The last two years of fighting in Ukraine have humbled the overly confident and shown that, without countermeasures and with optimal flying conditions, an attack drone can disable any tanks through a shaped charge, top-attack, or mobility kill, including the Leopard II, M1 Abrams, or Challenger II, and even armored helicopters. However, assessing a weapon’s ability to inflict losses does not have the same effect as shifting warfare to defense dominance and the attendant requirement of attrition to achieve victory. Once the net effect of drones and their countermeasures, as well as precision artillery and anti-tank missiles, are accounted for, tanks remain the most powerful single combat system on the battlefield. Eventually, the Ukrainians should be able to resume concentrated offensive armored attacks.

Thoughtful tactical and operational analyses from the U.S. Army, the Marine Corps intellectuals, U.S. Special Forces members, CSIS, IISS, and the Institute for the Study of War all agree (with some variations) that drones are having a transformational impact on the war, especially on the attacker. The offensive is required for eventual victory, and the Ukrainians are in serious need of retraining if they are to apply the necessary combined arms tactics for any phase of the war. These analyses mostly reflect on the failure of the NATO-trained and equipped Ukrainian army in its summer 2023 attempt to conduct an armored offensive to the Sea of Azov. Due to deep Russian defense and flexible reserves, Ukraine could never achieve the concentration of force necessary to realize a breakthrough. Fortunately, Ukraine’s deliberate control over its operations ensured that losses were moderate and reflected a normal exchange rate of attrition. 

An IISS analysis argued that this was because Western-trained troops lacked the combat experience to be effective, whereas Ukrainian combat veterans, who were better trained for positional battle, could not master combined arms. However, given NATO’s successful experience with the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq invasion, which were time-table rather than recon-pull operations, Ukrainian troops may have been trained for a deliberate attack rather than for genuine command decentralized needed for swiftly moving armor. Subsequent Russian offensives around Avdiivka, starting in October 2023, suffered similar challenges caused by the new technical problems of suppressing enemy drones and artillery.

The German general Heinz Guderian argued, in his seminal 1938 work on modern armored warfare Achtung! Panzer that successful offensive tank operations have four necessary conditions: attacks must occur on favorable terrain, with an element of surprise, with concentrations in mass, and be integrated into a combined arms force. 

The credibility of Guderian’s analysis in Achtung! Panzer, above other early writers, is established by the unprecedented accuracy of his predictions of the effects of armored warfare during the Second World War and the transparency of the explanatory variables in his model. While Soviet tank theorists generated similar insights, in practice, according to Air University Professor Charles T. Kamps, their Cold War doctrines were overly dependent on tempo while neglecting reconnaissance and overwatch. They thus would have suffered heavy personnel and equipment losses.

Guderian’s central problem is not achieving a break-in, which is addressed brilliantly in Erwin Rommel’s 1937 Infantry Attacks, but in how to carry that through into a breakthrough of the enemy’s lines and break out into the enemy’s rear to capture their supplies, artillery, and headquarters. In a series of vignettes in France, Romania, and Italy, Rommel demonstrates the importance of reconnaissance to exploit geographic opportunities, prompt and careful maneuver, the criticality of entrenchments, and machine-gun, infantry, and artillery combined arms in enabling a military advance against an adversary. 

In contrast, Guderian, who unsurprisingly worked in signals for the entirety of the First World War, repeatedly emphasizes the fundamental difference between the use of the tank for tactical versus operational advantages. Guderian concedes that armored vehicles add significantly to the infantry’s ability to destroy fixed targets and continue their advance. Guderian even made the then-controversial statement that the best tank killer was another tank despite the dramatically lower cost of anti-tank guns and rockets. It is no surprise, from his perspective, that the inexpensive and turretless Sturmgeschütz III Ausf. G tank destroyer, always used in penny packets, destroyed more Allied tanks during the war than the Panther and Tiger kills combined. However, its impact was an order of magnitude less than the use of tanks for breakthrough operations. 

Guderian stressed the inherent vulnerability of all tanks, both past and future, because of the poor visibility from a tank of anti-tank threats and their dependence on constant maintenance. Despite the periodic panic that easily hidden anti-tank guns, cheap infantry rocketed shaped-charges, long-range anti-tank missiles in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, sophisticated mines, attack helicopters, laser-guided artillery projectiles, and today drones had superseded the tank itself, Guderian shows convincingly that the most lethal environment for tanks was the combination of ditches and artillery repurposed for direct fire during the First World War. 

In a series of exhaustive case studies of tank operations (Berry-au-Bac in April 1917, Messines in June 1917, Chemin-des-Dames in October 1917, Cambrai in November 1917, Soissons in June 1918, Amiens in August 1918), Guderian demonstrated the hugely disproportionate benefits of an operational breakout into the enemy’s rear over the tactical use of the same armored force to support the infantry in the attack, even when operational use initially inflicted most of the tank losses on the attacker.

Guderian’s emphasis on mass attacks was not simply the standard re-statement of the benefits of the concentration of force at the weak point modeled by the Lanchester square law formula of an inverse hyperbolic tan difference in losses. Rather, mass in an armored breakthrough was for the concurrent and simpler arithmetic purpose of overwhelming anti-tank defenses. The difference is that Lanchester calculates an exchange rate in fires, whereas Guderian’s mass is also about maneuvering past threats. Anti-tank systems are almost always more cost-effective than the tanks they kill, even when deployed in clusters. Still, they have a limited time during which to inflict attrition on an attacker attempting a breakthrough. 

Guderian’s emphasis on surprise does not primarily mean deception of the enemy. Tanks are intended to exploit fleetingly emerging opportunities detected by reconnaissance, which the attackers do not know beforehand. His requirement of operating tanks on favorable terrain can be traded off to increase surprise, as it was for Case Yellow and the Manstein Plan to invade France through the rugged Ardennes in May of 1944. Importantly, there is also a great difference between tank warfare in theory and the challenge of its managerial application in the friction of combat, both of which Ukraine would need to master.

The scale of the use of guided munitions, including cruise and ballistic missiles, and uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as drones, far exceeds either the V-1 and V-2 attacks (over 15,000) of the Second World War, the high anti-tank missile expenditure of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, or the ballistic missile urban bombardments of the Iran-Iraq War (estimated at 750-900). According to the Ukrainian government, Russia has launched an unprecedented 43,000 guided projectiles and unguided missiles against Ukraine since the start of the war in February 2022. 

Russian drone attacks against Ukrainian infantry entrenchments (and vice versa) are constant and have superseded the interdiction effects of harassment fire by artillery. One RUSI estimate suggests that Ukraine is expending 10,000 drones per month. In contrast, Russia’s drone attacks are expected to rise from 250 daily attacks in May (equivalent to 7,500 per month) to 400-500 (15,000 monthly), mostly of the $350 per unit FPV (First Person) type. Similar trends are evident in the 25,000 drones used by rebels against the Myanmar government in October and November 2023 as part of their successful resistance.

The principal direct combat effect of attack drones in an environment of drone countermeasures is attritional. Drones have damaged tanks sufficiently to compel the crew to abandon the vehicle. However, drones must often be used in swarms to disable a target, estimated at six to ten versus armored vehicles (versus three to four per individual soldier), and the damage is often repairable. Drones are also used to inflict additional damage on already immobilized vehicles or to immobilize vehicles to instigate crew abandonment or for later destruction by artillery, which seems to be the situation with the case of one M1 Abrams tank. 

There is no aggregated breakdown of losses attributed to drones, except for naval platforms. There are rough estimates for specific battles, such as the 35 percent of seventy-five Russian tanks being destroyed by drones during the battle of Avdiivka from October 2–30, 2023, another thirty-nine tanks by drone in November 2023, and one unverified claim by a NATO official that two-thirds of all Russian equipment losses up to April 2024 were due to drones. In June 2024, a Ukrainian combat medic reported that ninety percent of casualties in the battle of Chasiv Yar over the previous six months were due to FPV drones.

Although drones have struck every conceivable target on the battlefield, even in depth, observers note that they cannot match artillery for a cost-effective volume of firepower. While there is almost no available direct data linking drone-directed precision artillery kills of armored vehicles as a proportion of the totals, it is pervasively present. UAVs (such as the Russian Granat-4) are instrumental in the reconnaissance, fire correction, and battle damage assessment of Ukraine’s and Russia’s precision artillery arsenal, which includes the Kitolov round, the laser-guided 120mm KM-8 Gran mine, and the fifty-five to sixty-km-range 152mm 3OF39 Krasnopol round. 

The U.S. equivalent used in Ukraine is the fifty-kilometer-range M982A1 Excalibur precision-guided 155mm artillery projectile, although jamming reduced its accuracy from 55 to 6 percent against point targets. Extended artillery bombardments hoping for a low-probability hit against an armored vehicle are especially vulnerable to precision counter-battery fire. According to a Russian estimate, thirty precision 152mm shells are the equivalent of 600 to 800 unguided indirect conventional munitions for counter-battery suppression. An alternative to precision shells is the 152mm round with forty sub-munitions, capable of penetrating 110mm of top armor, which can defeat any current NATO tank. 

Of the fourteen disabled U.S. M1 Abrams tanks (of the thirty-one delivered to Ukraine), methods of destruction include drone strikes, portable anti-tank rockets, T-72B3 gunnery, and at least one destroyed by a 2K25 Krasnopol precision-guided artillery round fired from a 152mm SP 2S19 Msta-S howitzer. Russian analysts assert that ATGM (anti-tank guided missiles) are the most effective tank killers of all of the competing systems, and their tandem missile Kornet is more effective than the Javelin. Ukrainians, in contrast, have found that ATGMs are far more likely to mobility kill because of tactical and technical countermeasures.

While Electronic Warfare (EW) was used intensively in the air wars over Vietnam and Iraq and against remote explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan, the reliance on radios for artillery direction and heavy use of drones in the Russo-Ukraine War has made EW unprecedentedly salient for ground combat. Russia inherited the world’s largest ground-based mobile EW assets from the Soviet Union, which, from the 1970s, had focused its efforts on jamming NATO’s significant advantage in responsive artillery and close air support. Following the 2008 reorganization of the Russian army, each brigade was assigned an organic EW company comprising twelve vehicle-mounted EW platforms, typically the Krasukha-4 truck-mounted jammer and fifteen smaller soldier-portable jammers. 

The Krasukha-4 operates on the X-band with a range of up to 300 km and is capable of scrambling Low Earth Orbit SIGINT satellites and U.S. J-Stars, as well as disrupting remotely controlled drones. It was used successfully against U.S. sensors and radars in Syria. In conjunction with the R-330Zh Zhitel truck-mounted jammer, it can interfere with the signals necessary to operate drones from the simpler FPV DJI Mavic to the TB2 Bayraktar. The truck-mounted Leer-3 EW system, when operating in conjunction with Orlan-10 UAVs, can selectively jam up to 2,000 cellphone users out to thirty kilometers without impeding friendly telecommunications.

The local threat of drones has pushed portable EW assets down to the company level. Whereas some Ukrainian portable jammers are effective out to three kilometers, most Russian-used systems are carried by individual soldiers or are fitted to tanks and create zones of several yards where drone signals are interrupted, disrupting dive attacks. The Russians are primarily relying on inexpensive Chinese-manufactured portable jammers, such as the Tx-Fq-01 signal jammer gun. Russian jammers have significantly degraded the accuracy of Himars’s GPS-guided projectiles. Reduced NATO’s 155mm Excalibur shells’ precision down to ten percent and raised the JDAM-ER bombing error from five to thirty meters. EW systems are more difficult to deploy during an advance, and so Russian jamming was lighter than expected in the early months of the 2022 invasion. The prevailing static attritional combat in Donetsk puts Ukraine in closer proximity to Russia’s EW systems, which severely hampers drone operations. There is substantial mimicry, as the Russians have copied Ukrainian acoustic drone detectors.

Ukraine’s EW, air defense, anti-drone, and aerospace systems are a cross between NATO and Russian systems in their performance, function, and portability, but fewer. There are over forty varieties of Ukrainian anti-UAV systems. The U.S. and NATO have prioritized jam-proof communications, such as in the SINCGARS portable VHF combat radios supplied to Ukraine (capable of over 100 frequency hops per second) and SpaceX’s Starlink Terminals. The problem is that because the bulk of the U.S. Military’s EA capabilities is carried by airborne platforms, such as the Navy and U.S. Marine Corps EA-18 “Growler” aircraft or the U.S. Air Force EC-130H Compass Call, the army does not have its own sustained ground-based EW support. In contrast, the U.S. Marine Corps possesses nine EW platoons equipped with the AN/ULQ-19 EAsystem, but these are only sufficient for three battalion-sized Marine expeditionary forces. In July 2024, the U.S. Army purchased the Stryker and AMPV-mounted TLS-BST jammer and the TLS-Manpack. 

So long as countermeasures can limit drone attacks to attritional effects of striking individual vehicles rather than whole platoons or batteries, the armored offensive can, in principle, be restored. Technical, but primarily doctrinal, and organizational changes were responsible for breaking the First World War tactical stalemate of trench warfare, the latter characterized by deep entrenchments and thick wire obstacles, slowly advancing artillery, and ease of relocating blocking reserves. As drones can be used for both offense and defense, it is the lack of sufficient Ukrainian combined arms rather than the drones themselves that is the cause of the current attritional warfare.

Kyiv claims that Russia has more than twice the number of tanks in service as Ukraine, at 3,500. Though Kyiv received deliveries of over 700 tanks from its allies, Russia is being reinforced by 1,200 refurbishments from its storage stock of 6,000 this year despite having lost 8,691 tanks thus far in the war. Even if a single decisive offensive is unlikely under these disparities, Guderian would argue that armor in the concentrated counter-attack role is still more effective than penny-packed for the attritional defense, even if part of a strategic plan. The Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region demonstrates all of Guderian’s principles of armored warfare. 

The Ukrainians, while cognizant of the political benefits of a conquest of Russian territory, focused on the destruction of the enemy in both the offense and now in the defense against desperate Russian assaults rather than sacrificing scarce lives and equipment to capture the limitless terrain of Russia. The operation was conducted with tactical surprise and mass on good terrain, and combined arms were utilized to the extent of Ukrainian training. The key difference between the failed summer 2023 offensive to Mariupol and the Kursk operation is surprise with the focus on destroying the enemy. The experience of conducting these operations is critical in turning the Ukrainian army away from its Soviet past.

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University and the author of Militarization and War (2007) and Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer of the 3rd Field Engineer Regiment from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11. He tweets at @Ju_Sp_Churchill.

Maximilien Hachiya is a War Studies scholar at King’s College London.

Ulysse Oliveira Baptista is a Political Science student at Concordia University Montréal. He is an associate researcher at the Canadian Center for Strategic Studies.

Image: Melnikov Dmitriy / Shutterstock.com.