Tank is not obselete, because if that is true, then I can use the same argument and argue Infantry is now also obselete. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (that's how much US spend on training a soldier, 250k for a regular soldier, up to 6 millions for SF) when you can get a cheap Mavic Drone for $1000 and put anti-personnel mine on them? Why not just disbanding the infantry crop?
If you have to move infantry in a battlefield, you will need to have armour, and when I say Armour, you don't just need tanks, you need IFV, APC, CFV, the whole lot. Because the alternative is for you to bum rush WW1 style.
Tanks are important to protect the flank of the infantry, and important to spearhead a counterattack, and important for dynamic defence. You cannot soften an enemy position with drone, you have to do that with tanks, because that gives you the direct fire advantage.
On the other hand, ever wonder while there are a lot of Ukraine drone footage destroying tank and there are few and far between on the other side? That's because drones have to be paired up with many ISTAR asset to be effective, if you are just a dude in the middle of battlefield launching a drone in a random direction, you aren't going to find anything, you need someone to tell you which area you want to scan with your drone, and what you are expecting. That's a lot of SIGINT, ELINT and SIGNINT as well as SATINT element involved. The reason why Ukraine can use their TB2 that effective is because someone, namely the US, is feeding them that intel, telling them where to strike and what to strike, because the US have a complete system monitoring battlefield, satellite, EC-135, compass call and so on, those asset provide real time information for the Ukrainian drone team, so they know what and where and how to look for Russian tank. It won't work like that if you don't have a complete ISTAR platform. And at this moment, only 2 countries in this world have the capability to do that. US and China, and even China can barely do it within a certain limit.
This is the same thing people saw footage of drone killing tank and think "Wow, that was easy" it's the same during Operation Desert Storm when we saw all those JDAM or any type of precision missile and projectile hitting target with pinpoint accuracy and declare Air Power is the king, thing is, most people don't know what had to be done to have that "Perfect" strike you saw on TV and thinking, that's easy, people in the know, like me, know inserting a SF team to lit up those target aren't easy, to maintain contact with said SF team aren't easy, to coordinate between interservice (Army-Navy or Army-Air Force) to make that strike is not easy, but yes, seeing a plane dropping ordinance and then target go boom is extremely easy. If you catch what I mean.
en.wikipedia.org
