I don’t think they will. Both serve a different role and will be part of modern combined arms warfare going forward. We can also see how Russia is able to successfully jam western drones right now, which shows limitations of relying solely on drones.

Do bullets make infantry obsolete? Humans die really quickly to bullets and the cost relation is horrible

Tanks might become obsolete, in fact NATO has been developing the concept of Strike/Stryker brigades as their main meat for a long time and those function mostly without MBTs as their primary armor. If they become obsolete it won’t simply be because of drones, but because their tactical role will be filled by other systems or concepts.

Heavy armor in large columns has a big problem in modern peer conflicts in general. Minefields and high precision weapons combined with constant satelite and UAV surveillance make them incredibly vulnerable. Both Ukraine and Russia have struggled massively with this. Both have resorted to small scale infantry teams to circumvent this problem. Cluster munitions should, however, make this manpower intensive strategy even more costly and difficult. So that doesn’t seem to be a good solution either in an age where manpower is sparse as hell due to demographic shifts.

The tank’s role in this seems to have shifted too tho. From what we can see they’re less effective as breakthrough weapons and more as short-range, direct fire, mobile artillery. In times of immense focus on artillery that still gives them a highly important role that drones don’t really impact any more than they do howitzers, SPGs or AD for that matter.

Personally I think long term drones will mostly impact the role of the airforce. Planes are absurdly expensive to build ($80mio for a single F35, bombers can cost close to a billion), operate and maintain, so are pilots. Much more so than tanks and their crews. Missiles, drones and integrated AD, to me, seem much more economical than huge fleets of jets and bombers operated by incredibly vulnerable human meat while filling similar tactical roles. We can see this in Ukraine where air power plays a pretty small role, while tanks are still all present and sought after.

Planes didn’t make tanks obsolete, I don’t think drones will. They serve a fundamentally different role. A tank can’t do much against a drone, but infantry can’t do much against a tank, but foot soldiers are still fielded by every army in the world. Hell, some even still have cavalry divisions, with horses and everything. The only thing that could make tanks fully obsolete is something that does every single job they do, but better.

No, but communism will

other people have already given detailed answers, so I won’t do that.

What you ask is something that has been asked and asked again for a long time now.

first, the question was “Is infantry obsolete, armoured vehicles are better” Then it was “Are armoured vehicles obsolete, ground attack aircraft are better”, and you are not alone in the current question “Are ground forces obsolete? drones are better”

Really, this question can be rewritten as “Are knives obsolete? scalpels are better for cutting.” Though that might be true, you don’t want to be cutting your steak with a scalpel. Armoured vehicles have their place on the battlefield where they’re useful, and so do drones. Without armoured vehicles, Infantry would be left without ground-level support. Drones are useful for precise strikes on targets, as they tend to be harder to detect on radar, have an easier time going further than manned aircraft, and carry smaller bomb loads.

Ever since the Russo-Japanese War artillery has been the main cause of death in conventional wars. There are exceptions but those are often under conditions of a guerrila war or between combatants unable to sustain enough forces to maintain an unbroken front line. In the face of artillery, armored vehicles are required to maneuver and the tank remains the only ground-based platform able to survive artillery shrapnel and simultaneously deliver firepower. IFVs, APCs, and the various fire support vehicles can survive shrapnel relatively better than their unarmored counterparts but are vulnerable to the many anti-tank munitions from all angles including their frontal arc. Contemporary main battle tanks still force their opponents to wait for better opportunities to fire into less armored sides, rears, and tops with the wrinkle being that the much more available FPV drones can easier find those opportunities. Tanks and their support arms will evolve in the future to take into account the work of enemy drones such as electronic warfare units becoming more involved and active protection systems being incorporated into new designs and retrofitted onto existing tank fleets.

What is most definitively dead however is the legend of Western tank supremacy. It used to be that because of battles like 73 Easting, Medina Ridge, and Norfolk that Soviet tanks are qualitatively inferior in all aspects for the common layman. Losses incurred during the Global War On Terror era can always be brushed off to exceptional circumstances or the weakness of auxiliaries. If anything, the deficiency in anti-tank weaponry among the guerilla forces during this era only reinforced the stasis of Western tank development because the existing tank fleet is good enough despite the criticisms of sustainability leveled against it. But by failing to create victory out of thin air in Ukraine, the legend of Western tank supremacy is forced back into reality that it is not just firepower, armor, and speed that matter but also their numbers.

The propagandists will be hard at work to stop common layman from drifting off into this reality by blaming Ukraine’s inadequacy and “Soviet-style thinking” while denigrating bean counting as a measure of military strength by invoking the first Gulf War. For the generals and designers however, they can either accept reality and silently make concessions to it or pay the cost in blood by reaching for the comfort of myth and propaganda.