Back in mid-2021 I wrote an article looking at how various nations were racing to build killer robots, which was depressing enough at the time. The focus of that article was on AI, but drones were mentioned, specifically the idea of coordinated swarms of them, although the actual ones referred to were things like the Predator drones, which had been around for more than two decades at that point. I did mention a quadcopter called the KARGU, used by Turkey, but that was also military. As is usually the case with peering into the future I missed the possibility of simply buying commercial drones off the shelf and converting them into weapons of war.

And now here we are.

The M1A1 Abrams is one of the greatest tanks ever built and has proved itself on multiple battlefields, no more so in that in 1991 during Desert Storm when it waged precisely the sort of fight it had been designed for, engaging Soviet tanks on vast, flat areas. To say that it won would be an understatement: it destroyed hundreds of T-72’s and T-80’s with single kill shots at ranges from which they couldn’t even hit the Abrams. Despite concerns about its weight (even the early versions weighed 70 tons) it maneuvered well in the desert sands and its unique gas turbine engine had no problems with the dirt and the dust. Not a single Abrams was lost in the conflict.

But that was a long time ago now. In the years since this 1980’s design first appeared the world of war-fighting has changed. It was notable that some Abrams were lost over a decade later during the Iraq War, taken out by close-in missile systems, and that continued to happen in Afghanistan and now in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Although it had always been understood that tanks had weak spots, the focus was on their rear where the armor was thinnest, and training and tactics would minimise that risk. Meanwhile, although the top of a tank was weak for the same reasons – and anybody who studied the 1944 Normandy battles, where even the fearsome Tiger and Panther tanks were literally ripped apart by Typhoon, Thunderbolt and Mustang fighter-bombers – this was not a concern for the West because they emphasised air superiority.

That left only artillery as a ground weapon that could drop down on a tank and destroy it, and artillery wasn’t designed to be that accurate, especially for a moving target. None of the weapons shooting flat along the ground were able to swoop up and then down on top of a tank. That was too difficult a targeting problem to solve.

But the relentless development of computer and sensor technology eventually resulted in ground-fired weapons that could do exactly that. Given the development of Western weapons like the Javelin in the mid-1990’s the writing was on the wall for any tank that couldn’t defeat a top-down attack. Thus it may be that tanks like the South Korean K2 Black Panther with built-in Active Protection Systems are the future.

But it should be noted that even these modern defence systems have been designed to defeat fast missiles like the Javelin. Slow-moving, loitering drones are a different challenge, especially if deployed in large numbers to exhaust APS systems of their ammo stocks.

In this respect the same dynamic that has seen the return of the old-fashioned anti-aircraft gun for dealing with drones, because you can’t waste expensive anti-aircraft missiles on drones, also applies to the drone vs tank fight; you can buy a lot of drones for one tank.