No, tanks are not obsolete, they are just really vulnerable.

What is obsolete is the earlier view of Russian armored warfare

Sorry for no midweek update until now. Been in Portugal for work this week. However, I’ve now had some time to get back to writing after some serious work (and one day of serious baroque sight-seeing in Mafra-more on that later). Once again, I cant update the piece on the making of national power as the article I’m working on is going through another round of revisions. I think/hope it will be worth the wait, but for now until that article is ready I can’t say any more (apologies Adrian).

However, there has been a very interesting discussion this week, about the future value of the tank. Much of it has come from a British Ministry of Defence decision which seemed to de-emphasize the tank—after examining the results of the Russo-Ukraine War so far. Since the full-scale Russian invasion, some had wondered if the British might reverse their decision to get reduce significantly the number of Main Battle Tanks (MBTs) that they keep operational. However, just a few days ago, the MOD confirmed that the tank cuts would continue, and that the British Army would soon have only 148 tanks operational (a major reduction from the over 220 they had previously).

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/uk-has-no-intention-of-reversing-tank-fleet-cuts/

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This is a serious cut, and will bring the British Army down to the smallest number of tanks it has fielded since probably the First World War. The British decision seems to be based around what is seen to be the significant vulnerability of the tank. As one UK government source said—better to have more ranged weapons (artillery) than tanks or infantry which might be too vulnerable to modern firepower.

“We have too much infantry — a legacy of the counter-insurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need more artillery. The jury is out on whether you need main battle tanks,” a Whitehall source said.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ben-wallace-resist-reverse-british-army-cuts-gd9pzd62j

This is a debate that will run and run—and certainly Ive taken part in it. In a piece I published in the Atlantic a year ago, I argued that large, expensive systems such as tanks, large warships, etc were in danger of heading down the road to obsolescence because they could be destroyed by far less expensive systems from anti-ship missiles (of the kinds that sunk the Moskva—a huge imbalance in cost. Tanks seemed in a similar situation, a very expensive, heavy system that can be threatened by a range of cheaper systems from hand-helds to UAVs.