The trends will have to change for the tank--or some other form of mobile, protected, firepower that engages in maneuver on the battlefield--to continue as the primary ground combat system.
Strategypage writes about the proliferation of cheaper precision tank-killing weapons:
Are tanks becoming obsolete? With smarter and cheaper anti-tank weapons available, including missiles, "smart mines", and air delivered robot tank killers like Bonus, Smart and SADARM, it will only take one incident of the "cheap and smart" stuff beating up on a lot of tanks to make the point. Another telling sign is the lack of enthusiasm in America and Russia for designing a replacement for current tanks, at least not a replacement that features the "bigger gun and thicker armor" that has characterized tank development for the century.
Then again, it may be premature to write off the tank. For a weapon that has been dismissed as obsolete for decades it still survives.
The problem is that with all the firepower from increasing numbers of sources that can kill heavily armored tanks, there is a lot more firepower that can kill unarmored and lightly armored vehicles, and--naturally--infantry on foot, too. Russian operations in Ukraine's Donbas region have demonstrated how vulnerable to firepower anything that isn't heavily armored or dug in is.
But even the edge tanks have today is in danger. With current trends, expensive tanks are on the way to being obsolete because they--along with anything else--can't survive on a modern battlefield.
Until defensive measures--whatever they are and whenever that happens--regain the upper hand and allow some sort of mobile protected firepower to restore maneuver on the battlefield.
