When a $770 drone can take out a $15 million tank, it puts t…

Depending on their size and technological sophistication, the drones can cost as little as $US500 ($770) – a paltry investment for taking out a $US10 million ($15.5 million) Abrams tank. Some of them can carry munitions to boost the impact of their blast, said Reisner. These could be rocket-propelled grenades, he said, or self-forging warheads known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, that were widely used in roadside bombs during the Iraq War. Reisner has collected videos of tanks in Ukraine being chased down by the drones or drones flying into their open turrets.

“Welcome to the 21st century – it’s unbelievable, actually,” said Reisner, a historian and former armor reconnaissance officer who oversees Austrian forces’ training at the Theresian Military Academy.

No Easy Way to Defend

In November, within weeks of receiving the Abrams tanks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “It is difficult for me to say that they play the most important role on the battlefield. Their number is very small.”

Some officials and experts believe Ukraine’s commanders had planned to save the Abrams for future offensive operations next year and resisted sending them to the front lines, where they risked losing the few they had. Instead, the tanks deployed early this year with the American-trained and equipped 47th Mechanised Brigade as Ukraine sought but failed to maintain control of Avdiivka, a stronghold in the eastern Donbas area that fell to Russian troops in February.

Reisner said drones, potentially including FPVs, may have been able to pick off the Abrams tanks because the 47th Brigade did not appear to have the protection of short-range air defence systems like the self-propelled, German-designed Gepard cannons that help safeguard Kyiv.

FPVs can be stopped with jammers that disrupt their connection to the remote pilot. Shotguns and even simple fishing nets have been used to destroy or catch some of them on Ukraine’s battlefields.

“At this stage, the most effective means used to defeat FPVs is electronic warfare and various types of passive protection,” including additional armor and other kinds of shielding on the tanks, said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. He said defeating FPVs required a “tailored approach on the battlefield” and that Ukrainian forces were becoming more adept at it.

But Reisner suggested that Ukraine was so desperate for air defences that it was depriving tanks of full protections by sending Gepards or other short-range anti-aircraft weapons that would traditionally deploy to the front lines to instead protect cities and critical infrastructure.

So Are Tanks Obsolete?

Reisner said military engineers had sought new ways to destroy tanks for as long as they have been used on the battlefield and that the FPVs did not render the Abrams and other advanced tanks like the German Leopards obsolete in Ukraine.

“If you want to seize terrain, you need a tank,” Reisner said of the single most lethal weapon in ground warfare.

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But he added that the FPVs were a key part of what some analysts believed would drive future warfare underground, with remote-controlled weapons fighting it out on the surface. In this circumstance, soldiers would direct weapon systems from nearby underground bunkers to ensure they could maintain lines of sight and radio frequency over the weapons.

Such land battles could largely pit first-person view drones against unmanned ground vehicles, Reisner said: “They will be fighting each other like in The Terminator.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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