In Ukraine, two years of high-intensity warfare has left more than 2,700 Russian and almost 700 Ukrainian main battle tanks visually confirmed as destroyed or abandoned by March 2024.
When taking into account these statistics, most of these victims are Soviet or Russian designs; even much better-protected modern Western tanks, including the M1 Abrams, Challenger 2s, and Leopard 2s, turned out to be fallible, with more than 30 destroyed during that time.
Inevitably, this armored carnage has produced a new chapter in the more-than-century-old discourse predicting that tanks are too heavy, too costly, and too easy to kill using the latest weapons technology. This packaging of the prescriptive with the descriptive claim is common: tanks already don’t work and shouldn’t be invested in going forward.
But the centenarian pedigree of the discourse hints that its prophetic powers have proved lacking. The role and relative importance of tanks certainly continue to evolve and fluctuate, and their use in future wars is unlikely to resemble the massive armor battles seen in Kursk 1943, or Golan Heights 1973, or the never-fought but infinitely war-gamed battle for the Fulda Gap.
“There do not yet exist entirely satisfactory substitutes for tanks: ground maneuver weapons designed to help capture and defend contested ground through direct fire—a task facilitated by all-terrain tracked mobility, firepower from a large-caliber main gun, and protection via heavy armor,” the article says. Noting that airpower and artillery can more easily deliver lethal attacks than a tank doesn’t change the fact that those systems cannot seize and occupy the ground.
While the infantry remains the key to taking and holding ground, their vulnerability to every type of weapon on the battlefield, and associated limitations to mobility and firepower, means that tanks continue to play important roles in both enabling maneuver warfare and providing support to slower infantry operations.
The elementary mistake is to have the arms race experience hiccups, where one or the other side seems to gain an advantage or enjoys the benefits of surprise and assumes it is permanent. It is not the first time that there has been a challenge to tanks, whether from anti-tank guns in the interwar period or anti-tank guided missiles in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but they have adjusted to the challenge and remained essential capabilities.
The failures of Russian armor in the initial stages of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine reflect a more fundamental offense-defense imbalance in the conflict, rather than being in any way peculiar to tanks. However, it is wrong to infer that the context and correlation of forces in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023 are universal. Ukraine’s Army is not the U.S. Army, Russia’s is not China’s, and the India-Pakistan border is not Donbas or Zaporizhzhia.
Beyond their use in maneuver warfare, tanks unexpectedly remain useful for urban combat, amphibious and riverine operations, and in defensive counterattacks. Though vulnerable, they are effective ‘fire brigade’ forces for rapidly relieving hard-pressed defenders or spearheading counterattacks.
Probably the most disruptive change in antiarmor warfare, however, has not come from anti-tank missiles at all, but from very cheap small aerial drones (SUAS) that are adept at finding, following, and guiding precision munitions or kamikaze attacks against tanks. This has opened a new arms race, with tanks fielding active protection systems and other countermeasures.