But, this doesn’t address his points from the end of the article about cheap drone swarm attacks on the top side of tanks.
imho the failures observed caused by manpad in the ukrane theatre were directly attributable to an almost comically poor systems integration on the part of the aggressor and an unwillingness to commit longer range artillery and missile strikes to soften what were hardened infantry targets equipped with sixth generation anti-air and anti-tank weaponry.
Given the current state of cities such as Mariupol I don't believe you can attribute an unwillingness to use artillery to the Russian side.
Russia's BTGs were explicitly designed to (a) consume minimal manpower (they were composed of non-coscript troops from their parent units), (b) consequently, to maximize lethality:person (tank co + 3x mech inf co + 2 AT co + artillery/anti-air), and (c) to minimize logistical support requirements (by deploying smaller units).
Essentially, they were built to win small-scale conflicts at a price Russia could afford.
Ukraine is not a small-scale conflict.
Consequently, the following chain of events (predictably) occurred: (1) Putin proposes 2003 military reforms [0], (2) Serdyukov realizes many of these in 2008 reforms [1], (3) optimistic appraisal of capabilities vs Ukraine leads to Army grandstanding, little strategic integration with different branches (e.g. VVS, VMF), (4) utter failure of real political intelligence mistakenly assumes Ukrainian population (esp urban) will not support government & defense, (6) infantry-light, manuever-oriented assault predictable bogs down in urban areas, without necessary troop count in assaulting units, (7) strategic approach is locked in, as a consequence of previous choices, (8) everyone involved at a command level scrambles to cover their ass and blame others.
If Russia had wanted to win the war they ended up getting, they should have never assaulted urban areas with BTGs.
They would have manuevered south from western Belarus, bisecting the country, and forced Moldova to declare neutrality and forbid weapons shipments. Then pick key infrastructure apart at leisure. Because that's the sort of thing the BTGs were built to do.
But presumably Russia didn't want to do that because it betrays the "this is all about Donbas (and the criminal Ukrainian government)" talking points, and it didn't think it would need to. Hindsight is 20/20.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ground_Forces#Reform...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Russian_military_reform
Systems like TOR/Tunguska/Buk should be easily capable of detecting the Bayraktar and destroying it. It's not like Russia didn't see how it worked in the Armenian/Azerbaijan conflict. They knew Ukraine had Bayraktar, but seemed completely unprepared to deal with it.
The Ukrainians have all the same SAM systems the Russians do, so are super familiar with their limitations. They’re also many times more motivated.
There is nothing fundamentally indefensible about drone swarms, the complex just hasn't had enough time to react. You can bet that, if it doesn't already exist in secret somewhere in the US, there are many teams actively working on tank-mounted drone laser defense systems.
I suspect that drones have been hard to target until now because they have a unique air signature far different from all previous air targets, not because they are fundamentally more "invisible" than a Predator or a helicopter. Given their unique shape, movement, noise, and radio profile, a CS grad could certainly cobble together a drone target acquisition system using some consumer-level optic systems combined with a radio antenna, radar, and microphone array.
And as we all know, quadcopter drones are exceedingly fragile and most of their profile is millimeter-thin plastic blades. Once you have the ability target them, you'd only need a moderately powered laser to completely disable them.
The tank may not be completely obsolete and indeed properly used like the US did and like Russia sadly probably re-learned it is a very useful tool.
More defensive automation will put even that "properly used" to the test. I think we've just scratched the surface of what AI can do for defense; for offense also, but not as much. It's now in the realm of reality (think the mossad machine gun attack in Iran) to have systems that will autonomously attack any tank/vehicle/human, just waiting in ambush. It's orders of magnitued to have offensive AI driven tanks.
Imagine 1000 Mariupols, all automated with automated machine guns, AT missiles, drones and so on. Those do not require food, no water, no sleep, are not afraid to die.
Regardless, tanks are not what they used to be in WW2 -- modern tanks are extremely expensive and there are a lot of ways to kill tanks nowdays.
The battle will go back and forth, the tanks will get active protection, the ATGMs will get a lot faster, will used efps like the NLAW, but I think the writing is on the wall. Yeah, it was said before, just like it was said about the missile making dogfights obsolete -- a little early, but true eventually.
Not true so. The US thought that in Vietnam, the F-4 (?) didn't have an on-board canon for that very reason. All new planes again have one, because dog fights turned out to be very much a thing. The Phoenix missile, and the F-14, have been built around the beyond-visual range idea. Both are out of service now. Beyond visual range works when you see the enemy but the enemy doesn't see you. If both parties see each other, the first shot will be beyond visual range, any survivors will find themselves in dog fight after that. And if both side use stealthy fighters, they won't see each other, or be able to engage each other, at distances beyond a dog fight.
That's one of the big challenges, isn't it? If an enemy catches a flight of F-35s / F-22s with enough numbers the result could be devastating. And the big limitation of stealth aircraft is payload. Have them carry more, on external hardpoints, and they loose stealth. Have them maintain stealth means carrying less. Having too large internal bays makes them useless as fighters. Quite a fascinating conundrum there.