Ukraine & T-72: The death of the tank? | The Tank Museum

Didn't they realize? Tanks being new in WW1, providing success to get over trenches, but too slow, getting stuck and breaking down, then just facing another, new trench. WW2 big time Blitzkrieg of fast, mobile, coordinated tank warfare. But already then became clear, tanks can't do much if they don't have some air superiority/defense, and facing more handheld antitank guns and mines. Since then, Korea, Vietnam, if in bad terrain or in guerilla warfare, tanks not of much use. But really, in Syria, the US TOWs supplied to the opposition to Assad, operating and maintaining their tanks is far too expensive and vulnerable against RPGs and so on. Since then, also drones and guided rockets, satellite imagery, make them pretty useless and easy targets. The scenarios in which tanks are still useful and could be seen in the field is if the opponent doesn't possess these capabilities, meaning in unbalanced conflicts, dirty wars, new uses such as civil unrest (unfortunately), and conventional warfare (like in the Ukraine, for example, where anti-air prevents tanks from getting knocked out from an airforce). Another option is to use the tank as armored platform for new systems, but then it's not the classical infrantry-support/push-through or tank-vs-tank battle MBT capacity any more (as the chassis are already often used for other configurations, like a weapon carrier, howitzer, and so on). For an army, probably good to have some, but depends primarily on their clever, wise use, and scenario of deployment + opponent + mission/task-at-hand.

I think, despite it's not much in the news, Ukraine might apply intelligence/drones/reconnaissance to a great advantage, together with portable anti-tank weaponry, and that might be contributing a lot to the losses of these vehicles for the Russian side.