“Artillery is the queen of the battlefield and it’s such an omnipresent threat that the only way you can move is under armor,” Drummond said. And we're seeing these guys on the ground, physically holding territory against Russian attack and inflicting damage.”Īrmor is still one of the best ways to protect infantry as it moves into position to capture and hold ground. What I'm saying was true, Waterloo, Gettysburg, during the First World War, in the Falklands, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

“And you just can't do that with a lot of these other modern bits of technology that people like to rant about. “That ability to seize and hold ground is fundamentally vital,” Drummond said. In order for Russia to achieve its territorial objectives in Ukraine, it has to pull Ukrainian soldiers out of their positions and control the ground Ukraine once occupied.

“But none of them can physically seize and hold ground.” “Everybody says war in the future is going to be fought only with drones, aircraft, missiles, submarines, satellites, and so on,” he said. Each time it has risen from the grave to which they had consigned it-and they have been caught napping.”įor Drummond and others, the tank plays an important part in war. In 1960, a British historian wrote, “Time after time during the past 40 years the highest defense authorities have announced that the tank is dead or dying.

Tank combat, of course, dominated World War II. At the end of World War I, people wrote that mechanized armor would probably never be used again on a battlefield. It’s almost a cliche to say that tanks are obsolete. There’s some kind of new conflict, a few tanks get whacked and people start asking that question,” Nicholas Drummond, a former British Army officer, defense industry analyst, and U.K advisor to the German defense company Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, told Motherboard. “Every now and then people like to suggest that tanks are obsolete.

It’s also wrong, completely misunderstands modern war, and fails to recognize what is really screwing over Russian tanks in Ukraine: poor planning and logistics. It’s bizarre given that Ukraine itself is asking for tanks from its allies. It’s an assertion that’s almost as old as tanks themselves.

Main battle tanks outdated