Armoured warfare will never be the same

The era of the ‘cautious tank’ is here. But can a tank be cautious and still be a tank?

Russia’s wider war on Ukraine didn’t make the tank obsolete – but it did make the men and women who operate tanks much more careful. 
Small drones are everywhere all the time over the 700-mile front line in the 31-month wider war. The threat from these all-seeing drones, many of them carrying grenades or rigged with explosives, forces the tankers to hide and sneak around if they’re going to have any chance of surviving.
“Enemy and friendly drones criss-cross the air space, hunting for valuable targets like heavy armour and artillery,” David Kirichenko wrote for the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington DC. “This aerial cat-and-mouse game has fundamentally altered tank tactics.”
It’s a new “era of the cautious tank,” according to CEPA.
There was a time, in the early decades of armoured warfare, where tanks could roll across the battlefield in broad daylight – and their crews could expect to survive. Yes, rough terrain, mines, artillery, handheld anti-tank weapons and other tanks posed a threat. But not an existential one.
It was this expectation that tanks could survive – especially when supported by engineers, infantry, artillery and air power – that underpinned the tank doctrine that the biggest armies championed through the Cold War and into the 2020s. Tanks would spearhead powerful attacks on enemy lines, aiming to break through the outermost defences in order to run amuck in the enemy’s vulnerable rear area. The essence of tank warfare was aggressive attack, not caution: and many advocates of armoured warfare would say that it still is.
Massive, tank-led attacks were common as recently as the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. But in the 20 years that followed, drone technology developed faster than anti-drone defences developed. 
When the Russian army launched powerful tank assaults deep into Ukraine in February 2022, it ran straight into the drone revolution in armoured warfare. Russian tank columns, stretched out along the highways leading to Kyiv, were under constant surveillance by Ukrainian drones. Ukrainian artillery and anti-tank missile teams lay in wait to ambush the Russian vehicles where they were most vulnerable: at the end of the Russians’ fragile supply lines.
It got worse for the tankers. The first few explosive first-person-view drones appeared in the sky over Ukraine as the Russians fell back later in 2022. By 2023, the tiny hovering drones – some equipped strictly for surveillance, others built to explode on contact – were everywhere. Today, Ukraine builds two-pound, $500 FPV drones at a rate of three million per year. Russia at least matches that production rate, although its poorly-managed drone operators may be less skilled.
Most tanks were designed in eras when attacks from the sides and front were most common. To protect tanks from the likeliest attacks, engineers thinned out the tanks’ top and back armour and reinforced the armour on the turret face and along the hull’s frontal arc. 
But FPV drones can strike at angles that exploit this thinner protection along a tank’s top and back. The sheer number of FPV drones over a given length of the front line – sometimes dozens at a time in a single spot – compounded the problem. “In 2024, you can have a $500 FPV drone take out a tank worth millions,” a tanker with the last name Bohdan told Kirichenko.
FPVs are now among the biggest killers of Russian and Ukrainian tanks. In 31 months of hard fighting, the Russians have lost around 3,300 tanks, according to the analysts at the Oryx intelligence collective. That’s as many tanks as the Russian military had in active service before the wider war. (The Kremlin has made good its losses by building new tanks and reactivating old Cold War tanks.) The Ukrainians have lost nearly 900 tanks. That’s also nearly 100 percent of their pre-war inventory.
To put into perspective the scale of the tank losses, consider that the British Army possesses slightly more than 200 tanks. The Russian army loses that many tanks in two months.
Russian and Ukrainian tankers are scrambling to adapt. To survive, tanks hide – and fire their guns from under the cover of camouflaged, stationary positions. When tanks must venture out into the open for attacks, their crews count on anti-drone radio jammers and layers of add-on armour – outward-exploding reactive blocks, metal grills and shed-like metal shells – to mitigate the risk from drone strikes.
“Tanks aren’t as effective as they once were,” a tanker with the first name Victor told Kirichenko. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t still useful. “Tanks will still be around in the future, but FPV drones have changed tank warfare forever,” Victor added.
Don’t expect hundreds of tanks to mass for swift attacks across open ground like they did as recently as 2003. Swarms of drones have rendered that tactic obsolete.
Instead, tanks will fight in small numbers and from under cover where possible – their crews more cautious than ever.