From Ukraine to Israel, the Death of the Tank Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
The Israeli soldiers heard the danger before they saw it. By the time they spotted the drone in southern Lebanon last month, it was too late: the feed went black as it exploded beside them, killing one and wounding six. Hezbollah's cheap, locally built drones, which cost about $300 to $400 and are made with 3D printing and commercial electronics, had been hitting Israeli tanks, soldiers and bulldozers for weeks, and one had slipped past the vaunted Trophy protection system on a Merkava.
The war in Ukraine had supplied similar footage for years: Russian and Ukrainian tanks run down by quadcopters, filmed from above and swallowed in fire. The Merkava kill was different, because the Merkava is the armored emblem of a country that has spent half a century preparing for anti-tank war. If a flying bomb that cheap can destroy a tank, surely the age of the tank is over?
It’s not that obvious. Drones may be new, but the obituary of the tank is not new. Writing in 1960, a British military historian marveled that everyone kept pronouncing the tank dead, only for it to rise again "from the grave to which they had consigned it." The tank has a habit of attending its own funeral.
Common Knowledge
By late May 2026 Oryx, the open-source tracker, had visually confirmed 4,390 destroyed Russian tanks and 6,429 infantry fighting vehicles since February 2022, about 2.8 a day, and likely undercounted. The International Institute for Strategic Studies put Russia's 2024 losses alone near 1,400 main battle tanks and 3,700 lighter armored vehicles, closer to 3.8 a day.
The economics look grim too. Tanks worth millions are killed by cheap drones and local copies that "sell for about $3,000," one analyst wrote. Another called tanks and armored personnel carriers "obsolete" as far back as March 2022. The charge sheet has three counts: tanks are expensive, visible, and unevenly armored, being built for frontal hits, but not from above or behind. The U.S. learned that lesson with its own Abrams, pulling them from Ukraine's front in 2024 after five of 31 were lost.
The threat keeps mutating. When radio-controlled drones were thwarted by jammers, fiber-optic drones trailing up to 10 miles of physical cable replaced them. Ukraine's Achilles regiment commander, Captain Yuriy Fedorenko, said they "cannot be jammed." Even Israel’s Trophy defense system, which has been used since 2009, has not been spared criticism since operations in Lebanon began. U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll caught both sides in 2025: "Where people have started to predict the death of the tank, I think they're misunderstanding what probably will happen," he said, but conceded that how they are deployed would have to change.
Uncommon Knowledge
These concerns are not as new as many people think. Tanks have always died at frightening rates, yet armies keep building more. Israel lost 40 percent of its tanks in just three days during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Egyptian infantry with Soviet anti-tank missiles shocked Israeli armor-killing not only the tanks themselves but the idea they could roam unsupported.
The cycle is old: anti-tank rifles developed near the end of World War I embarrassed early armor, the German Panzerfaust and American bazooka punished it in towns during World War II, the Soviet Sagger forced a rethink in 1973, and American TOW and Javelin missiles destroyed Soviet-era confidence during and after the Cold War. Each time a weapon exposed a weakness, critics called tanks finished, and engineers redesigned them.
From the cope cage to a moving bubble
The first answer to drone warfare was so ugly it got laughed at. "Cope cages" are welded frames and mesh bolted onto turrets, popularized by Russian forces in Ukraine as a defense against suicide drones and dropped munitions. The idea is to make a shaped charge of the sort used on a rocket-propelled grenade, detonate before it reaches the hull. Ukraine built tidier steel screens, designed by Rinat Akhmetov's Steel Front, for its donated Abrams.
Jamming the control link is the next layer, though fiber-optic drones are the counter to it. Trophy, which can track incoming threats to a tank and destroy them with explosive projectiles, is one system to address this challenge. In 2024 tests showed Trophy could intercept drones with modest software and hardware changes, which can be effective in combination with other air defenses, including jammers, decoys and lasers.
Everyone still wants tanks
If the tank is dead, countries are still clamoring to buy the corpses.
The next generation is drawn for this world. The U.S. Army rolled out an early M1E3 Abrams prototype in January 2026-lighter, easier to maintain with a diesel-electric hybrid drive, active protection and a modular, software-defined design. Ukraine, Major General Glenn Dean said, showed the need for protection "built from within instead of adding on." Europe's Main Ground Combat System goes further: it’s a "system of systems" of robotics, AI, onboard UAVs and datalinks-in other words, a manned tank, a manned missile carrier and an unmanned support vehicle that shield one another.
Europe’s version of Trophy will be fitted on Leopard 2A8 tanks in Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Croatia. "Any Leopard 2A8 that rolls out from the factory will have Trophy on it," EuroTrophy's Dan Kalfus said, about 400 vehicles in all. Elbit's Iron Fist, picked for U.S. Bradleys under a $228 million deal, has also been filmed downing drones, and Rheinmetall's StrikeShield kills incoming threats just before impact.
Drones can kill tanks but they cannot yet do what tanks do: seize ground, shelter a crew, stare down defenders at a street corner with a devastating gun. The obituary will be written again, and the tank, rude as ever, will likely interrupt it.
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This story was originally published June 2, 2026 at 8:14 AM.