasty shock. The Challenger-2 proving quite effective. But they operate in ones and twos, often as fast ambush attacks because they simply can’t hang around and wait for enemy drones to get them.
There have been low points. The Russians recently captured a fully intact and working Leopard-2A5 and made a big deal of making sure we knew it.
These things happen in war but rarely do they change anything short term. We have captured Russian equipment and missiles and drones just as they have, unless they gain some encrypted information and how to access communications it’s going to take months to analyse a tank that’s not even the latest version.
Is the tank here to stay - especially what we see as the main battle tank?
I’m not sure it’s dead but it certainly needs to evolve. They’re too big and unwieldy and they need speed and a different kind of protection.
We seem to be employing what we have in ways to make them useful - just as the gun armed super dreadnoughts were used as land bombardment platforms in amphibious invasions. They existed so we found a use for them but we don’t build new ones. They passed into history.
I think the Main Battle Tank has had its day but, clearly, smaller lighter vehicles like the Bradley and the CV-90 have proven to be highly effective against even a T-72/80/90, so a new generation of IFV with anti-drone weapons and defences, fast, mobile, multi-purpose hulls and equipment options looks to have a more positive role going forward.
The generals will be hard pressed to give up on the MBT completely- yet clearly the concept is struggling to justify itself on the modern battlefield.
The age of mass armour seems to be over because ironically we don’t have enough of it to make it a mass that works.
1 MBT is 1.6 IFV’s in rough cost terms. When you have so few -
for example the UK will have just 143 Challenger-3’s and they’re based on massively overhauled and upgraded Challenger-2’s, is there really any point at all?
We use them because we have them. Ask yourself if you were posed the question ‘design me a vehicle to support troops, destroy enemy APC’s and IFV’s, defend and defeat drones, counter helicopters and help the crew survive if things go badly’, what would you build? I’d bet it wouldn’t be an MBT. Most likely a flexible hull that splits the roles of drone defence and anti-air, networked to protect others of the same hull with different modular load outs would be far more useful.
Let’s see what time provides us.

‘The Analyst’ MilStratOnX
Slava Ukraini

A T-72 turret is blown 75m into the air - believed to be a record just a week or so ago. It weighs almost 3 tons.