The obituary for the tank has been written many times. After every war that featured a drone strike or a precision missile destroying an armored column, the commentary class updated the eulogy. The argument is intuitive: if nearly every movement can be targeted, why send steel and crew into a kill zone?
Two U.S. Army commanders say the detractors are missing the point.
Colonel Jose A. Reyes and Lieutenant Colonel David 'Cam' Smith of the 1st Cavalry Division appeared on the School of War podcast, hosted by MacLean, to make the opposite case. Drawing on their experience operating and commanding armored forces, they argue that the transformation of modern battlefields by drones and precision strikes does not render armored vehicles obsolete — it changes how they must be used.
The debate is not academic. Defense budgets, procurement decisions, and the structure of the U.S. Army's brigade combat teams all turn, in part, on how seriously policymakers take the 'tanks are finished' school of thought. If the consensus is wrong, the cost of acting on it is paid not in think-tank white papers but in the lives of soldiers sent into combat with the wrong equipment and the wrong doctrine.
The cavalry charge analogy — the standard rhetorical move of the tank skeptics — is worth examining on its own terms. The cavalry did not disappear because horses were vulnerable to rifle fire. It disappeared because the specific combination of speed, shock, and terrain dominance it provided could be replicated more effectively by other means. The question for armor is whether that threshold has been crossed. Reyes and Smith, on the record, say it has not.
What the drone era has done, by their account, is raise the cost of careless armored movement — not eliminate the value of armored mass. The trade-off is real. Visibility on the battlefield has increased dramatically. But so has the premium on combined-arms integration, electronic warfare, and the kind of disciplined, adaptive command that turns a vulnerable vehicle into a survivable one.
Follow the incentive, not the press release. The institutions with the strongest interest in declaring armor obsolete are not always the ones with the strongest evidence. Some are vendors of the systems that would replace it. Some are analysts whose careers are built on predicting discontinuous change. The Army officers who have to fight inside those vehicles have a different set of incentives — and, on this question, a different answer.
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Say it plainly: the 'drones have made tanks obsolete' argument is a clean narrative that fits poorly on a complex battlefield. The record from recent conflicts is messier than the headline version. Armored vehicles have been destroyed in large numbers — and they have also been decisive. The lesson is not that armor is finished; it is that armor used without combined-arms support and electronic countermeasures is finished.
The U.S. Army's ability to project credible land power depends on getting this question right. Procurement cycles are long, and doctrine, once institutionalized, is slow to reverse. The commanders making the case for armor are not defending a relic. They are defending a capability that, if discarded on the basis of a fashionable consensus, will not be easily rebuilt when the next conflict makes its necessity plain.
