I made this website after a long, slightly feverish conversation with a few former classmates from the War Studies programme at King’s College London who are now researchers / analysts on modern warfare. The conversation started with the question: are drones making the main battle tank obsolete?

That question gets asked a lot now, usually in an imprecise way. Since 2022, the most common depiction of a tank is through the grainy video of an FPV drone hitting it, cutting to black at the moment of impact. This tank is dead. Tanks have been declared dead before.

Armor, artillery, airpower, and survivability. The decisive fight has moved upstream of the gun. This was the idea I wanted to explore.

The main battle tank was designed around a certain geometry of maneuver warfare. It had to move under fire, see, shoot, survive hits, force contact, and control the battlespace. Its central measures were a remarkable trinity: firepower, armour, mobility.

But the battlefield around the tank has changed shape. Before the tank reaches the direct-fire fight, it is already inside a contest over detection, custody, jamming, decoys, drones, operators, batteries, relay nodes, and strike assignment.

So I built the site as a visual essay exploring our discussion: part argument, part mood board, part systems sketch.

The core analogy we used was naval. In the early c20th, dreadnought battleship became the supreme expression of one model of combat: huge guns, thick armor, fleet action, decisive engagement. Then the aircraft carrier changed the distance at which the decisive fight happened. Battleships remained useful in specific roles. They screened carriers, bombarded shore targets, absorbed punishment. But they lost the central role in deciding fleet combat.

The tank-heavy formation measured mainly by gun and armor looks like an old capital ship model. The plausible future armored group looks more like a compressed carrier group on land: a protected close-combat core surrounded by drones, counter-drones, EW, decoys, reload vehicles, robotic breachers, repair loops, and operators.

Codex made a lot of the work editorial. The best improvements came from compressing and making the visual structure carry more of the argument. Image generation in particular has come a long way in the last year, and I used it to create the “Retro British Comic” style graphics directly in codex.

The final site is a structured provocation rather than a prediction. The point is to make one possible future of armored warfare easier to see: heavy armor absorbed into a wider combat system built around custody, drones, EW, counter-drone defense, decoys, reload loops, and protected close contact. The tank of 2050 may be judged less by whether it can win a clean duel and more by whether its group can keep producing local information and local denial while under observation. The gun still matters, but the fight increasingly turns on who can preserve a usable picture for long enough to act.