This question of whether tanks are obsolete has been covered extensively. The short answer is no, they aren't obsolete. I'll use my experience as a tank officer to nuance that conclusion by detailing what makes American tank warfare different from what we see in Ukraine.

I'll start with some basics about tanks that are important for this discussion. I 'll then talk about what I've seen from Ukraine and offer three explanations before concluding.

What is a tank?

Here's a quiz. Are these are tanks?

If you got all of those correct, you can probably skip this section. If not, slow down.

What is a tank? My opinion:

A tank is a tracked, armored vehicle with a large main gun. 

• tracked means its engine turns a track contacting the ground. Turning this track allows the vehicle to move. This contrasts with a "wheeled" vehicle. You can split hairs and say a tracked vehicle has wheels that turn its track, but those wheels function more like gears.

Tracked vehicles have the advantage of greater off-road capacity. They carry the costs of higher maintenance demands (another component that breaks), higher logistics demands (more spare parts to carry), and reduced speed.

• armored is what you think. Modern tanks have extremely strong armor. The current American tank, the Abrams, has depleted uranium armor. Its specific composition is considered a national security secret. The density of the uranium makes it very strong, but also very heavy—the Abrams is around 70 tons. This has downsides for maintenance and logistics.

• large main gun—this is subjective. Modern tanks' main guns are between 100-130mm in bore diameter. Russian tanks are typically 125mm; the Abrams, 120mm. Contrast this with the British Warrior pictured above: it's a tracked, armored vehicle, but its main gun fires 30mm rounds. While it can destroy tanks, it isn't one itself.

There are some shortcomings in that definition, but it's 90% correct and will work for this discussion. The vehicles pictured below are tanks. 

What are tanks good for?

Tanks give a battlefield commander speed, firepower, and armor.

Speed: Infantry is known as the Queen of Battle, and in the end you must have a person on the ground if you want to hold it (more on this later). But people are slow. Tanks are fast. The Abrams top speed is around 45 miles per hour. This speed allows a unit commander to quickly maneuver his assets to defend vulnerable positions and exploit advantageous ones.

Firepower: This asset also has a huge amount of firepower. In addition to the main gun, tanks usually have smaller weapons. The commander of an Abrams controls a .50 cal machine gun with a remote, video-game-like joystick. The Abrams also has a 7.62mm machine gun mounted alongside the main gun and another on the top of the turret. Consider that Abrams tanks almost always move in groups of at least four (a platoon), and you'll understand that tanks give unit commanders massive firepower. For comparison, the equivalently sized American infantry unit carries three 7.62mm machine guns as their heavy weapons.

Armor: Modern tanks have excellent armor to protect all that firepower. I won't go into detail, but suffice to say that tanks have enough armor to protect themselves and any infantrymen who want to use the massive metal object as cover.

What are tanks' problems?

Maintenance: This is what tankers spend 90% of their time doing. If you aren't actively maneuvering, you are (or should be) doing maintenance. It doesn't matter how robust the design is, when you're moving a 70 ton weapon at 40 miles an hour, something is going to break. This is could be a weapon system, the motor, the track, you name it. This means that it's important for a tank unit to have not only good mechanics, but also expertise at the operator-level to identify issues and, if necessary, operate the tanks in spite of them. 

Logistics: Maintenance demands are one reason logistics for tank units are so difficult. You need a large amount of mobile spare parts. But even absent maintenance issues, tanks consume huge resources. Fuel is the most important of these. Our rule of thumb was that a tank burned 11 gallons of fuel an hour while idling. If you plan to move a unit of 15 tanks ten miles to an objective, you need to have hundreds of gallons of fuel ready. 

If you want them to assault that objective, you need to give them ammo. One Abrams main gun round is around 40 pounds and three feet long—not easy to deliver if each tank carries 42 rounds. Add to this the miscellaneous consumables that tanks need to function and their crews need to live, and you begin to get an appreciation for military logisticians.

Design Limitations: The tank also has some design features that can become liabilities in certain environments. The most notable is that the weapon systems can only elevate to a certain angle. In other words, the guns can't shoot above the tank. While this doesn't matter much if the tank is maneuvering through a desert and engaging targets 1km out, it means that as soon as the tank enters an urban area, it needs external support. 

Tanks' inability to elevate weapons above a certain angle (usually about 30 degrees) is not the only reason they are vulnerable to targets above them. The top of the tank is also the area with the weakest armor. This is because tanks are optimized to fight other armored vehicles, head-on, in open space. The strongest armor is at the front of the tank, where you're most likely to take enemy fire in that context. In fact, American tank crews are trained that the first step in reacting to enemy fire is to pivot the tank so that the thick front armor faces the enemy. 

What are we seeing in Ukraine?

It's clear the Russian army is losing many tanks. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence tweeted on August 17 that they had destroyed 1,886 tanks since the war began in February. CSIS reported in April that the Russian military only employed 2,800 tanks, with another 10,000 in storage. Together, those numbers suggest the Ukrainians have destroyed almost 70% of Russia's operational tanks, and almost 15% of its total stockpile. Even if you only believe the Ukrainians have destroyed half as many tanks as they've claimed, that is still a substantial blow.

It also seems like a blow to the usefulness of tanks as a platform. Before we draw that conclusion, we need to examine why those tanks are being killed.

Why are we seeing so many destroyed tanks?

Russian commanders have failed to employ tanks in a way that makes use of their advantages while mitigating their limitations. Specifically, their command structure negates the speed advantage tanks provide, and their poor logistics and tactics leave tank units vulnerable.

The Russian command structure is ill-suited for tank warfare.

I mentioned above that a tank's main advantages is that  it provides a combination of speed, firepower, and armor. The Russian army is not built for speed. It employ a command structure that is first and foremost directive. Information flows up and orders flow down; battlefield units send reports up to high level commanders, who take in the information and reply with orders. The battlefield unit executes that order. This sounds very standard—what you would expect from a military. But this organization is old-fashioned and deeply flawed.

The problem with a directive leadership structure is that it performs very poorly with imperfect information. In war, information is always imperfect because the battlefield is dynamic and unstable. Intangible conditions cannot be communicated across a radio or in a text message. Even if they could be, they often change by the time any message arrives.

This means that leaders on the ground, in the fighting, need to exercise the initiative to respond to a changing situation. Lower-level Russian army leaders have neither the authority nor the ability to do this. They have not been trained to make decisions—they've been trained to send reports up and execute the orders that come back down.

Contrast this with the U.S. Army. The command structure of the U.S. Army emphasizes junior leaders in the decision making process. This includes not only young officers such as Lieutenants and Captains who lead platoons and companies, but also the Sergeants who lead the crews, sections, and squads that comprise those units. It's often Sergeants (generally referred to as non-commissioned officers or NCOs) who make the decisions in combat. This is because Sergeants have been promoted through the ranks, accumulating experience along the way. Their experience is the Sergeant's most important contribution to his unit, while for the young officer it is her doctrinal knowledge. 

The Russian military employs the opposite paradigm. In the Russian army, officers play the role of both tactical decision maker and doctrinal expert. This is because they have failed to develop a strong cadre of Sergeants, usually referred to as an NCO corps. The Russian military has long recognized this liability and undertook reforms in 2015 to develop their NCO corps into one resembling the American model.  But because of the scale of this cultural shift and the accumulation of experience it needs, little progress has been made.

In tank warfare, the Russian's directive leadership structure is the worst option. As I discussed, a major advantage of tanks is speed. If every decision requires communication up and down the chain of command, a tank unit cannot make use of this advantage. Even worse, if your opponent has a decision making process that emphasizes initiative at the lowest level, you will always be responding to what they do. This is exactly what is happening to the Russians, and one of the reasons their tanks are getting destroyed in droves.

Russian logistics are terrible.

Tanks need good logistics because they are so resource dependent. They need huge amounts of fuel, oil, and spare parts. The Russians have demonstrated an inability to supply these during the opening stages of the war.

This has surprised me. I knew the Russians were bad at logistics, but not this bad. Two historical notes about the Russian army are important to understand this failure. First, they have always been poor at power projection and expeditionary wars. In other words, they don't fight well outside of Russia. Examples include Russia's many wars with the Ottomans, its fights with Napoleon, and the Russo-Japanese War. Logistics are essential in power projection, and this has been a point of failure for the Russians historically. The further an army projects, the longer its "lines of communication", the greater their vulnerability, and the harder they are to maintain. Because Russia is bad at power projection, everyone knew they had an underdeveloped logistics system.

What is shocking about the logistics failures in Ukraine is that the Russians are only projecting their power into the country next door. Their logistics system makes heavy use of rail transport, and this shouldn't be a problem entering an adjacent country with deep economic ties. The Russians have been instigating in Ukraine and building up forces along its borders for eight years. In 2020, they massed forces on that border in a trial run for the buildup last winter that eventually culminated in the February invasion. There is no excuse for poor logistics.

Contrast this with how the American military almost immediately began shipping billions of dollars worth of materiel from a continent and an ocean away, and the only conclusion is that the Russian logistics are pathetic.

The implication for tank warfare is that the commanders of those units not only run out of supplies, but are far less aggressive in asserting the advantage (namely, speed) of their unit in battle. No tank unit commander will attempt to exploit what he sees as a vulnerability in the enemy's defenses if he thinks he may run out of fuel when he breaks through. The result is that the Russian military's poor logistics have rendered tanks less effective.

Lack of infantry support.

The last reason that Russia is losing so many tanks is that they are failing to support them with infantry. This is a necessity when tanks move into environments they are ill-suited for. As I mentioned above, tanks are designed to maneuver in open, unrestricted terrain. Their weapons are most effective engaging targets between 600 and 2000 meters away.

Tanks are far less effective in terrain with short sight lines and ample cover, so-called "restricted terrain." And they are altogether useless if a target is above them: their weapon systems are unable to elevate high enough to shoot anything overhead. This means that urban areas are particularly dangerous, and drones, planes, and helicopters are massive threats.

This means tanks often need infantry support. The infantrymen clear areas the tank crew can't see ("dead space") to ensure there are no enemies lurking. They enter buildings that could hide enemy observers, reconnaissance units, or command posts. They advance ahead of the tank, acting as flankers to prevent the tank from being ambushed. They can shoot down drones.

The fact is that often the idea of infantry support is a misnomer—in restricted terrain, it's the tanks that are supporting the infantry. They do this by destroying buildings with enemy, reducing obstacles in the infantry's path, or acting as a quick response element if an infantry unit is attacked.

The Russians don't use tanks with infantry. Russian tanks fail to adjust their tactics and advance through especially dangerous areas without infantry support. The result is that they are constantly ambushed and attacked by small teams of Ukrainian infantry wielding anti-tank guided missiles. You can see that here, when a dismounted Ukrainian missile team kills four Russian tanks from a concealed position in woods. Or here, where another Ukrainian team ambushes from a position in the woods.

So are tanks obsolete?

No. Tanks are far from useless. They have strong advantages, but some strong disadvantages. We see Russian tanks destroyed because the Russians are bad at using them. They have poor leadership and worse logistics, so they put their tanks in environments where they are ill-suited to do anything but explode.

A better question is whether tanks are worth the investment. I won't touch that question, except to say that if you're going to use them like the Russians do, they aren't.

Unfortunately, it appears we will have plenty of more time to observe tank warfare in Ukraine. Putin's regime seems intent on continuing this war for as long as he can blame the West for the economic pain his people are enduring. Maybe when the urbanites, particularly Muscovites, begin to identify Putin as the source of their hardship, he'll feel sufficient pressure to end the war.