The situation is akin to WII and the battleship-carrier shift. Main battle tanks are the capital ships of old.
Drones and guided munitions have made them sitting ducks, and the ability of drones to target their “soft spots” have compounded the problem.
It’s the history of warfare really. Once a technology is established, a new approach is developed, ie, pikes vs armored cavalry. Big aircraft carriers are next.
I’ve read in passing that carriers are extremely vulnerable to missiles, but still survivable in formations. I think air and sea defenses are probably going to get more effective in the long run, rather than retiring carriers. There is just no other system like it and at least some carriers would survive a near pear conflict, for now anyway.
The thing with carriers is that they’re designed to be at the center of an extremely capable formation, whose primary defensive objective is the carrier. A tank is more similar to the old battleships in that sense: They are heavier and pack a harder punch than anything else on the field, but need to expose themselves to be effective. A carrier is more like a HIMARS launcher surrounded by a small army of tanks, infantry and all thinkable kinds of air defence.
The drones wreak havoc on dispersed targets with insufficient air defence, not well defended troop concentrations. What makes them so effective in this war is that artillery has largely prevented troops from concentrating, so there are a lot of these dispersed targets that drones are good against.
The situation is akin to WII and the battleship-carrier shift. Main battle tanks are the capital ships of old. Drones and guided munitions have made them sitting ducks, and the ability of drones to target their “soft spots” have compounded the problem.
It’s the history of warfare really. Once a technology is established, a new approach is developed, ie, pikes vs armored cavalry. Big aircraft carriers are next.
I’ve read in passing that carriers are extremely vulnerable to missiles, but still survivable in formations. I think air and sea defenses are probably going to get more effective in the long run, rather than retiring carriers. There is just no other system like it and at least some carriers would survive a near pear conflict, for now anyway.
The thing with carriers is that they’re designed to be at the center of an extremely capable formation, whose primary defensive objective is the carrier. A tank is more similar to the old battleships in that sense: They are heavier and pack a harder punch than anything else on the field, but need to expose themselves to be effective. A carrier is more like a HIMARS launcher surrounded by a small army of tanks, infantry and all thinkable kinds of air defence.
The drones wreak havoc on dispersed targets with insufficient air defence, not well defended troop concentrations. What makes them so effective in this war is that artillery has largely prevented troops from concentrating, so there are a lot of these dispersed targets that drones are good against.
Maybe they’ll be replaced by many smaller drone carriers, but their general purpose is strategic, that won’t go away.
So what’s going to replace MBTs then? I mean they still serve a purpose right? They just need to figure a way to mitigate the drone threat.