Interwar periods are inherently challenging for militaries, who must balance lessons from previous wars with emergent technologies and tactics being tested in observable wars. Much of future warfighting is being reexamined in light of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, and the role of armored formations receives significant attention on a cyclical basis. Russia’s early failures, stunning Ukrainian armored counteroffensives, the failure of subsequent offensives, and the stagnation into attritional warfare have resulted in a seesaw of analysis and arguments about whether armored formations can remain relevant, whether they can even survive modern battlefield conditions, and even if the US Army’s armor branch will go the way of the pre–World War II horse cavalry.
Many arguments heralding armor’s irrelevance overweight evidence from ongoing observable wars. But the context in Ukraine is unique: The battlefield geography, the strategic culture and military history of the combatants, and the overarching political objectives at stake are specific to that conflict. That means lessons must be carefully scoped to be exported and applied elsewhere. Nearly all militaries get interwar innovation and adaptation wrong, and it is likely that whatever ideas the US Army has about how to structure and fight its armor in the next war will be proven flawed, at a minimum, once the war starts. The question is not whether or not armor will be relevant in the next conflict; mobile protected firepower with shock effect will always have an important place in land warfare, even if its preeminence waxes and wanes with changing technologies. The question is how it will be relevant and survivable, and what the Army can do now to ensure its formations do not go into the next war trained and equipped to fight the last one. Armor is not a specific platform, nor is it a specific formation construct. It is the provision of mobile protected firepower capable of both penetration and exploitation to operational depth for the joint force commander.
One criticism of armor proponents’ arguments is that they focus too intensely on maneuver. On a battlefield with persistent observation and layered defenses, including the ability to swarm precision munitions onto identified formations, maneuver is no longer widely possible. Attritional warfare is said to be the new norm, therefore, with maneuver possible only in small windows. Yet this criticism of the maneuverist mindset ignores the fact that maneuver warfare has always only been possible in windows, and Army doctrine acknowledges this fact. Warfare continually vacillates between offensive and defensive ascendancy, and during times of ascendant defense, attritional warfare will always be the norm for most engagements. Attrition and maneuver as operational methods exist in relation to and complement each other; neither is an absolute.
History is rife with examples when maneuver occurred only in bursts separated by longer periods of positional and attritional fighting. The maneuver warfare of the early stages of World War I in Flanders and France ended after several weeks. This led to years of static warfare before tactical and technological adaptation and the exhaustion of German forces led to renewed maneuver in the Hundred Days campaign in 1918. Yet throughout the same war, in Poland and Russia, German and Russian forces alternated between positional and maneuver warfare. Major maneuvers such as the Russian invasion of Galicia, the Tannenberg campaign, the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, the Brusilov Offensive, and Operation Faustschlag were separated by long periods of attritional warfare resembling the war in France. In World War II, the dramatic maneuver operations of the Wehrmacht in the summer and fall of 1941 and 1942 ended in positional periods. After the failure to take Moscow, much of the Soviet-German war in the north was positional while maneuver occurred only in the south. After Stalingrad, the Soviets continued to build increasingly dense defensive systems until 1944, when deep Soviet maneuver destroyed Germany’s Army Group Center during Operation Bagration. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War compressed the same cycle into weeks. Egypt’s surprise attack across the Suez Canal and its integrated antitank and air defense network halted Israel’s attempted maneuver counterattacks and fixed the Sinai front into a positional fight. The subsequent Egyptian attack beyond its own defensive lines and air defense bubble enabled the Israel Defense Forces to employ maneuver tactics and exploit a seam in the Egyptian formation, penetrate at Deversoir, and encircle the entire Egyptian Third Army.
While history does not repeat, military history often rhymes. Western militaries’ discourse in response to the combat use of the Sagger missile and other Soviet weapons in 1973 bear many similarities to discussions today. The display of the antitank guided missile was said to be the end of the tank, while new air defense systems made integrated defenses impenetrable. However, the US Army, and others, developed new tactics, techniques, and procedures, new equipment, and new doctrine designed to defeat these systems and create periods of maneuver. The problem posed by drones today is not dissimilar from the antitank guided missile problem in the 1970s, nor from the defensive firepower problem in 1914.
Even when the offense is ascendant, terrain, materiel limitations, and logistical requirements can force both sides into attritional periods. None of this makes attritional warfare desirable or decisive. Attritional warfare at the operational level results in decision by long exhaustion. Attrition degrades the enemy, strips away defensive systems, and saps manpower, but it does not convert battlefield destruction into operational or political decision. Maneuver remains the means by which a force can exploit that degradation by seizing critical terrain, disrupting cohesion in depth, collapsing defenses, or threatening locations, facilities, and systems the enemy cannot afford to lose.
The choice between maneuver and attritional, positional warfare is a false one. The challenge facing the Army is how to create and exploit maneuver windows without exhausting the forces required. Attritional warfare imposes different demands on a military, but is also inherently self-perpetuating. A force optimized exclusively for exchanging losses naturally becomes proficient at destroying enemy matériel and personnel without retaining meaningful capability to exploit that degradation or translate it into effects at the operational level. Ignoring the certain prospect of stretches, potentially long, of attritional warfare before a maneuver window opening is perilous and should be avoided, yet that does not mean the Army should abandon maneuver and train and equip itself exclusively for an attritional fight. Doing so cedes any prospect of decision on the United States’ terms.
Moreover, the limited windows during which maneuver is possible does not make it passive or accidental, however. Army forces will constantly seek to create the conditions for their own maneuver windows in concert with the joint force. Mobile protected firepower, as a central part of a combined arms team capable of sensing, striking, protecting, and sustaining its tempo, remains the best method whereby the Army can first create openings for maneuver, and then exploit that success. It is and never will be the only option, and in some terrain or against some enemies, other formations may be preferable. However, armored formations are the best formations to truly exploit the success of a penetration, and when they conduct the penetration themselves, can most rapidly do so. Even when equipped with robotic and autonomous systems and light wheeled vehicles, other formations will not have enough firepower, speed, and survivability to conduct any sort of deep exploitation and survive sustained or unexpected contact. Through persistent sensing, fires, electromagnetic effects, mobility efforts, layered protection, and support from other warfighting functions, future armored formations have the unique capability to rapidly mass at an identified point of penetration, rupture the enemy’s defenses, and then continue the fight into the enemy’s deep area with the goal of collapsing his warfighting systems more rapidly than he can react. Armored formations are fast enough, with enough firepower, and robust enough to accomplish these tasks.
This does not mean, however, that heavy main battle tanks such as the Abrams need to form the majority of the combat power in these armored formations. Concepts such as the British Army’s 20-40-40 split—where 20 percent of a formation’s composition is exquisite systems such as main battle tanks, 40 percent is attritable but reusable systems such as robotic and autonomous platforms, and 40 percent is consumable systems like one-way attack drones—illustrate a different way to think about combat power. Mobile protected firepower should not be tied to a specific system. And armored platforms, be they manned or unmanned, cannot do any of this alone. Armor enhances and is enhanced by the other capabilities in a brigade combat team, and is an essential component of the Army’s combined arms approach. Dispensing with mobile protected firepower from the combined arms toolkit at scale is ill-informed and ill-advised.
A future armored brigade combat team (ABCT) under any new model must retain its ability to maneuver and deliver mobile protected firepower. A combined arms battalion should look radically different from one merely augmented with robotic platoons or drones flying from armored vehicles. Instead, the Army and its armor branch should determine what capabilities a future ABCT needs in order to continue to provide rapid, survivable penetration and exploitation capability to the joint force, and then apply the correct mix of technologies, systems, and personnel to ensure that provision. Robotic and autonomous systems likely have a place in all elements of the future ABCT fight, from sensing and detecting to shaping and suppressing, finishing, and finally maneuvering on the enemy.
These capabilities begin with the ability to see while simultaneously minimizing the ability to be seen. Persistent aerial, ground, and electromagnetic sensors coupled with deception, signature management, and even improved tactics, techniques, and procedures for individual-level concealment are essential to enabling the future ABCT to identify the point of penetration while preventing destruction before massing. An ABCT must have organic and responsive sense and strike capability combining drones, loitering munitions, direct fire, indirect fire, and electronic attack out to some distance within its exploitation target, perhaps forty to fifty kilometers or beyond, depending on battlefield conditions. And crucially, an ABCT must have the ability to displace this capability forward rapidly.
Next, it needs robust and redundant engineer mobility capability providing explosive and mechanical breaching as well as gap-crossing. It must have layered protection including counterdrone, short-range air defense, electronic warfare, and active hard-kill capabilities sufficient to protect massing forces. Command and control must be resilient, distributed, and capable of functioning through enemy degradation. Most importantly, it requires enough mobile protected firepower—whether manned, robotic, or some mix of the two—to survive contact, penetrate enemy defenses, seize and hold terrain, and exploit to operational depth.
Finally, none of these capabilities matter if the ABCT cannot maintain tempo. Protected logistics, robotic recovery, rapid repair, additive manufacturing, energy as a class of supply, and flow of replacement attritable and consumable systems must move through the penetration alongside the maneuver force.
These capabilities need not exist in all battalions simultaneously, but must be available at the echelon, speed, and scale required to continuously identify, create, and exploit the maneuver window faster than the enemy can reconstitute his defensive system. Using the capabilities as guidelines will enable us to think about how robotic and autonomous systems alter the ways in which a combined arms formation fights. It could be that they extend reconnaissance, conduct warfare in a completely unmanned zone, or take tasks such as strongpoint assaults, flank security, or obstacle breaching away from manned organizations, thereby allowing for a redistribution of manpower elsewhere. Their value lies in changing when and how the formation exposes its personnel and platforms that are most difficult to replace.
Reorganizing the ABCT around these capabilities and a substantially larger robotic and autonomous systems component carries significant risk. Yet while these risks are different, they are not necessarily greater than the risks and challenges our current formations face from the rapidly changing character of the modern battlefield. Different does not mean harder in the long term. There is significant up-front investment cost of modernization and change, but the Army must pay it in order for its armored formations to survive the transformation of battle and remain a relevant, effective tool for maneuver at the leading edge. Only extensive and aggressive experimentation of new, sometimes radically different ABCT structures under realistic conditions can determine whether the risks of new types of formations outweigh their benefits.
As the ABCT evolves so too will future main battle tanks, beyond being simply a better version of the Abrams. Just as naval and air warfare both evolved from direct-fire, line-of-sight engagements, so too will tank warfare. Whether with first-person-view drone-like munitions or precision rounds delivered by guidance from spotter drones operated at the platoon level, future tanks will need to be capable of firing accurately beyond line of sight. They must still retain lethal direct-fire accuracy in line-of-sight engagements, as closing with and destroying enemy formations in close combat will always remain necessary to take and hold terrain and provide the translation of effects to the operational level. Yet the engagement zone for tanks will extend as technology improves. Tanks should also have a suite of localized, automated electronic warfare and active protection systems to defend against similar capabilities from the enemy, and their force protection role remains critical. If their soft- and hard-kill systems fail, tanks must still provide the protection necessary for the most important asset, the crew, to survive. In an Army reliant on a qualitative advantage over its opponents, ceding heavier armor protection in favor of cost and more rapid deployability cripples armor in the long term.
The M1 Abrams and the current ABCT are temporary manifestations of an enduring battlefield requirement. Maneuver is not synonymous with continuous movement and constantly sweeping advances. Armor’s enduring function is to deliver mobile protected firepower that the land component commander may use to survive sustained contact, create freedom of action, rupture enemy defenses, and exploit success to achieve effects, at depth, at the operational level.
The demise of horse cavalry is a poor analogy to any discussion of the future of armor. Horse cavalry provided mobile striking power and exploitation capability at speed as part of a combined arms approach that the tank provided better. Despite the rise of robotic and autonomous systems and the proliferation of sensors, there remains no other capability which can as consistently provide this for the joint force while remaining survivable. The Army and the armor branch must continue to experiment with new and sometimes aggressive changes to how they think about the delivery of mobile protected firepower, even if some or many of those changes end up being wrong. The platform, the organization, and the windows available for delivery can and will change radically as time goes on. The requirement for armor’s existence will not.
Major Patrick O’Keefe is a US Army armor officer currently studying in the Secretary of War’s Strategic Thinkers Program. His most recent assignment was as the brigade executive officer for 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. His previous experience includes service in armored and Stryker formations and both combat and operational deployments to CENTCOM and EUCOM.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: 1st Sgt. Luisito Brooks, US Army
