tl;dr: yes

What is a Tank, Anyway?

In three words: Mobile Protected Firepower.  Implicitly, it is also ground-based.  This discussion will involve three other somewhat related but important qualities — autonomy, responsiveness, and availability — which will be covered in more detail later.  However, Mobile Protected Firepower is the fundamental nature of the tank.

A tank is mobile because it moves faster than a man on foot; also, practically, it moves faster over certain terrain types than motor transport vehicles.  It is protected likewise because it requires more firepower to kill than a man on foot.  And it itself has more firepower than a man on foot.  The comparison to the infantryman is not only for historical reasons but because he is the fundamental component of warfare.

The Fantastic Tank

Before getting going further, I want to make something clear.  Tanks are not, have never been, never will be, and in no way need to be invulnerable or able to operate with impunity.  The fact that any given tank can be destroyed, or even that large numbers of tanks are destroyed, does not imply that they are useless.  It may mean that they are terminally cost-ineffective.

I have noticed that actual crewmen tend to conceive of their vehicles more on the basis of firepower than protection compared with non-specialist perceptions.  I chalk this up to several things, of which the most trivial is that a tank’s armor requires very little crew attention; it’s just sort of there.  Every tanker has fired their vehicle’s weapons, a visceral experience even in training; far fewer have ever been saved by the vehicle’s armor — and a significant portion of those still ended up running for their lives on foot or were badly hurt.  Training obviously and correctly rewards hitting the enemy over surviving a hit — as does combat.  Regardless of a given tank’s protection level — the details of which are classified and generally unknown to the crew by the way — there is no realistic basis for a crew to regard their vehicle as an impenetrable cocoon.

As for non-specialists, even those familiar with the technical and tactical characteristics of tanks often have their perception influenced by popular history and media/propaganda towards the tank’s supposed invulnerability.  The cultural salience of World War 2 figures into this — a period of a local maximum in tank protection vis a vis antiarmor weapons because rapid improvements in automotive technology allowed steel to be piled onto chassis in a time when the disruptive HEAT warhead was either primitive or nonexistent.  As for media, it uses both destructiveness and impunity (“plot armor”) to construct martial narratives.  It is difficult even using audiovisual techniques to convey any real difference between a personal firearm and a tank gun in terms of destructiveness in a media framework; indeed, the more impersonal nature of the tank gun probably puts it at a disadvantage.  However, the simple analogue between narrative-driven plot armor and literal armor makes the connection between them both easier to make and more effective.

Not to get too metaphysical here, but I’m not sure that even the Ideal Essential Tank is invulnerable.  Certainly no one with a clue has ever conceived any actual tank as such.

The Revolution in Military Affairs

The “Revolution in Military Affairs” is a real if somewhat nebulous concept that nonetheless describes an actual phenomenon: that there was a technology-driven disruption in the conduct of warfare sometime between, roughly, 1975 and 1991.  In my view, this term is best understood as a shorthand for rapid changes in methods of warfare driven by the development or proliferation of technology.

One motto of the Revolution in Military Affairs might be:

If it can be seen, it can be hit.  If it can be hit, it can be killed.

To many Americans, especially airmen, this “motto” is now an implicit assumption if not a hard truth about combat.  Some thinkers — including General Mark Milley, the current Army Chief of Staff — now concern themselves about what happens as this becomes true of other (adversary) forces as well.

One possible result of this is what I will call “sensors and dispensers” warfare.  Every combatant force deploys a large number of expendable and/or difficult-to-detect sensors.  As soon as these identify a target of any value, the sensor will call some sort of precision strike to destroy the target from standoff.

This scenario, the thinking goes, renders tanks obsolete because they are too clumsy and slow to evade sensors or displace from incoming strikes (unlike aircraft), too high-signature to escape detection (unlike infantry), and their weapons are too short range to function as standoff munition dispensers (like artillery) along with their armor being generally useless against new precision weapons.  Witness the annihilation of the former Libyan government’s armored units by strike aircraft armed with the Brimstone missile in 2011.

Problems and Implicit Assumptions

In my view, the biggest problem with this vision is the assumption of unchallenged supremacy of electromagnetic spectrum bandwidth (EM).  The sensors & dispensers model requires high-bandwidth digital radio transmissions over long distances in order to work.  In fact, because of the necessity of Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) to maximize efficiency, these transmissions must be two-way.  So far, the possible precursors to this model have either not worked or not been tried against adversaries of even marginal parity.  I’m not the first one to predict an increased importance for electronic warfare in ground combat, of course, although to me the important fact is that EM superiority isn’t an all-or-nothing quality but something that is continually contested, and in fact can be continually contested at least locally with a low force overhead in a way that the analogous air superiority cannot — in other words by a savvy but relatively underequipped force.  Lacking electronic warfare assets will soon be like going without mortars or radios: physically possible, but a serious disadvantage with little lost opportunity cost and characteristic of only the most marginal threats.

Armor’s disadvantage fighting under enemy EM superiority will be no worse than fighting now under air superiority.  Actually, future armored vehicles will probably have something to bring to the EM fight in the future.

Another factor are Active Protection Systems (APS, sorry for the acronyms).  I’m not familiar with the characteristics of current systems in detail, but they have clearly shown themselves able to defeat at least some surface-launched ATGMs and lighter weapons.  These will only improve in quality and quantity, I think.  Going back to an earlier statement, it’s important to realize that these don’t need to render the protected vehicle invulnerable, they merely need to make it harder and costlier to kill relative to other assets.  Given that anti-infantry guided weapons are a near-term threat and there is probably no way for a man on foot to safely deploy a dismounted equivalent to the Trophy and other hard-kill APS, this technology will allow armored vehicles including tanks to continue being quantitatively harder to kill than other ground assets even when identified by a first-rate attacker.  Again, this doesn’t  imply invincibility but only making it difficult for tanks and other armored vehicles to be attacked with impunity.

Sketch of the Future Tank

The point of this is that the fundamental characteristics of the tank — mobile protected firepower — will not be obsoleted by foreseeable technological changes.  They will still be able to provide more firepower faster than light forces while being meaningfully protected.  Of course, they will maintain their present advantages over aviation — persistence and presence on the terrain.

I’ll write another post about exactly what capabilities I think a future tank will have, but here’s an outline.  Although any future tank will be part of  a network with remote components and will also carry its own remote sensors, it will be able to fight effectively in degraded/contested environment where the “kill chain” linking sensors and dispensers of stand-off munitions is broken or unreliable.  I believe that this autonomy will become increasingly obvious and prominent in defining the role of tanks.

The different demands of maneuver warfare and urban combat will impose different demands on tanks, particularly in armor protection.  I think APS will be less reliable as a primary means of protection in an urban environment for several reasons, so as APS technology matures modern tanks with very heavy armor will continue to be attractive in cities even if APS proves reliable enough to reduce armor protection of most tanks.  I’ll also point out that besides their armor protection, tanks are also protected against CBRN/NBC environments.

Maneuver warfare — or the threat of it posed by a mechanized force in being — will continue to prove critical enough for major powers to maintain significant armor-primary mechanized forces.  The naval analogue to this mission arguably kept the battleship alive well beyond its true useful life, and even if the network-centric sensors & dispensers schema proves so effective as to render tanks worthless I suspect that the force-in-being mission will keep the tank alive long enough to produce at least one more generation of vehicles that will be as effective as possible on the future battlefield.  Certainly it has worked force the Airborne.  Even if I’m wrong, in other words, the Iowa tank hasn’t yet been built.

Conclusion

The tank’s fundamental essence of mobile protected firepower will not be rendered obsolete by network-centric warfare, even if the future tank will require some new capabilities.