chrisl

The tank was on shaky grounds at that point from NLAWs and Javelins.  NLAW has a range of ~ 1km.  Javelin to 2500 m.  That's not quite to the horizon, but it means that any piece of cover within 2.5 km can contain a fire and forget ATGM that has a high probability of one shot/one kill.  So at that point it was tough for tanks to go anywhere that infantry hadn't already cleared.  We saw a few tank ambushes, but no real tank battles, and most tanks were killed by ATGMs, artillery, or Bayraktars.
Already in the first year you couldn't send mass around anywhere because it would be spotted and hit by some combination of ATGMs, artillery, or Bayraktars, depending on the location.  The UA already had "Uber for artillery" so they could provide battery performance from a bunch of dispersed artillery. 
Then we saw the transition to drones. Now we see entire convoys getting wiped out by FPVs.  Or immobilized and partially wiped out by the FPVs, with an artillery chaser.
Given the proliferation of cameras and drones with cameras, don't you think we'd be seeing a lot of videos of tanks doing effective things if they were effective?  Wouldn't the UA want russian soldiers to see tanks making a mess of the RA so they'd quake in fear when they hear a tank or a round going overhead?
We've also seen a lot of video of UA soldiers clearing trenches the hard way, but are starting to see it done with drones.  Or at least with the drones being the ones that go into the line of fire at the high risk spots.
There were discussions thousands of pages ago:
"soon, every soldier/squad/platoon will have a drone/bunch of drones/etc".
"but they take up mass and space, what are they going to leave behind?"  
It's turning out that a backpack full of drones has enough precision that it can replace a lot of mass of crew served weapon and ammo.

We're literally watching it happen in Ukraine.
The death of the battleship started with pilots dropping hand grenades out of aircraft in WWI.  It didn't take long for someone to think they could launch and land aircraft on boats, and have those aircraft carry munitions.  So instead of sending a giant capital expense into LOS of the target (that might be a giant capital expense full of explosive stuff that can shoot back) and putting that giant capital expense and 5000 sailors at risk, they could launch ~100 guys off of a different giant capital expense, send them to targets hundreds of miles further than the battleship could reach, and put only the 100 guys and some relatively cheap, almost disposable aircraft at risk.  The battleship was dead by 1941.  It wasn't extinct at that point, but it got on the endangered list and went down from there.
With modern ISR, electronics, and radio Ukraine is doing the same thing on land that the aircraft carriers did on the sea.  It happened earlier on the sea because it's dead flat and there's nothing to hide behind except fog and clouds, so airplanes could do the spotting and eventually satellites with relatively low resolution could do it.  It's taken longer on land, but between optical and SAR, plus local scouting UAVs, high altitude UAVs, and crewed aircraft at a variety of ranges, you can't move something the size of a tank anywhere without being seen and tracked in near real time.  Except maybe in a tunnel, but that presents a whole host of other issues... Which kind of precision weapon destroys your tank will depend on who you are and who your enemy is.  So what if you have APS.  I can drop a bunch of mines around you.  Or fly a drone underneath you.  Or fly a bunch of drones at you from different directions all coordinated to come in faster than your APS can change targets because I can spend 100 drones to learn that, and it still costs less than one of your tanks, and doesn't put my drone drivers at risk
What does the tank get you?  Direct fire AP.  But at what?  Tank duels are pretty much over.  Direct fire HE.  Ok, but you can't depress enough to really get the guys in a trench - we watched a tank use all its HE and then do an overrun to grind up the trench because all that HE on the lip of the trench wasn't useful.  But we've also watched a drone team sit and watch a trench with 2-3 drones while they systematically send FPVs into the secure dugouts in trenches to clear them out. Got a door on your dugout?  We'll send one to blow it open and another to go inside and blow you up.  While sitting safely in Baba's basement eating milk and cookies.
 

You missed the second part of the sentence: "the parking lots haven't been cleared out yet".
How many countries on that graphic have been involved in a conventional ground war recently? When was the last time an Abrams was used in combat outside Ukraine?  Against whom?  So they still have full parking lots.
Ukraine and Russia are still using (and at low levels producing) them because they both need everything they can get to fight with, and they already have the infrastructure to keep doing it.
How many videos do we see of tanks destroying things?  There were a number at the start of the Ukraine war, but fewer and fewer over time.  The tanks basically provide precision HE infantry support, as they were originally intended for in the early part of the last century.  There are more effective ways to do that that are currently in use.
The US was still building battleships throughout WWII.  As previously pointed out - no battleship whose keel was laid down after Pearl Harbor saw combat in WWII.  Meanwhile, the allies cranked out ~180 aircraft carriers and countless aircraft.
The tank is currently on the endangered species list and you're just arguing that we should implement the same protections we do for wildlife.

Would be assuming that this is an industrial accident. Zero evidence for a pretty extraordinary claim of international infrastructure destruction.

Current production is at levels of post WWII battleship production.  
The US produces ~130 tanks/year, mostly because we can and maybe they'll be useful some day, and it keeps some people off the street in Ohio.  But as noted by @photon regarding battleships - the US is famous for its excesses.  "we wallow in so many resources that we can commit to building ships that we'll just scuttle later to make reefs"
Russia loses more than that many per month in Ukraine.
People sailed battleships around long after they stopped being particularly useful.  Argentina even managed to get one sunk by a submarine after they invaded the Falkland Islands.
ETA: and with the levels of ISR available to the US, if the tank were that valuable to Ukraine, we'd be cranking up tank production for our own use.  There's a room full of E4s somewhere verifying tank kills that the AI has picked out from satellite imagery.

Current production is at levels of post WWII battleship production.  
The US produces ~130 tanks/year, mostly because we can and maybe they'll be useful some day, and it keeps some people off the street in Ohio.  But as noted by @photon regarding battleships - the US is famous for its excesses.  "we wallow in so many resources that we can commit to building ships that we'll just scuttle later to make reefs"
Russia loses more than that many per month in Ukraine.
People sailed battleships around long after they stopped being particularly useful.  Argentina even managed to get one sunk by a submarine after they invaded the Falkland Islands.
ETA: and with the levels of ISR available to the US, if the tank were that valuable to Ukraine, we'd be cranking up tank production for our own use.  There's a room full of E4s somewhere verifying tank kills that the AI has picked out from satellite imagery.

Even scarier: with enough compute (and I suspect enough isn't very much by modern standards), you can passively use all the other RF sources in your neighborhood as the transmitters and do radar without your own active transmitter.  The math fairly well understood but kind of compute intensive.

Smoke is transparent.

Russia is certainly trying to dump its tank fleet as fast as they can.

This is because you do not understand how military procurement works.  Those tanks were put in motion, contracts awarded and money spent years ago.  We normally buy 10 years out, tanks in the program are evidence of the program and real world corporate commitments, not operational viability.  They will stick more turrets on them to try but these are really post mortem twitches.

JFC.  Zombie hordes were bad enough. Now we have zombie tanks?

Current production is at levels of post WWII battleship production.  
The US produces ~130 tanks/year, mostly because we can and maybe they'll be useful some day, and it keeps some people off the street in Ohio.  But as noted by @photon regarding battleships - the US is famous for its excesses.  "we wallow in so many resources that we can commit to building ships that we'll just scuttle later to make reefs"
Russia loses more than that many per month in Ukraine.
People sailed battleships around long after they stopped being particularly useful.  Argentina even managed to get one sunk by a submarine after they invaded the Falkland Islands.
ETA: and with the levels of ISR available to the US, if the tank were that valuable to Ukraine, we'd be cranking up tank production for our own use.  There's a room full of E4s somewhere verifying tank kills that the AI has picked out from satellite imagery.

You missed the second part of the sentence: "the parking lots haven't been cleared out yet".
How many countries on that graphic have been involved in a conventional ground war recently? When was the last time an Abrams was used in combat outside Ukraine?  Against whom?  So they still have full parking lots.
Ukraine and Russia are still using (and at low levels producing) them because they both need everything they can get to fight with, and they already have the infrastructure to keep doing it.
How many videos do we see of tanks destroying things?  There were a number at the start of the Ukraine war, but fewer and fewer over time.  The tanks basically provide precision HE infantry support, as they were originally intended for in the early part of the last century.  There are more effective ways to do that that are currently in use.
The US was still building battleships throughout WWII.  As previously pointed out - no battleship whose keel was laid down after Pearl Harbor saw combat in WWII.  Meanwhile, the allies cranked out ~180 aircraft carriers and countless aircraft.
The tank is currently on the endangered species list and you're just arguing that we should implement the same protections we do for wildlife.

Vehicles in inventory is a lagging indicator. The United States, Britain, Italy, France (sort of), and Japan all had battleships in inventory in 1944, at least three years after astute people realized that they were no longer useful for power projection.

This, in passing, was a sign of our hilarious naval production dominance. When Japan, our primary naval adversary, was desperately trying to scrape together enough fuel to allow its existing battleships to sortie, we kept building and fueling ships we considered mostly unnecessary. http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm nicely lays out the extent to which naval warfare in WW2 was anything but a peer-on-peer conflict.

Even scarier: with enough compute (and I suspect enough isn't very much by modern standards), you can passively use all the other RF sources in your neighborhood as the transmitters and do radar without your own active transmitter.  The math fairly well understood but kind of compute intensive.

Wait, what?
It's already been replaced, and the parking lots of old tanks just haven't been cleared out yet.  The rest of your same post that I cut from the quote pretty much summarizes it.
It's all about C4(or 5?)ISR+precision, and how the precision is delivered doesn't really matter.  Up until the mid 1970s, ISR on the ground was practically limited to LOS with binoculars plus some broad view from an airplane. In the mid 1970s, electro-optics+microelectronics began making the world, including the ground environment, more transparent and making it faster to distribute that information.  The tank remained useful because at the "guy standing in a field" scale it still could do local ISR+precision quite well and carried enough protection to last at least a few minutes on the battlefield statistically.  
Fast-forward to "I'm sitting in a home office within arms reach of a few hundred TB of storage and more computers than I can count that would have been considered supercomputers when I was in graduate school" and that's over.  High performance, low power, extremely compact computing power is essentially free.  SDR is practically free and fits on a thumb drive.  Battery tech has created bonkers energy density at low cost and high efficiency. High school kids can build and launch satellites as part of their space club.  They get capable ISR drones under the christmas tree and could build FPV drones in their aerospace club if they could get ahold of RPG-7 warheads (fortunately those aren't *that* easy to come by in the US). We're living in the future.
And unbelievably, about 10 years ago I even started having my thanksgiving menu and recipes planned out on a laptop that was in the kitchen during meal prep.

Exactly.  People are just using ChatGPT now, which as far as I can see basically creates a wiki page answer on the fly. I always use wiki and then dig into the refs.  That plus a search engine offers up a lot of information.  But it has become “cool” to look down on wiki for some reason.

Hey JonS rained all over my parade for saying that two thousand pages ago....🤣
 

Stealth seems like a likelier option than a powered battle suit...and really a necessary concomitant. If Watling it to be believed, as time goes on signals discipline will need to include not just IR and EM but also sound, etc. Think the movie Quiet Place but with smarms of smart drones instead of beatable-by-one-smart-trick alien attack dogs. 

I would quibble with redundant, and would say not required anymore. Tanks are for heavy direct fire. Nobody needs direct fire nowadays,when you have equally effective indirect,guided, long range fire. Whereas transporting infantry under armour still remains a valid task, if you can pull it off.

Turns out there's actually a real war going on, not a theoretical one.  And in the real war there's some small but interesting UKR offensive operations.  Not war-changing, ~1km advances, but indicates that UKR isn't stretched so thin by RU's Kharkiv attack they have denuded all other sectors.  Also, we are seeing how RU's suicidal tactics are actually having a cost as UKR can counterattack the weakened units and make some small gains.  Video below is about UKR small advances in Kremmina direction, but we're seeing similar thing in the two little bulges north of Kharkiv.  
I think Putin has been thinking "so what if I burn up a thousand meat-truppen a day?  UKR won't be able to do anything about it anyway."  We see a some little signs that RU's slaughter might actually lead to UKR gains for a change.  I keep hoping that somewhere along the front that the meat-truppen decide to not be meat and mutiny, violently, due to the pressure, but nothing substantial yet.  Instead they send videos to Putin et al like a bunch of idiot sheep, thinking there's someone in power who cares.
 
 

The only practical use that I have seen suggested is pretty much how the tanks are being used now - largely indirect fire support.  A tank is a platform from which to launch weapons systems.  It gun can lob shells very far, over the horizon.  It can also fire NLOS missiles.  So as a mobile intermediate fires platform - say 10-15kms the tank may have a role.  But that role will continue to get squeezed as unmanned ranges increase.
I strongly believe we are entering into a Firepower age - a time when firepower is manoeuvre. The tanks ability to move and survive while delivering long range fires has potential for their recycled use in the next 10 years.  Also in extremis, like a bayonet, if one finds yourself in a DF fight where you need one, it is available.
The main problem the pro-tank camp is having is that they are not really trying to solve for the future of land warfare, they are trying to solve for the future viability of the tank.  This is wrong headed.

It has mobility only for the gun and the crew to operate the gun and drive it around.  An M1 carries ~40 rounds.  You can probably get the same or better effective mobility of firepower with 40 FPVs that each cost about the same as one of those tank rounds, especially if you can run them in shifts and always keep half of them airborne in the combat area.  And the tank can only fire one at a time, but with enough drivers you can run all the FPVs in parallel.
IFVs at least function as survivable battle taxis that reduce the hike to the area the infantry are going to try to occupy.

I can put optics and electronics on an artillery shell that will guide it to a laser designated target, with a UAV providing the laser designation.  That doesn't even take any new technology.  One shot, one hit.  Maybe fire 2 for simultaneous ToT if you really want it dead.
Tanks need those fancy optics to see through smoke at ~5 km, but they can't see over the horizon.  If they're getting spotted at 40 km and met by FPVs at 15 km, those optics do nothing.