The development of sophisticated anti-missile and counter-drone platforms could reintroduce maneuver warfare to Ukraine—and modern war planning more generally.
It would be difficult to think of a more stimulating book than ‘Mine Were of Trouble,’ Peter Kemp’s memoir of his service with General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. While the Soviet-backed Spanish Republic garnered much sympathetic press and the majority of international volunteers, the Nationalists (backed by Nazi Germany) emerged victorious after a long and bitter conflict.
Kemp explains that the war served as a test range and incubator for new technologies and tactics—as with so many other “proxy wars” between great powers. (In the Spanish case, we need to be careful with the “proxy” characterization. The Nationalists were initially no one’s proxies. It was the Republicans who served as Stalin’s foot soldiers; the Nationalists became a German proxy out of necessity, since their opponents were receiving extensive support from Moscow.) The war provided an opportunity to discover what worked, and what didn’t.
The Germans, whose assistance was sought by General Franco, took full advantage of the opportunity to mature aerial bombardment—notably in Guernica—and to develop the tools and tactics that later became central to the Nazis’ “Blitzkrieg” offensives. A relatively small number of German tanks and bombers, used very effectively, broke the Republican lines in critical places and permitted rapid advances behind these lines.
Military revolutions often happen quietly—and the import of these victories was not lost on the German high command. But it is far from clear that their future adversaries took away the right lessons. Given continued French reliance on the Maginot line, history suggests that the key lessons were not, in fact, learned.
Modern Militaries Rely Too Much on Static Defenses
The situation today is not entirely dissimilar. The Europeans are, for instance, focused on building “drone walls.” This may well be a dangerous strategy—static and quasi-static defenses are relatively easy to detect, understand and disable with adequate planning, technological innovation, and a willingness to engage in tactical improvisation. Even Hamas, operating at the end of complex underground supply chains, was able to locate and disable the high-tech Israeli defenses around Gaza. It took the terrorist organization years of infiltration and surveillance, but it discovered the weak points and exploited them. If there is any lesson from the October 7 attack, it is that static technological defenses, while useful, are no substitute for an armed population, constant vigilance, a recognition of enemy intentions, and rapid reaction forces held in reserve.
Static defenses certainly have their place. They are comparatively inexpensive, they delay an adversary, and they impose operational complexity. But the Europeans’ decision to rely primarily on static defenses today is most likely a terrible mistake. When static defenses are overwhelmed or saturated, there needs to be a maneuvering reserve to deal with surprises. And behind that, as Ukraine has made clear, the broader society needs to be trained and armed to resist invasion, create delay, and blunt an invading force.
There have been many eras when land warfare has been defensive-dominant. Forcing an adversary to blunt its army in attacking a prepared defensive position has been a winning strategy at many moments. There have also been eras of offensive dominance. For instance, today, the comparative costs of offensive and defensive cyber-warfare make this arena clearly offensive-dominant. By contrast, for many years, it was widely assumed that ballistic missiles were too expensive to intercept, and doing so against a large-scale attack was difficult or impossible. This set of assumptions gave the Iranians very strong strategic leverage against Israel, until the point when Israel demonstrated the capability to intercept their ballistic missiles at scale.
Are Tanks Moribund in Modern Warfare? Not Exactly
Another lesson that many are taking away from Ukraine is the death of the tank, largely driven by the availability of inexpensive tank-killing missiles and drones. Both are powerful weapons, but there is also excellent portable counter-drone and counter-missile technology, based both on directed energy and on kinetic systems, in the field and under development.
There has been a long pattern of ebb and flow between tanks and anti-tank systems, with each new generation of anti-tank weaponry resulting in new defensive systems. The first tanks were countered by tactical innovations among infantry, aimed at disabling them through attacks on their fuel tanks using anti-tank rifles, the fielding of anti-tank field guns, and the use of specialized explosives (i.e. bundles of grenades) aimed at the tracks.
Specialized anti-tank units were deployed shortly after the first British Mark-1 tanks made their way into combat in World War I. Kinetic energy rounds were upgraded to shaped-charge rounds, which spawned reactive armor, and later detachable/replaceable armor plates. Israel, Russia, and the United States have all deployed various active, hard-kill anti-missile systems (Arena, Quick Kill, Trophy), aimed at destroying incoming munitions; such systems can be enhanced to destroy drones or even drone swarms. There are also a variety of soft-kill, dazzler, and electronic warfare systems.
Partially because of the broad deployment of counter-armor drones, and the lack of effective air support, trenches—an ancient but still very effective form of static defense—are dominating the battlefield in Ukraine today.
Truly effective anti-drone/anti-missile systems necessarily start out heavy and complex. They are appearing first as static defenses and on-board naval ships, in places where they can draw a lot of power, and where a heavy, complex system can operate without being shaken and jostled in motion. The next step will be for these systems to become robust and cheap enough to be mounted on tanks and trucks, moving at speed. Once this happens, I hope (though I cannot say that I expect) that a large number of these systems will be deployed to Ukraine, so as to re-inject maneuver into the fight. A couple of armored divisions, equipped with tanks with truly effective counter-drone systems and with trucks that could provide bubbles of drone protection for supply convoys, could produce a Blitzkrieg-style breakthrough across the Russian lines, especially if the Ukrainians were supported to achieve localized air superiority.
The West Is Well-Suited to Offensive War
Deploying such a system at scale is well within the technical capabilities of the United States—or perhaps of Germany, if they chose to prioritize it. In fact, it’s the kind of initiative that would play to Western strengths. Building a modest number of platforms with exquisite capability is the sort of thing that our industrial base is very well-suited to do.
One further consideration for the use of armor, of course, is minefields. While mines can be very effective in delaying or shaping the environment for maneuver, there are now very effective counter-mine technologies. Tanks equipped with specialized equipment can clear paths through minefields rapidly, as can dense artillery barrages. And sophisticated anti-tank mines are neither cheap nor quick to deploy at scale.
I fully expect to see the return of armored maneuver warfare in the next decade. Just as static defenses and trench warfare have returned, we can expect the breakout from this mode of warfare soon. It will be a return to the importance of heavy armor, and to mechanized infantry protected by active anti-drone and anti-missile systems.
Against first-class enemies, with modern air forces, this mode of warfare will be very expensive and will require serious anti-aircraft capabilities, in addition to counter-drone. But against a second-rate power that cannot achieve air superiority—in other words, most armies in the world today—the combination of air power and tanks will serve, as it did during the 1930s, to break through static defense lines and achieve re-inject maneuver into warfare.
If we want to bring the Ukraine war to an end, the best and fastest way to do so is to develop and deploy armor and transport with a new generation of counter-drone systems. A couple of hundred tanks would probably do the trick, with the right kind of active protection systems on them. Until then, the death of the tank is being greatly exaggerated.
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