Until very recently, 2 guys hiding in a bush couldn't kill a tank, you needed a predator drone, an helicopter or some other advanced system requiring heavy logistics. Now behind every bush and every road corner is a potential enemy able to defeat you. With >90% kill ratio for javelins, the tanks needs to be lucky for weeks on end to survive, and the ATGM needs to be lucky only once.

Handheld old anti-tank weapons like RPGs with HEAT warheads were extremely unreliable, defeated by reactive explosive armors, successful only at very close range and so on. Modern ATGMs able to be fired from kilometers away and with >90% kill rates completely changes the dynamic. Those systems are only going to get smarter and cheaper when there is a physical limit on the armor+weight+cost+logistical support equation for tanks.

It's easy to forget that reality isn't a third-person shooter. When you're sitting in a steel box with an engine in the back and a cannon on the top, situational awareness will inevitably suffer to some degree, and no amount of cameras will completely offset that.

Do you now what's funny? Even RTS videogames like the Command and Conquer series or Star-Craft made this point clear early in our childhoods.

Tanks will be eaten alive by hoards of cheap disposable units, so you always had to support them with anti-infantry units if you wanted them to be useful in battle.

Putin and most of the Russian military doctrine would beg to differ.

It depends on the nation and their political situation.

Since 1945, Russia hasn't shown that it can accept a war of mass casualties without political fallout. Russian military doctrine may say that it can, but Putin would be unwise to assume so.

Siege tanks are grouped with marines and firebats for protection, Marines and medics run with medics for assistance. Have your infantry out front. Move to a location, plant your troops, put your tanks in siege mode, rain hellfire down upon aerial defenses and approaching units so your Battlecruisers can come in with their Vulture and Wraith support to decimate a base.

It takes a village. You know, to destroy the other guys village. But still. Villages.

No realistic amount of infantry support can shield you against weapons with such a huge range. An entire army could, but that is obviously too much.

The point is that a soldier with a Javelin is a much less visible target than a big vehicle. Even if he runs just 40 meters away between the firing of the missile and its impact, any return fire aimed at the original site will likely miss him. And there can be a hundred of such Javelin-equipped soldiers in range.

There’s no scenario where hundreds of Javelins are sitting in one infantry company. It’s the type of thing that only makes sense on paper.

Would be much more worried about evolution of loitering fires with drones.

But there may be cheaper and better models one day. This war has shown that ATGMs, MANPADs and their ilk have a huge potential, which means that a lot of countries and companies are going to pour resources into R&D. This usually means an overall improvement in capabilities and possibly a reduced price tag.

As an analogy: once it would be considered too expensive and impractical to equip infantry with night vision en masse. Russia still cannot do that, but for rich Western countries, it is an absolutely realistic option.

Have you ever humped a combat load? It sucks. You’re rolling out with 40 lbs of stuff hanging off you before we even talk sustainment.

Javelin has gotta be 40-50 lbs. Add that on. Want an extra missile? Add another 30 or so.

Now suppose you don’t run into any armor, this is why every infantryman doesn’t/won’t carry one. Maybe 1 per squad, if we want to be super aggressive maybe 1 per fireteam. But that’s now a machine gun they’ve left out, what if they really needed more suppression?

It’s a trade off and humans aren’t capable of bringing all the nice to haves to every fight. This is why there won’t be hundreds in a company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin

What we are witnessing from Russia is not how armor should be employed. Armor is not suddenly obsoleted due to tech that’s been out for decades. That take is probably overly simplistic and wrong.

By the way, I’m a big proponent of FD2030.

And when that "one day" comes around, the tank engineers will have outfitted every vehicle with Trophy-style active protection systems AND laser anti-missile/anti-drone remote weapons stations on the turrets.

>>>As an analogy: once it would be considered too expensive and impractical to equip infantry with night vision en masse.

Interesting that you mention night vision. We used to swear by equipping our infantry with IR lasers as well, for pinpoint accuracy during night combat. Now that more of our adversaries are using night vision, we are swinging back towards NOT using IR lasers because the active emission is just like the old Murphy's Law adage: "tracers point both ways".

A tank performs a critical role. You can't replace it until you have something else performing that role.

And you don't just have the cost of the tank - there's also the cost of all the logistics needed to get the tank to the battlefield, no matter where it is in the world - and then to feed it a constant supply of fuel, ammo, spare parts and repair.

Tanks are expensive, missiles that can defeat tanks are cheap. But the question is, what is a replacement good for a tank? What fills the role? What is the role?

Does it take a platoon to replace a tank?

The lifetime value of a human is only going up. Most soldiers go on to take jobs and contribute to the economy of a nation.

You could think of a tank saving the lives of the 3 people inside it, or the lives of the 10 or 20 people it would take to fill the role if the tank was not available. You could think of the days, hours, or minutes of fighting it might save, which might translate to many more lives saved.

Also consider the political cost of loss of life.

I don't think it is AT ALL clear how to evaluate the relative costs here. One would have to consider the mission at hand and the value of that mission.

I'm guessing the total lifetime cost of a trained soldier is less than $8.9M but I wouldn't be suprised to find that the figures are comparable in the end.