The wars in Ukraine and the broader evolution of hybrid warfare have reshaped assumptions about land combat. Persistent unmanned aerial surveillance, FPV drones, loitering munitions, precision artillery, mines, cyber effects, and electronic warfare have created a battlefield where detection can rapidly lead to destruction.
Yet these developments have not eliminated the need for protected manoeuvres. Drones can observe and strike, but they cannot seize and hold terrain, escort infantry through a breach, defeat a counterattack, or consolidate captured ground. Armour remains the only land system that combines protected direct firepower, cross-country mobility, and the ability to convert tactical success into territorial control.
The central military question is therefore not whether tanks remain relevant, but how armour must be organised, protected, connected, and trained to survive in an environment saturated with sensors and autonomous systems.
The Enduring Role of Armour
Armour continues to deliver operational effects that unmanned systems cannot replicate. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles provide protected direct fire, shock action, mobility, and the physical presence needed to break through fortified positions, exploit gaps, and hold decisive terrain.
In offensive operations, armour enables breakthrough and deep exploitation. It suppresses enemy positions, supports infantry under fire, defeats opposing mechanised forces, and prevents an offensive from devolving into attritional trench warfare.
Armour also retains psychological value. Its visible presence can reassure friendly infantry, disrupt enemy cohesion, and compel an adversary to divert resources to anti-armour defence. However, this advantage depends on credibility: tanks repeatedly destroyed by cheap drones or precision fires may lose their deterrent effect.
The crew remains central. Automation can accelerate detection, navigation, and targeting, but it cannot replace human judgment under fire. Crews must confirm targets, distinguish combatants from civilians, prioritise threats, decide when to displace, and act when communications or digital systems fail.
What Has Changed
Recent conflicts show that isolated, static, or unmasked armour is highly vulnerable. FPV drones can attack from the side, top, or rear, where armour is traditionally weakest, while loitering munitions, top-attack ATGMs, mines, electronic warfare, and long-range fires compound the threat.
Armour’s relevance now depends less on its inherent qualities than on how it is employed. A tank operating alone, without infantry, engineers, air defence, electronic warfare, or counter-UAS support, becomes a prime target.
The response is not to abandon armour but to change how it is employed. Armoured forces must operate as low-signature, mobile, digitally integrated components of combined-arms formations rather than as independent tank units.
Combined Arms in Drone-Dense Environments
In drone-dense environments, combined-arms tactics must shift from massing platforms to massing protected effects while dispersing physical forces. The objective is to disrupt the enemy’s entire targeting chain: detection, identification, tracking, decision, fire direction, strike, and battle-damage assessment.
Organising the force
Armour should operate in small, mutually supporting combined-arms battle groups centred on tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, mechanised infantry, engineers, artillery observers, tactical air defence, electronic warfare teams, UAS operators, and counter-UAS elements.
A practical assault group may include:
- Two to four tanks or IFVs in dispersed packets, providing protected direct fire and shock action.
- Dismounted infantry to clear trenches, buildings, dead ground, and close approaches.
- Engineers to breach minefields, reduce obstacles, mark safe lanes, and support recovery.
- Organic ISR and attack UAS to observe the objective, fix enemy forces, and identify firing positions.
- Counter-UAS teams and EW detachments to detect, jam, spoof, or destroy hostile aerial systems.
- Artillery and mortar support to suppress enemy observation posts, ATGM teams, drone launch sites, and assembly areas.
The principle is dispersed movement, concentrated effect. Vehicles and dismounts must remain sufficiently separated to deny the enemy a lucrative target, yet close enough to provide mutual fire support, security, casualty evacuation, and rapid consolidation.
Shaping the battlefield
Before a manoeuvre, a force must establish temporary local superiority in observation and denial. Friendly UAS should locate enemy drone teams, ATGM positions, artillery, command posts, and reserves, while EW and counter-UAS systems degrade hostile ISR.
The aim is to create a temporary “ISR bubble” over the objective: friendly forces can see and strike, while the adversary’s ability to observe and target is degraded during the critical period of the assault.
Artillery, mortars, attack drones, and EW should then suppress known and suspected enemy observation and firing systems. Russian forces increasingly use UAVs to locate enemy EW systems, radars, command posts, UAV crews, artillery, and hardened positions, then strike them with artillery, MLRS, powered bombs, FPV drones, and glide bombs.
The assault sequence
A drone-era combined-arms assault should follow a deliberate sequence:
- Detect and fix the enemy using UAS, ground observation, and electronic support.
- Suppress enemy ISR, ATGMs, artillery, and command nodes with fires, EW, and attack drones.
- Breach obstacles under cover of smoke, suppressive fires, and counter-UAS protection.
- Assault with armour and infantry in dispersed packets.
- Consolidate rapidly, displace firing systems, and prepare for enemy counterattack or drone-led reconnaissance.
Armour Employment in the Drone Era
Tanks remain essential for breaching, exploitation, and terrain control, but they must be employed differently: in smaller packets, with extensive engineer support, close infantry coordination, and tight integration with ISR and fires.
Their role is to provide protected direct fire against bunkers, ATGM positions, vehicles, and fortified points; to support infantry assaults; and to exploit breaches before the enemy can restore the defence.
In drone-saturated sectors, tanks and IFVs assigned to combat roles must be concealed and ideally dug in, particularly when operating near the front line. After firing, resupply, or detection, armour must displace immediately. Static vehicles become reference points for enemy artillery, FPV teams, and loitering munitions.
Armour should not move without close-in security. Infantry must clear approaches, watch rooftops and elevated ground in urban areas, and detect dismounted drone operators or ATGM teams. Engineers must lead obstacle reconnaissance and breach operations.
Survivability: A Layered System
Passive armour alone is no longer sufficient. Survivability must be layered across physical protection, concealment, mobility, electronic defence, active protection, and rapid displacement.
Key layers include:
• Passive armour and spaced protection against direct-fire and fragmentation threats.
• Active protection systems to intercept incoming projectiles and soft-kill systems to disrupt guidance.
• Concealment, camouflage, terrain masking, and overhead cover.
• Control of thermal, visual, acoustic, and electromagnetic signatures.
• Rapid displacement and shoot-and-scoot drills after firing or detection.
• Tactical air defence, counter-UAS systems, and electronic warfare.
• Infantry security, engineer support, and rapid recovery arrangements.
The objective is not to make a tank invisible. It is to prevent detection from becoming rapid, accurate, and exploitable for targeting.
Electronic Warfare and Spectrum Discipline
Electronic warfare has become a continuous, software-driven contest embedded at the tactical level. It affects drones, artillery precision, navigation, communications, and the wider targeting chain.
Counter-UAS and EW capabilities must therefore be organic requirements at the battalion and company levels, rather than distant brigade-level support functions. Armoured units need the ability to detect hostile drones, disrupt their links, engage them at short range, and protect themselves while manoeuvring.
Every combat unit should train regularly on available C-UAS systems, detection methods, reporting procedures, and engagement options. A layered response should include detection through radar, acoustic sensors, radio-frequency detection, visual observation, and friendly UAS; threat classification; disruption through jamming, spoofing, smoke, or deception; and defeat through guns, directed energy, netting, hard-kill systems, or dedicated C-UAS platforms.
EW is essential, but it can interfere with friendly drones, communications, navigation, and precision systems. Electromagnetic-spectrum fratricide is a major challenge in large-scale operations, requiring brigade-level spectrum command and control, with deconfliction procedures pushed down to tactical formations.
Every movement plan should include an electronic-warfare annex specifying friendly emitter locations, UAS corridors, jamming sectors and durations, navigation-degradation procedures, and alternate communications methods.
Networked Armour and Mission Command
Digital fire control, battlefield management systems, AI-assisted target recognition, tactical-UAS feeds, and counter-UAS interfaces can significantly improve situational awareness and engagement speed. But they must not create dependency.
Commanders must plan for communications and navigation to fail. Digital systems should provide a shared picture when available, but junior leaders must be able to act on commander’s intent when BMS, radios, navigation, or UAS feeds are jammed or lost.
Every unit requires clear intent, objectives, boundaries, and priorities; pre-briefed triggers for displacement, breach, assault, and withdrawal; alternate communications methods; delegated authority to engage, relocate, or preserve combat power; and rehearsed degraded-mode drills.
Drone-dense combat rewards decentralised initiative. Small-unit leaders must be authorised to adjust routes, use smoke, displace, engage drones, request fires, and coordinate locally without waiting for higher headquarters.
Autonomous and AI-Guided Drones
Autonomous and AI-guided drones are transforming combat by reducing reliance on human-controlled communications links, accelerating targeting, and enabling operations in electronic warfare. Their most important effect is creating a faster, more resilient, and more dispersed targeting chain.
From Assistance to Autonomy
Most battlefield drones are not yet fully autonomous. They are semi-autonomous systems in which humans generally select the mission, approve targets, supervise flight, or confirm engagement, while onboard AI handles navigation, image recognition, target tracking, route adjustment, and terminal guidance.
The distinction is critical:
- AI-assisted systems, where a human operator retains control of target selection and engagement.
- Human-on-the-loop systems, where the machine can act but a human can intervene or abort.
- Fully autonomous lethal systems, where the drone identifies, selects, and engages a target without real-time human authorisation.
Current combat use is concentrated in the first two categories, particularly navigation and terminal guidance. Fully autonomous strikes against human targets remain legally, ethically, and operationally contested.
Resilience against electronic warfare
AI guidance addresses the primary vulnerability of drone operations: jamming. A drone can be locked onto a target by its operator, after which onboard systems can complete the final approach even if the radio link is lost. Ukrainian systems reportedly use AI to lock onto targets and complete terminal guidance without an active operator link.
AI-enabled drones increasingly use computer vision and terrain matching rather than relying solely on satellite navigation. By comparing roads, buildings, rivers, forest edges, and other terrain features with preloaded maps, a drone can maintain course when GPS is jammed or spoofed.
ISR and precision strike
Autonomous drones are most mature in ISR. They can patrol routes, monitor sectors, detect movement, identify equipment, and cue artillery, attack drones, or ground forces.
AI improves ISR by filtering vast volumes of imagery, recognising objects, tracking movement, and flagging priority targets. This compresses the sensor-to-shooter cycle and allows scarce human operators to focus on validation and tactical coordination.
In precision strike, an operator may guide a drone close to the target area, after which onboard computer vision identifies the target, locks on, and adjusts the flight controls for the final dive. This is particularly valuable against moving vehicles, concealed artillery, logistics convoys, and targets protected by electronic warfare.
Swarms and counter-drone AI
Drone swarms use AI to share information, reassign tasks, and sustain an attack when individual platforms are lost. Reports indicate experimentation with coordinated groups of 8 to 25 aerial drones that can redistribute tasks and conduct precision strikes despite communications disruption.
AI is also central to counter-drone warfare. AI-controlled turrets can detect hostile drones, track flight paths, calculate intercept solutions, and engage faster than a human gunner can react. Ukraine has deployed AI-guided turrets to intercept drones, including fibre-optic-guided systems that radio jamming cannot defeat.
Risks of autonomy
AI systems can misidentify objects in cluttered terrain, adverse weather, smoke, or low-light conditions. A system trained to recognise military equipment may mistake civilian vehicles, infrastructure, or non-combatants for legitimate targets.
Adversaries may also use camouflage, decoys, thermal signatures, altered visual patterns, electronic spoofing, or false targets to manipulate image-recognition systems. Forces relying on AI recognition must retain redundant sensors, human review, and procedures to validate automated outputs.
Autonomy also creates escalation and attribution risks. A drone that loses its link, navigates independently, and strikes a target may create ambiguity about whether the attack was authorised, accidental, hacked, or deliberately autonomous.
The prudent military posture is to permit AI autonomy for navigation, sensing, tracking, and defensive interception, while requiring human authorisation for lethal engagement against personnel. Systems must maintain auditable logs, be tested against scenarios involving civilian presence and deception, and preserve abort mechanisms and human override wherever technically feasible.
Urban and Open Terrain
Shared requirements
Urban and open terrain require the same combined-arms, EW-resilient foundation. In both environments, armour must operate alongside infantry, engineers, artillery, air defence, UAS, counter-UAS, and EW elements while maintaining mission command under degraded conditions.
Urban operations
Urban combat diminishes some of armour’s advantages and increases its exposure. Tanks and armoured vehicles deployed in city streets without infantry suffer heavy losses because buildings, alleys, rooftops, basements, and dead ground create concealed approaches and close-range ambush opportunities.
Urban training should emphasise close infantry-armour coordination, rapid threat discrimination, precise vehicle handling, obstacle awareness, recovery procedures, short-range defence against ATGMs and mines, and local communications procedures, as buildings disrupt radio, navigation, and sensor performance.
Open terrain
Open terrain exposes armour to long-range observation and precision strike. Training should prioritise thermal, visual, and electromagnetic signature management; dispersed movement with mutual support; shoot-and-scoot drills; and counter-ISR integration.
Crews must also practise long-range combined-arms coordination, route discipline, fuel management, mobility, cooling, filtration, recovery, and operations when BMS, radios, navigation, or UAS feeds are jammed or spoofed.
Drone-threat emphasis
Drone-threat training should vary by terrain. In urban areas, the priority is close-in threat detection, infantry coordination, safe C-UAS employment, and rapid reporting in congested airspace. In open terrain, the priority is breaking the detect-to-strike cycle through signature control, dispersion, rapid movement, and counter-ISR measures.
Future Armoured Vehicles
Future armoured platforms should be modular and scalable, able to integrate new protection, sensor, power, and weapon systems without a complete redesign. Open electronic architectures are essential because threats and countermeasures will evolve faster than vehicle replacement cycles.
Growth capacity should include unmanned turrets, directed-energy counter-drone systems, improved active protection, enhanced local situational-awareness sensors, and resilient power systems.
A future tank must remain effective across plains, deserts, high-altitude terrain, and urban or semi-urban environments. It must balance protection, mobility, firepower, weight, logistics, and transportability. Excessive protection that reduces strategic mobility or overwhelms sustainment may be as damaging as insufficient protection.
Advanced platforms also require advanced ecosystems: high-fidelity networked simulation, cyber-electronic training, maintainers skilled in software and sensors, indigenous spares, line-replaceable units, and resilient supply chains.
Training Priorities
Training should treat drone presence as a normal operating condition, not an occasional complication. Exercises must include persistent ISR, FPV attacks, drone swarms, EW disruption, minefields, degraded communications, and combined-arms coordination.
The top priorities are:
- Survive ISR and precision attacks: master dispersion, concealment, signature control, terrain masking, rapid displacement, and shoot-and-scoot drills.
- Fight under EW and degraded communications: rehearse manual navigation, local situational awareness, alternate reporting, pre-briefed loss-of-connectivity procedures, and delegated authority.
- Master combined-arms integration: train repeatedly with infantry, engineers, artillery, air defence, EW detachments, UAS, and C-UAS teams.
- Use digital systems without dependence: employ APS, digital fire control, BMS, AI-assisted recognition, and UAS feeds while verifying outputs and reverting to degraded-mode procedures when systems fail.
- Develop rapid, accountable judgment: test target confirmation, threat prioritisation, escalation decisions, and actions under ambiguity.
- Conduct deception and signature management: use decoys, false thermal signatures, dummy positions, controlled movement, smoke, and deliberately exposed false routes to mislead enemy ISR.
High-fidelity networked simulators should rehearse drone surveillance, loitering-munition attacks, minefields, EW disruption, and combined-arms coordination before field exercises validate these skills in plains, desert, and high-altitude environments.
Sustainment and Recovery
Logistics in drone-threat areas should rely on smaller, more numerous, and better-protected vehicles rather than large, concentrated resupply convoys.
Resupply should occur at night, under EW cover, along varied routes, and at dispersed transfer points. Ammunition, fuel, batteries, spare parts, and recovery assets must be pre-positioned close enough to sustain tempo yet concealed well enough to avoid detection.
A disabled vehicle is a high-value target and a potential intelligence source. Recovery teams, engineers, and infantry must rehearse rapid recovery under drone observation, including smoke, suppression, towing, crew extraction, and removal or destruction of sensitive equipment.
Net Assessment
Armour remains valuable when its unique ability to seize and hold terrain outweighs the cost of protecting, supporting, and employing it effectively. It is least cost-effective when used as a static, unsupported target.
Without armour, manoeuvre can devolve into attritional trench warfare. Without combined-arms integration and survivability discipline, armour can suffer disproportionate losses. The correct choice is therefore not armour versus drones or missiles, but networked, mobile, protected armour as part of a combined-arms force.
Autonomous and AI-guided drones are becoming the connective tissue of modern combat: they sense, navigate, recognise, prioritise, strike, and defend in a contested electromagnetic environment. Their military value is greatest when they shorten the targeting cycle and preserve effectiveness in electronic warfare.
Conclusion
Steel armour remains vital, but steel alone is no longer decisive. The tank’s future lies not in thicker armour or larger guns alone, but in its ability to operate as a protected, low-signature, digitally connected node within a combined-arms system that can withstand persistent surveillance, electronic attack, and autonomous threats.
Armies must first invest in soldiers, crews, and junior leaders; then in electronic warfare, counter-UAS, aerial sensors, active protection, resilient communications, and open-architecture vehicles. Investment in platforms without investment in people, training, sustainment, and doctrine will produce expensive targets rather than decisive combat power.
The decisive battlefield equation is no longer armour versus drones. It is networked armour versus a dispersed, AI-enabled targeting system. Victory will belong to the force that can see first, decide faster, strike accurately, protect its forces through dispersion and deception, and retain human judgement at the point of lethal decision-making.
Human decision-making, combined with advanced technology, disciplined combined-arms tactics, and resilient sustainment, will determine future battlefield outcomes. Armour provides the physical means to seize and hold terrain; integration, training, and responsible autonomy determine whether that capability translates into battlefield dominance.