The Russo-Ukraine war is still raging in all its fury, with the outcome far from clear. It is much too early to draw any definitive judgments about lessons learned. But what we have seen to date is already offering fresh evidence for the continuing debate in military circles over the future of warfare — and in particular over whether the tank can continue its eight-decade reign as the king of land warfare.
On one level, what we are seeing vindicates the judgment reached by national security adviser H.R. McMaster’s 2017 National Security Strategy and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s 2018 National Defense Strategy. Both proclaimed, in the words of the Defense Department, that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security”. And both documents correctly focused on the looming threat from Russia. As the National Security Strategy stated, “Russia seeks to restore its great power status and establish spheres of influence near its borders”.
That change in national strategy encouraged the Army to double down on conventional, large-unit armored operations. The Marine Corps went the other way by ditching its tanks to focus on a strategy of employing portable missiles to challenge Chinese ships and aircraft in the western Pacific. Both decisions can claim some degree of vindication from events in Ukraine.
The Russians have attacked using large numbers of tanks and armored vehicles, which again emphasizes their importance on the battlefield. But the Russians have also suffered devastating vehicle losses at the hands of Ukrainian troops armed with potent, hand-held antitank missiles such as the American Javelin and the British NLAW (Next Generation Light Antitank Weapon). The Ukrainians have also made good use of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones firing antitank missiles. Open-source reporting indicates that the Russians have lost more than 1,600 vehicles and equipment, including nearly 300 tanks and more than 500 armored vehicles of other kinds.
The Russians are likely to suffer even heavier losses now that the United States is not only providing Ukrainians with many more Javelins but also 100 Switchblade kamikaze drones — technically known as loitering munitions — that can stay aloft searching for a target and then dive into it. The combination of TB2 drones and Israeli-made loitering munitions proved highly potent for Azerbaijan in its victorious war against Armenia in 2020. As I previously reported, 47 percent of Armenia’s combat vehicles were damaged or destroyed.
The Army Times wrote that the Armenia-Azerbaijan war “has given armor supporters and detractors a lot of talking points. ... Depending on the take, the destruction of tanks by precision drone strikes either spelled the end of armor as we know it or served as an example of what unprotected, poorly deployed armor would face”.
The Russo-Ukraine war is certain to intensify the debate.
Already some are rushing to claim that “tanks & armored personnel carriers have become obsolete. They are too expensive & are easily destroyed with manifold light anti-tank weapons or drones”. But armor experts reply: Not so fast. As former British army officer Nicholas Drummond wrote: “Russia’s disastrous tactics have been a terrible advertisement for tanks. But we should be careful to avoid drawing the wrong conclusions. No artillery support. No infantry support. No air support. This is not how combined arms tactics work in an era of multi-domain operations”. If the Russian tanks were better supported by infantry, artillery and airpower, the argument goes, they would not be so vulnerable to the hit-and-run tactics of Ukrainian infantry armed with antitank weapons.
The consensus of military experts is that armor still has a vital place on the battlefield in enabling offensive operations. Mick Ryan, a recently retired major general in the Australian army, told me that “the historical data on ground forces that have tanks, versus those that don’t, is pretty exhaustive. If you have tanks, you lose less soldiers and have a better chance of success. The caveat is that they need to be used in a well-led combined arms team”.
The question, then, is not whether armies should have tanks in the future but what they should look like. The U.S. Army is spending $4.62 billion upgrading its M1A2 Abrams tanks with the Israeli-developed Trophy active-protection system to defend against drones, electronic warfare devices to counter roadside bombs, and ballistic armor upgrades. But is there a point at which these 40-year-old, 80-ton behemoths become too costly and unwieldy? The Army is spreading its bets around by developing a light tank, along with unmanned ground vehicles.
Some visionaries suggest that the eventual M1 replacement shouldn’t be a new tank at all, Breaking Defense writes, but a wolf pack of manned and unmanned vehicles working together: “Instead of having gun, sensors, and crew all on one vehicle, you could put, say, your long-range sensors on a drone, your decoys on another (expendable) drone, your main gun on a ground robot, and your human controller in a small, well-armored command vehicle hidden some distance away”.
The only thing all sides in the armor debate can agree on is that Russia is badly misusing its tanks — and Ukraine is taking full advantage of Russian ineptitude.
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam”.