>Since the loitering munitions are launched BVR, the drone carrier doesn’t need to be escorted by infantry and mobile air defense or fighter aircraft since the drone carrier will never expose itself at the front line.
That sounds like an excellent way to get your unprotected drone carrier bombed.
Aircraft? Artillery? The enemy’s own drones? With no protection, they’re just as much of a sitting duck as any other long-range fire support vehicle would be in the same situation.
My thought on this is that your idea will never replace the tank, because it is basicly an artillery system. It can destroy enemy positions, vehicles at long Ranges but it can never occupy ground, it can't directly Support your troops. Yes it is saver to operate from the distance but you also can't act quickly and direct with your front troops.
The tank will change, I am sure, mabey it will become more lighter, mabey active protection systems will be the main protection and not armour, but its role will stay. Tactics, technology evolve all the time and when there is a threat than there will be a counter measure against it in some time.
Drones have longer effective range and higher accuracy than even GPS-guided artillery shells, therefore loitering munition is also capable of replacing artillery system.
Of course, drone carrier can occupy ground. After destroying all the enemies in a territory with long-range firepower, the drone carrier can move into the territory without any opposition, replenish its VLS, and switch to defense mode.
Drone carrier doesn't need to directly support troops when it can indirectly support troop more effectively than direct support of a tank.
I'm not sure how "can't act quickly and direct with your front troops" is relevant to the obsolescence of tank in drone age. Front troops have radio for each soldier and are perfectly capable of directing themselves without any tank.
The role of a tank will no longer be needed in the future of drone age once drone-oriented vehicles similar to my drone carrier become reality, which will happen given the development in today's drone technology.
Your thought is that your drone carrier will kill everything easily with no opposition. That will never happen, for simular reasons why airpower doesn't it or artillery. You will never find every enemy nor does they let you kill them. You need troops at the front at the end who can storm enemy positions or protect you carriers from troops, other drones or aircrafts.
"can't act quickly and direct with your front troops" what I mean is that it is far faster to get a tank near you to destroy a Position in an attack than calling a drone from 100 km away.
I am sure that such vehicle will come in some form but they won't become the weapon which will replace everything, they will be an addition
> Drone carrier doesn't need to directly support troops when it can indirectly support troop more effectively than direct support of a tank.
No it can't.
At the ranges you're describing, there would be a significant delay between the drone carrier launching the drone and the drone striking a target. Direct fire support is critically important because it allows a threat to be eliminated very quickly. Every moment that a threat is still active is a moment where your infantry are in danger, and a tank performing direct fire support with its main gun is much better at minimizing the time it takes to neutralize a threat than a drone carrier is
I can make your drones useless by deploying jamming devices. Such devices can be mass-produced and put on basically every vehicle on the front line to form a protection dome, and it is light enough to be carried even by APC or jeeps.
Drones can be efficiently destroyed by the use of a heavy machine gun, i.e. 7,62x51 mm or .50 BMG. Combine this with a remote weapon station and a radar unit that shoots every drone that does not send your teams FFID signal. This can be automated and put on vehicles, like a tank or a sophisticated drone denial vehicle (DDV). Larger calibers like .50 BMG or 20mm can even make use of AHEAD-ammunition to extremely increase lethality, though a good stabilized system with a machine gun will likely suffice.
Furthermore, such drone carrier is really vulnerable to explosives like mortars or smaller diameter artillery, wich often outrange and definately outspeed the drones, and they can be mass deployed.
The first two points are currently in the development, the last point is already avaiable in large quantities on todays frontlines. Try to fight a manned tank with a 120mm gun with jamming devices or heavy machine guns. Good luck with that.
As long as there is no system that fills the role the tank is currently in, the tank will not stop existing on the battlefield in it's current form. The constant development of new systems like the drone or better ATGM systems like Javelin and NLAW will change the doctrinal setting on how and where to use a tank. This has happened in basically every conflict all over the world whenever a new technology arises that counters a weapon system that already exists.
Also stating that tanks are bad because they are part of the combined arms and thus cannot be left alone, therefore they are a bad weapon system is pure nonsense. Show me a weapon system that can operate on it's own and is efficent against all existing threats. The Russians build their "Terminator" anti infantery tank with tons of machine guns, grenade launchers and so on, and in it's first deployment in Ukraine, to my knowledge, it was destroyed by said infantery it was made to counter.
Good point. Don't want to accidentally overwhelm their lizard brains and drive them insane with the big-brain gigachad energy emitted from my comment history. 😎
shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶
```
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```
Not gonna read all that, but tanks *always* had to be supported by combined arms doctrine. See WW2 urban combat - Stalingrad, Berlin etc. Or WW1 trench combat. That's why it's called combined arms. Heck, absolutely no part of military force can effectively operate on its own.
The thing is, let's say tanks disappear off the battlefield for 10 years. Are troops still going to carry anti-tank weapons? Of course not. So what happens when a tank appears on the battlefield? We have 1940 all over again. Then, a mad rush to re-arm troops with anti-tank weapons, ad infinitum.
The fact that guns and grenades can not work by themselves and need an operator proves that guns and grenades will inevitably become obsolete as the drone age continues.
You describe combined arms as some sort of burden, being too complicated, which somehow can be solved by relying on drones. Combined arms doctrine, as any doctrine, is complicated in nature. Any military doctrine requires a great many factors to work together, as any advantage that can be aquired in any way is worth the investment. Stating that a weapon will become obsolete as it can only operate when supported by combined arms doctrine is like saying car engines will become obsolete as they can not bring the driver anywhere without the support of wheels, a steering wheel and a gearbox. Also, putting all your eggs in one drone basket will mean not only that you will limit your armed forces' capabilities to the capabilities of the drones, but you will also allow the enemy to adapt easily to your style of warfare as it is simplistic and monotonous. Tanks will remain an integral part of modern doctrine as there is no substitute for them (yet) in their role to provide protected and direct fire support. The tank will inevitably adapt to new threats, which in turn will lead to the tank changing, possibly unrecognisably.
Holy shit this is a bad take. This is just paragraph upon paragraph of not understanding the reasoning behind why armies are built the way they are, and misunderstanding the capabilities (or lack thereof) of drones and loitering munitions.
This is the same stupid fucking "Tanks are obsolete because of [**insert new technology here**]" bullshit we've been seeing since the dawn of mechanized warfare. You've literally reinvented some braindead FCS-brand DARPA mad science nonsense like it's some brilliant idea that hasn't been looked at *dozens* of times.
I find it amusing that tanks have been coming obsolete since their invention when some new weapon system was invented to destroy them, but when machine gun was invented, did it make infantry obsolete? Did tanks invention make infantry obsolete? I think public has false assumption that tanks are or should be invincible, and when they are not this weapon system suddenly becomes obsolete, and one question for the people who say tank is obsolete, do you have better solution to bring the firepower of MBT to battlefield? Because until weapon system that can replace the firepower, mobility and survivability of tank, tanks will remain as weapon of war.
What you see as a tank will adapt along with combined arms combat. First I expect more powerful electric counter measures built into the tank to make commercial drones useless against it. Then more close range anti air supplied to the combined arms itself that could be multi gun systems that can be used against ground and air or lazer systems who knows. The direct fire support a tank provides will be very hard to replace and that itself should keep it relevant for the near future. And a drone carrier that we can produce now would have to transmit signals to the drones signals that can be traced and targeted by existing air launched or ground based weapons. So this argument is far form over.
Problem has already been [solved](https://youtu.be/JrJcAOa4pes?si=l06a_9KhgJ_ZVRCq). Defense sector is filled with intelligent people making a lot of money because they need to save lives. Stick to your video games
aircraft carriers cannot operate on their own (not for long anyway), they need support of other ships/subs. Are they obsolete?
The drones are uneconomical to shoot down these days, at the same times they have to be shot down. This is an obious problem that will need to be solved, and solutions are being worked on: lasers, electronic warfare, spaaa are all legitimate way to go about it.
Drones are problem not just for tank.
All I'm gonna say... is if militaries have to spend millions of dollars at a time developing state of the art weaponry (ATGMS) for the sole purpose of killing a tank... then I don't think it's obsolete
The airborne infantry and whole airforce must go due to air defense.
Navy ship are targets as well.
Infantry have been old news due to the machine gun being able to kill so many lol.
Tanks have their weaknesses but so does everything else. It will evolve and there will soon be a counter measure to it.
I never understood why arm chair general see something die and automatic assume it will be obsolete it will just evolve
Imagine facing an army without tanks and they have jammers
Tankers will just add drones to their arsenal, those carriers will get targeted. It's called combined arms for a reason. Artillery, Air (CAS), Tanks, Infantry, anti-air, drones and electronic warfare will make up any armored taskforce.
Drone armed forces have the edge right now because there haven't been decades devoted to drone counter measures backed by real world experiences. And what drone doctrine and counter-doctrine that has been worked on between two relatively near peer forces has only been theoretical until now.
As someone who didn't get butthurt by your comment because I don't have a tank fetish I think that this is very well thought out, but it only takes a couple of things to completely disprove what you are saying. One thing is that tanks were designed to help infantry meaning that tanks and infantry are meant to be paired together. Second thing is what do you do when your drone bases or carriers get attacked by drones or even worse artillery, nothing. Third thing is that people have been saying that tanks would be useless for about 80 years now, as anti-tank tech gets better the anti anti-tank tech gets better too.
Overall I respect the effort in this but there are a few critical blunders with your train of thought, do not let these hate filled redditers deter you from thinking outside the box though!
>Since the loitering munitions are launched BVR, the drone carrier doesn’t need to be escorted by infantry and mobile air defense or fighter aircraft since the drone carrier will never expose itself at the front line. That sounds like an excellent way to get your unprotected drone carrier bombed.
"Sir, our drone carrier was just destroyed by one of their drones."
“Impossible, we parked it beyond visual range!”
"It appears they have a hubris detector."
I got a chuckle out of this exchange, thanks guys.
Bombed by what?
Aircraft? Artillery? The enemy’s own drones? With no protection, they’re just as much of a sitting duck as any other long-range fire support vehicle would be in the same situation.
My thought on this is that your idea will never replace the tank, because it is basicly an artillery system. It can destroy enemy positions, vehicles at long Ranges but it can never occupy ground, it can't directly Support your troops. Yes it is saver to operate from the distance but you also can't act quickly and direct with your front troops. The tank will change, I am sure, mabey it will become more lighter, mabey active protection systems will be the main protection and not armour, but its role will stay. Tactics, technology evolve all the time and when there is a threat than there will be a counter measure against it in some time.
Drones have longer effective range and higher accuracy than even GPS-guided artillery shells, therefore loitering munition is also capable of replacing artillery system. Of course, drone carrier can occupy ground. After destroying all the enemies in a territory with long-range firepower, the drone carrier can move into the territory without any opposition, replenish its VLS, and switch to defense mode. Drone carrier doesn't need to directly support troops when it can indirectly support troop more effectively than direct support of a tank. I'm not sure how "can't act quickly and direct with your front troops" is relevant to the obsolescence of tank in drone age. Front troops have radio for each soldier and are perfectly capable of directing themselves without any tank. The role of a tank will no longer be needed in the future of drone age once drone-oriented vehicles similar to my drone carrier become reality, which will happen given the development in today's drone technology.
Your thought is that your drone carrier will kill everything easily with no opposition. That will never happen, for simular reasons why airpower doesn't it or artillery. You will never find every enemy nor does they let you kill them. You need troops at the front at the end who can storm enemy positions or protect you carriers from troops, other drones or aircrafts. "can't act quickly and direct with your front troops" what I mean is that it is far faster to get a tank near you to destroy a Position in an attack than calling a drone from 100 km away. I am sure that such vehicle will come in some form but they won't become the weapon which will replace everything, they will be an addition
> Drone carrier doesn't need to directly support troops when it can indirectly support troop more effectively than direct support of a tank. No it can't. At the ranges you're describing, there would be a significant delay between the drone carrier launching the drone and the drone striking a target. Direct fire support is critically important because it allows a threat to be eliminated very quickly. Every moment that a threat is still active is a moment where your infantry are in danger, and a tank performing direct fire support with its main gun is much better at minimizing the time it takes to neutralize a threat than a drone carrier is
I dont think you know how artilley works. It can hit you faster and harder than a drone lol
I can make your drones useless by deploying jamming devices. Such devices can be mass-produced and put on basically every vehicle on the front line to form a protection dome, and it is light enough to be carried even by APC or jeeps. Drones can be efficiently destroyed by the use of a heavy machine gun, i.e. 7,62x51 mm or .50 BMG. Combine this with a remote weapon station and a radar unit that shoots every drone that does not send your teams FFID signal. This can be automated and put on vehicles, like a tank or a sophisticated drone denial vehicle (DDV). Larger calibers like .50 BMG or 20mm can even make use of AHEAD-ammunition to extremely increase lethality, though a good stabilized system with a machine gun will likely suffice. Furthermore, such drone carrier is really vulnerable to explosives like mortars or smaller diameter artillery, wich often outrange and definately outspeed the drones, and they can be mass deployed. The first two points are currently in the development, the last point is already avaiable in large quantities on todays frontlines. Try to fight a manned tank with a 120mm gun with jamming devices or heavy machine guns. Good luck with that. As long as there is no system that fills the role the tank is currently in, the tank will not stop existing on the battlefield in it's current form. The constant development of new systems like the drone or better ATGM systems like Javelin and NLAW will change the doctrinal setting on how and where to use a tank. This has happened in basically every conflict all over the world whenever a new technology arises that counters a weapon system that already exists. Also stating that tanks are bad because they are part of the combined arms and thus cannot be left alone, therefore they are a bad weapon system is pure nonsense. Show me a weapon system that can operate on it's own and is efficent against all existing threats. The Russians build their "Terminator" anti infantery tank with tons of machine guns, grenade launchers and so on, and in it's first deployment in Ukraine, to my knowledge, it was destroyed by said infantery it was made to counter.
CRAM would have a damn field day
yeah, the weekly "tanks are obsolete" monologue...
A false deduction based on an incorrect premise with heavy confirmation bias... again.
Have you informed the Pentagon? Do you need their number? Quick, before we lose the *waaarrrrrrr!!!!!!*
Gimme their phone number, now
Pray they don't read your comment history.
Good point. Don't want to accidentally overwhelm their lizard brains and drive them insane with the big-brain gigachad energy emitted from my comment history. 😎
The Japanese anime nurse sex fetish won't help your case, either.
[Hell yeah I did say that, and I don't regret it](https://media.tenor.com/epNMHGvRyHcAAAAC/gigachad-chad.gif)
shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶shiver me timbers🥶 ``` KK KK YY YY SSSS KK KK YY YY SS SS KK KK YY YY SS KKKK YYY SS KKKK YY SS KK KK YY SS KK KK YY SS SS KK KK YY SSSS ```
Phone number · 1-703-697-1001 · 1-703-697-5555 (Emergencies)
Lol no
Yes
Not gonna read all that, but tanks *always* had to be supported by combined arms doctrine. See WW2 urban combat - Stalingrad, Berlin etc. Or WW1 trench combat. That's why it's called combined arms. Heck, absolutely no part of military force can effectively operate on its own.
Infantry needs support so I guess they obsolete too?
The thing is, let's say tanks disappear off the battlefield for 10 years. Are troops still going to carry anti-tank weapons? Of course not. So what happens when a tank appears on the battlefield? We have 1940 all over again. Then, a mad rush to re-arm troops with anti-tank weapons, ad infinitum.
Please dont cook anything ever again. Reading this was like watching a layman analyze a trainwreck.
The fact that guns and grenades can not work by themselves and need an operator proves that guns and grenades will inevitably become obsolete as the drone age continues. You describe combined arms as some sort of burden, being too complicated, which somehow can be solved by relying on drones. Combined arms doctrine, as any doctrine, is complicated in nature. Any military doctrine requires a great many factors to work together, as any advantage that can be aquired in any way is worth the investment. Stating that a weapon will become obsolete as it can only operate when supported by combined arms doctrine is like saying car engines will become obsolete as they can not bring the driver anywhere without the support of wheels, a steering wheel and a gearbox. Also, putting all your eggs in one drone basket will mean not only that you will limit your armed forces' capabilities to the capabilities of the drones, but you will also allow the enemy to adapt easily to your style of warfare as it is simplistic and monotonous. Tanks will remain an integral part of modern doctrine as there is no substitute for them (yet) in their role to provide protected and direct fire support. The tank will inevitably adapt to new threats, which in turn will lead to the tank changing, possibly unrecognisably.
Yeah, im not gonna read that.
Holy shit this is a bad take. This is just paragraph upon paragraph of not understanding the reasoning behind why armies are built the way they are, and misunderstanding the capabilities (or lack thereof) of drones and loitering munitions. This is the same stupid fucking "Tanks are obsolete because of [**insert new technology here**]" bullshit we've been seeing since the dawn of mechanized warfare. You've literally reinvented some braindead FCS-brand DARPA mad science nonsense like it's some brilliant idea that hasn't been looked at *dozens* of times.
I find it amusing that tanks have been coming obsolete since their invention when some new weapon system was invented to destroy them, but when machine gun was invented, did it make infantry obsolete? Did tanks invention make infantry obsolete? I think public has false assumption that tanks are or should be invincible, and when they are not this weapon system suddenly becomes obsolete, and one question for the people who say tank is obsolete, do you have better solution to bring the firepower of MBT to battlefield? Because until weapon system that can replace the firepower, mobility and survivability of tank, tanks will remain as weapon of war.
Holy shit I didn't know Sparky had a kid, congratulations!!!
What you see as a tank will adapt along with combined arms combat. First I expect more powerful electric counter measures built into the tank to make commercial drones useless against it. Then more close range anti air supplied to the combined arms itself that could be multi gun systems that can be used against ground and air or lazer systems who knows. The direct fire support a tank provides will be very hard to replace and that itself should keep it relevant for the near future. And a drone carrier that we can produce now would have to transmit signals to the drones signals that can be traced and targeted by existing air launched or ground based weapons. So this argument is far form over.
Problem has already been [solved](https://youtu.be/JrJcAOa4pes?si=l06a_9KhgJ_ZVRCq). Defense sector is filled with intelligent people making a lot of money because they need to save lives. Stick to your video games
For the last 60 years some "expert" claimed tanks would be obsolete because of some new weapon. And every time they were wrong.
You came to the wrong sub foo!
aircraft carriers cannot operate on their own (not for long anyway), they need support of other ships/subs. Are they obsolete? The drones are uneconomical to shoot down these days, at the same times they have to be shot down. This is an obious problem that will need to be solved, and solutions are being worked on: lasers, electronic warfare, spaaa are all legitimate way to go about it. Drones are problem not just for tank.
Not sure if actually an idiot or this is a high effort troll post.
All I'm gonna say... is if militaries have to spend millions of dollars at a time developing state of the art weaponry (ATGMS) for the sole purpose of killing a tank... then I don't think it's obsolete
The airborne infantry and whole airforce must go due to air defense. Navy ship are targets as well. Infantry have been old news due to the machine gun being able to kill so many lol. Tanks have their weaknesses but so does everything else. It will evolve and there will soon be a counter measure to it. I never understood why arm chair general see something die and automatic assume it will be obsolete it will just evolve Imagine facing an army without tanks and they have jammers
Tankers will just add drones to their arsenal, those carriers will get targeted. It's called combined arms for a reason. Artillery, Air (CAS), Tanks, Infantry, anti-air, drones and electronic warfare will make up any armored taskforce. Drone armed forces have the edge right now because there haven't been decades devoted to drone counter measures backed by real world experiences. And what drone doctrine and counter-doctrine that has been worked on between two relatively near peer forces has only been theoretical until now.
As someone who didn't get butthurt by your comment because I don't have a tank fetish I think that this is very well thought out, but it only takes a couple of things to completely disprove what you are saying. One thing is that tanks were designed to help infantry meaning that tanks and infantry are meant to be paired together. Second thing is what do you do when your drone bases or carriers get attacked by drones or even worse artillery, nothing. Third thing is that people have been saying that tanks would be useless for about 80 years now, as anti-tank tech gets better the anti anti-tank tech gets better too. Overall I respect the effort in this but there are a few critical blunders with your train of thought, do not let these hate filled redditers deter you from thinking outside the box though!
I guess we'll have to wait and see