Note: Most Thursdays, I take readers on a deep dive into a topic I hope you'll find interesting, important, or at least amusing in its absurdity. These essays are made possible by — and are exclusive to — our VIP supporters. If you'd like to join us, take advantage of our 60% off promotion.
Tanks are cool.
That's just a natural human bias toward well-made gear, particularly when that gear has a massive cannon, and can drive over — or through — seemingly anything. There's hardly a little boy (and more than a few little girls) anywhere who hasn't dreamed of driving a tank, firing the main gun at enemy tanks, strafing bad guys with the machine gun, or sitting in the commander's seat and directing all the action.
Few topics spark more unending arguments among grognards than "What was the best tank ever?" or "Country X's tank Y was so superior to country's A's tank B." The names don't matter because whatever names you fill in, you’ll find dedicated defenders on both sides, happily arguing long past the point of exhaustion.
But the one thing everyone agrees on? Tanks are cool. Driving around in 50, 60, or even 70 tons of highly armored, fast-moving, and hard-hitting tank is exhilarating beyond words. Not only are you suddenly the living embodiment of the old military motto — What you can see, you can hit, and what you can hit, you can kill — but you feel nearly invulnerable.
Were only it so.
And Another Thing: Although the M4 Sherman of World War II fame tactically came up short in armor and firepower compared to German Panther and Tiger models, it proved to be the operationally superior tank. Discuss in the comments, long past the point of exhaustion.
Despite all that armor, mobility, and firepower, tanks are vulnerable beasts, and always have been.
Tanks really can kill almost anything they see — but when battened down for close-quarters combat, visibility is awful. Those multi-ton monsters aren't exactly stealthy, either. While a tank on the move sticks out like a sore thumb, well-trained infantry hide in waiting. So give an infantryman a satchel charge, a rocket-propelled grenade, a portable anti-armor missile, or a $400 suicide drone, and suddenly the tank is toast.
"Experience has shown that attacks against tanks with close combat weapons by a sufficiently determined man will basically always succeed," Nazi Germany's Army Group Center anti-tank manual advised.
Coming from the country that invented high-speed armored warfare as the world knew it from 1939 to at least 2003, that advice ought to be sobering.
Tank designers — at least in the West; Russia not so much — have made great strides in crew survivability. But even if the entire crew lives to fight another day, losing a company of $12 million M1A2 SEPv3 (I'll get back to all those numbers and letters further down) Abrams tanks to $150,000 missiles or $400 drones is no way to win a war. Ask a Russian sometime about how blitzing Kyiv in 2022 went, but first, maybe get him too drunk to fight.
"You cannot move without being seen," Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll put it during a War on the Rocks podcast back in May. "The amount of sensors on the battlefield, the amount of ability from both sides to see what's going on" means that tanks can no longer fight "as far forward in the formation... because very cheap drones are able to take them out of any usefulness," he said.
The lesson is that, on their own, tanks aren't much more than well-armored coffins — but that's been the case from the very beginning, more than a century ago during the First World War.
And Another Thing: 2003 was the beginning of the Iraq War — the last armored blitzkrieg that went as planned. The invasion gave way to an undermanned occupation, ill-advised nation-building, and a long-term counterinsurgency campaign. Russia attempted a many-pronged blitzkrieg into Ukraine in 2022, and more than three years later, it's still going at it. Plenty of krieg, zero blitz.
Early in World War I, a few British officers — none high-ranking, sadly — saw the need for tracked, armored vehicles that could survive machine-gun fire and give it back. Their pleas went unheeded for more than a year, but the Royal Navy, courtesy of Winston Churchill, finally picked up the idea.
The top-secret project referred to early prototypes as mere "water carriers," and then "water tanks," and finally just "tanks."
The French military went through a similar process, and by 1916, small numbers of tanks were in use by both countries on the Western Front. They were slow-moving, almost comical-looking contraptions by modern standards, but they eventually provided infantrymen with the protection and mobile firepower needed to overcome German trenches.
Tanks would soon do so much more — for the Nazis, sad to say.
What the world came to know as Blitzkrieg, following Germany's rapid defeat of Poland and France in 1939-40, was actually first envisioned by British military theorist J.F.C. Fuller in 1918 — and I swear those are his actual initials. Fuller's Plan 1919 called for masses of tanks, supported by accompanying infantry, and airstrikes to disrupt German lines and communications, to move quickly into the German army's rear, engineering a rapid collapse.
Fuller understood that tanks required infantry and air support — what we'd later call "combined-arms warfare."
It seems likely, however, that the tanks of the time were inadequate for Fuller's sustained, combined-arms offensive... because they were. A WWI armored offensive might involve 300 tanks, but more than 200 would be out of action — disabled, destroyed, or just broken down — by the end of the day.
Fuller's suggestions were ignored by postwar Britain, too, even as tanks became more reliable and motorized infantry more feasible.
Britain's interwar thinking could be summarized like so: "That's not how we used tanks in the last war, and we won the last war. Besides, motorizing and armoring everything is just too expensive." But do you know what was really expensive? Barely evacuating 340,000 soldiers from Dunkirk after German armor sliced through Allied lines and sent them racing for the beach.
More forward-thinking was a German officer named Heinz Guderian, who took Fuller's Plan 1919 and turned it into a complete operational concept in his 1937 book, "Achtung — Panzer!" Guderian envisioned fully armored divisions, with motorized infantry and artillery keeping pace with the tanks. Dive-bombers would reduce any strongpoints that slowed the advance, allowing the armored and motorized troops to stream into the enemy's rear. That was Fuller’s Plan 1919, but executed with Teutonic precision and no shortage of ruthlessness.
Hitler read "Achtung — Panzer!" and was reportedly excited to see a real-world demonstration. He would soon get one at an armored field exercise at Kummersdorf.
"That is what I want," Hitler said when the exercise concluded, "and that is what I will have."
The rest is bloody awful history.
More than 10,600 Soviet and German tanks and assault guns clashed during Operation Citadel/Battle of Kursk in 1943 — the largest tank battle in history, and certainly the last of its kind. Probably 8,000 of those tanks were destroyed.
Ouch.
The Soviets ground down the Wehrmacht at Kursk, finally and thoroughly cutting the offensive heart out of the war machine Guderian envisioned and Hitler so loved. Yet the modern Russian army has fared far worse against an opponent that would barely register by Guderian's standards.
We can’t talk about the future of tanks without looking at how they’ve fared in the only major combined-arms war underway: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Oryx, a Dutch open-source intelligence group, tracks visually confirmed losses. That means destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured vehicles — each confirmed with photos or video. As of early 2025, Oryx reports at least 3,734 Russian tank losses, with 2,666 destroyed, 157 damaged, 534 captured, and others abandoned. The real total is obviously higher, since not all losses can be confirmed through open sources.
Kyiv claims to have taken out 10,000 tanks — a number no one else believes — but even Oryx’s confirmed total still represents the offensive heart of Russia’s war machine.
Multiple reports suggest Russia has nearly exhausted its inventory of modern tanks — the T-72, T-80, and T-90 models — and has since restored — and lost — most of what could be salvaged from its Cold War stockpiles. Other reports suggest Russia may be hoarding what tanks remain for one last offensive — a belated attempt to shatter Ukraine’s brittle frontlines. Whatever the case, Russian tanks are by all accounts now scarce on Ukraine's battlefields.
It might seem oxymoronic: Russia has lost more tanks than it can afford — yet it’s still holding back masses of them, hoping for one final blitzkrieg.
But that's the thing: Even in drone-choked skies, the thinking goes, tanks can still get the job done.
The Russian army is a uniquely bad example, as I pointed out back in 2022.
The Red Army mastered combined-arms warfare during the desperate fight against the Nazis 80 years ago — but modern Russia’s demographic and logistical shortfalls forced deadly compromises.
We need to go a little into the weeds here, so bear with me.
“Beginning in 2010,” The National Interest reported in 2020, “Russia’s ground forces began eliminating the division structure it had used since the battle of Stalingrad in favor of smaller, more lethal combined arms formations.”
More lethal, eh? Recent results argue otherwise.
Those smaller formations are Battalion Tactical Groups (BTG), usually consisting of 600-900 men. They're heavy on armor and artillery, but light on the infantry units necessary for combined-arms effectiveness.
BTGs were first formed in Afghanistan, where the Soviets needed combat units powerful enough to cause some serious hurt, but small enough to react quickly to mujahideen attacks.
The Russian military came to rely on them during both Chechen Wars and the 2008 Russo-Georgian wars. Not because BTGs were necessarily more effective, but because Russia lacked the manpower to staff proper divisions properly.
Complicating things, most Russian foot soldiers are typically draftees who serve for only one year and do not receive the necessary training to serve as an effective part of a combined arms team. And remember, without combined arms support, tanks are just coffins — 3,734 of them as of January, according to Oryx.
The U.S. military's nearly 50-year-old M1 Abrams tank remains relevant, thanks to constant upgrades and lessons learned during Iraq and Afghanistan. Originally designed to fight across the forests and plains of Cold War Europe, the latest Abrams is an urban street-fighting machine.
That SEPv3 I mentioned earlier is the System Enhancement Package version 3, providing increased situational awareness, lethality, and survivability. Put simply, the latest Abrams can see more and thus kill more.
SEPv4 is on the way.
But those upgrades were designed with lessons that are now becoming obsolete in the Drone Age.
Introducing the AbramsX.
"The AbramsX is technically not just a new tank," Andrew Latham wrote for National Security Journal last week. "It is a prototype for a new kind of platform altogether – one that tries to reconcile the raw firepower of traditional armor with the demands of a sensor-saturated, drone-heavy, AI-enabled battlespace."
AbramsX keeps the same cannon but eliminates a crew member by adding an autoloader. It even "ditches the aging gas turbine in favor of hybrid-electric propulsion, improving fuel efficiency, reducing thermal and acoustic signatures, and providing bursts of silent mobility."
It also features a layered Active Protection System for intercepting enemy shells and even drones, because otherwise, why bother?
In Latham's words:
The AbramsX is not a closed system – it is designed as a combat node. It integrates next-generation C4ISR connectivity, enabling real-time data sharing with unmanned systems, airborne platforms, and other combat vehicles. It comes equipped with a suite of AI-enabled battlefield management tools, automatic threat detection, and semi-autonomous target engagement capabilities. A tethered drone mounted on the turret can scout over the horizon. Its sensors fuse feeds from across domains into a single situational awareness picture. Think of it less as a tank and more as an armored data processor with a main gun.
In essence, the AbramsX is a land-based F-35 — a crewed vehicle with a God's eye view of the battlespace, able to instantly communicate everything it sees with every tank, armored vehicle, missile system, warplane, warship, drone, and satellite in range. And thanks to secure digital communications, that range is global.
The question is whether a crewed vehicle is still needed, and whether the AbramsX's job can't be done cheaper — and with less risk — by drones or autonomous weapons systems.
The answer might be that drones and robots can't occupy enemy territory. Occupation requires boots on the ground, and ask the next grunt you meet whether he'd rather do that with or without a friendly tank nearby. I'm pretty sure he'd say "Hell, yes!" faster than an Abrams can score a direct hit on the enemy — and trust me, that's fast.
But if the tank has a future, it lies in active protection, greater lethality, and global comms…
…but far fewer of them.
Masses of anything can't survive drone-infested battlefields under constant satellite surveillance, and as the troops spread out, so necessarily will the armor.
And yet, after more than a century, tanks may endure.
They're still pretty cool.
Last Thursday: Can Trump’s Tariff Hammer End Putin’s War?
