Re:Does the Tank Have a Future?
by prometheus76 on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @12:59PM
(#31755872)
It's the scarcity of the parts, not the overall cost. Javelins require rare-earth minerals (which largely come from Russia) and rare silicon chips that are in short supply worldwide. I edited my original post to include a link to an article about the difficulties in replacing the diminishing stock of anti-tank weapons.
Modern tanks also use minerals and chips, they're basically armoured computers. They also, obviously, take a huge amount of resources to produce, transport and train to use.
That's the expensive drones. But there are plenty of kills attributed to octocopters dropping modified anti-tank grenades.
Re:Does the Tank Have a Future?
by imtringued on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @05:29PM
(#31759695)
Tanks can also destroy more stuff than they cost.
The anti-tank weaponry is an order of magnitude less expensive than the tank (some is several orders).
The M1A2 Abrams has a unit cost of around 10 million USD (numbers from 2016, so likely higher now).
The drones currently destroying tanks in Ukraine (Bayraktar TB2) had a unit price of around 5 million, although some estimates are as low as 1-2 million per unit delivered to Ukraine at this point (production has ramped up).
notably - the whole drone isn't consumed when a tank is destroyed, so I really suspect we're going to see a drastic ramp up in drone warfare.