Italy's Defense Ministry has opened a €5.14 billion ($5.86 billion) procurement for a new main battle tank and vehicles built on it, according to a record published Sept. 21 in the database of Italy's National Anti-Corruption Authority (ANAC). The entry,
If the war in Ukraine is any indication, drones don’t move the frontline much, tanks still do.
That said, developing a new tank now seems like a high risk to me. Developing a tank that will do well in the current environment is likely doable. However, drone warfare is evolving so much faster than tank development will or can, because tanks are simply too expensive and complicated to iterate quickly (among other reasons).
While I’m by no means an expert on the matter, as I understand it there is some solid reasoning here: whatever the best solution to fighting drones turns out to be, it’s probably going to require you to bring some heavy equipment and power generation to the frontline. We’ve got various directed-energy systems, guns similar to the CIWS on ships but scaled down, interceptor drones, jammers… But at the end of the day, all of them require you to be able to carry a bunch of heavy shit to the frontline and for it to be durable enough to survive there. At that point you’ve got something a lot like a tank again
Well, no. Not every armoured vehicle is a tank.
The engineering logic for large, probably armoured vehicles checks out, though.
Well, tanks haven’t either. They just aren’t survivable enough, in that war, to get through. How much that generalises to the next one, is the question.