Armor in the Drone Age

Armor is in crisis. Not because of technology, funding, or industrial capacity, but because the premier combined arms capability of the U.S. Army has been forced to confront a fundamental truth that Ukraine has written in destroyed vehicles: the armored formation that cannot protect itself from drones cannot fight. From February 2022 through July 2024, drone strikes accounted for 42.47 percent of all combat-damaged vehicles in Ukraine, according to the National Ground Intelligence Center, making unmanned aerial systems the single most lethal anti-armor weapon on the modern battlefield. By early June 2025, of the 31 U.S.-supplied tanks lost by Ukraine, 27 were destroyed by drones. A $500 FPV drone destroyed what a $3 million tank could not defend against.

The Army’s armored force has recognized this reality and is responding. The Tank Platoon manual, revised in 2025, mentions unmanned systems over 100 times and designates C-UAS as one of 12 Critical Tactical Tasks for armored crews. The Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning conducts a SUAS Master Trainer course and has opened the Maneuver Innovation Lab. Transforming in Contact 2.0 is restructuring two Armored Brigade Combat Teams to fight with integrated drones, counter-UAS, and electronic warfare.

But the training architecture has not kept pace with the doctrinal and organizational recognition. The Center for Army Lessons Learned documented in September 2025 that C-UAS training is relegated to a secondary priority at NTC rotations even for armored formations. Gunnery tables and crew qualification standards have been revised in TC 3-20.31, but no equivalent mandatory C-UAS crew qualification standard exists for the defeat side of the engagement.

The National Ground Intelligence Center’s analysis of vehicle damage data from the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, covering February 2022 through July 2024, documents a finding that should define every Army armor training discussion for the foreseeable future: kinetic drone strikes, including dropped munitions and loitering munitions, accounted for 42.47 percent of all combat-damaged vehicles in that period. Artillery accounted for 24.28 percent. Tank main gun fire was responsible for hits on 78 vehicles. Unmanned aerial systems were responsible for 3,028 strikes.

The implications are specific, not general. Loitering munitions alone, led by the Russian Lancet, accounted for 3,045 vehicle strikes, compared to 584 for FPV dropped munitions. By early June 2025, of the 31 U.S.-supplied M1 Abrams tanks delivered to Ukraine, 27 had been destroyed by drones — 87 percent of losses on the most survivable Western main battle tank in inventory.

The cost asymmetry is not simply a budget problem — it is a tactical problem: a $500 FPV drone operated by a trained operator can destroy or immobilize a $10 million armored vehicle system. Ukraine’s own estimate is that it now takes seven drones, up from three earlier in the conflict, to destroy a modern tank. The defining operational effect of the drone on armor is not destruction but immobilization: if the Armored Force cannot fight through the drone threat, it cannot fulfill its doctrinal mission.

The FPV drone has created a transparent battlefield where constant surveillance and the ever-present threat of attack from above have fundamentally broken the traditional model of combined arms maneuver that armor doctrine depends on. Passive defenses — camouflage, decoys, and dispersion — address the visibility component but do not resolve the surveillance-saturation problem: if an adversary employs hundreds of FPV drones and dozens of ISR drones across a brigade frontage, passive measures reduce detection probability but cannot eliminate it.

French Chief of Staff General Pierre Schill’s April 2025 order of the day, calling on the cavalry to reinvent itself in response to drone warfare, captures the institutional recognition that the drone threat is not an adaptation challenge but a force design challenge. For the U.S. Armored Force, the answer implicit in the Transforming in Contact 2.0 program is integration of drones as an organic tool of maneuver — but the training system has not yet fully operationalized that answer.

The most significant doctrinal development in the armored force’s response to the drone threat is the revised Tank Platoon manual. The revision is comprehensive: unmanned systems are mentioned over 100 times, and C-UAS is designated as one of the 12 Critical Tactical Tasks that define armored crew competency — placing it alongside fundamentals such as field maintenance and casualty care and evacuation.

The manual’s doctrinal treatment addresses two categories of armored C-UAS: active measures, including manual and automated systems designed to engage drones, and passive measures, encompassing limiting damage, avoiding detection, and employing decoys. The active measures section covers the air guard role, which the manual assigns to the loader, establishing 360-degree security against aerial threats.

The March 2025 revision of FM 3-0 introduced operational imperatives directly relevant to the Armored Force’s C-UAS integration requirement. The two most consequential for armor are: protect against constant observation, and make contact with sensors, unmanned systems, or the smallest element possible. These imperatives restructure the armored formation’s approach to maneuver: advance the sensors and unmanned systems first, not the tanks.

TC 3-20.20, Training: Maneuver Platoon, published April 2025, provides the integrated weapons training strategy for all platoon-size formations in Armored, Infantry, and Stryker Brigade Combat Teams. BG Chad Chalfont’s September 2025 article on ABCT transformation acknowledges that establishing UAS, C-UAS, and emissions control training standards for tactical units and doctrine is an active Armor Training Systems Integration effort — confirming that C-UAS training standards are still being established, rather than already established.

The Army’s Transforming in Contact 2.0 program is the most consequential current laboratory for C-UAS integration in the armored force. Four ABCTs have been designated as TiC ABCTs for NTC rotations: the 2nd BCT 1st Cavalry Division (Rotation 26-02, Fall 2025), the 2nd BCT 3rd Infantry Division (early Summer 2026), the 1st BCT 1st Cavalry Division (2027), and the 2nd BCT 3rd Infantry Division (also 2027).

TiC 2.0 has three primary technology infusion focus areas: unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS, and electronic warfare. This triad mirrors the interconnected nature of the drone problem on the modern battlefield: you need organic UAS to see, you need C-UAS to survive, and you need EW to degrade adversary command and control over both offensive and defensive drones.

The 2nd BCT 1st Cavalry Division’s November 2025 NTC rotation documented what armored TiC integration looks like in practice. Brigade leaders transitioned to smaller, modular groupings at company level, integrating counter-UAS, electronic warfare, and real-time intelligence fusion. The Mastodon Beast+, a deployable system that detects, tracks, and disrupts enemy drones and communications, provided armored units with electromagnetic maneuver warfare capability during the rotation.

The 1st Cavalry Division’s Pegasus Charge working groups, convened at Fort Cavazos in April 2025, represent the most structured effort to redesign the ABCT around the drone-saturated battlefield. Working groups attended by the Armor School Commandant, the Maneuver Center of Excellence leadership, Army Futures Command, and DEVCOM experts focused on five organizational options under DOTMLPF review.

The most consequential C-UAS-relevant organizational decisions under consideration are the Multi-Functional Reconnaissance Company at brigade level and the multi-purpose company at battalion level. Both formations integrate UAS, C-UAS, EW, and fires in a combined package that keeps the sensor-to-shooter chain inside the battalion or brigade. MG Thomas Feltey’s published statements identify the core training challenge: they require Soldiers and leaders who can operate, maintain, plan, and integrate capabilities that have no established training pipeline within the ABCT.

The most consequential training gap in the Armored Force’s C-UAS integration is the absence of a formal crew qualification standard equivalent to the gunnery qualification tables that define armored crew readiness. A tank crew’s certification to operate in combat depends on demonstrated proficiency across Tables VI through XII of the gunnery program. There is no equivalent table for C-UAS crew qualification: no demonstrated standard for air guard employment, for immediate action drill execution against drone threats, for passive air defense measure implementation, or for reporting in accordance with the C-UAS ROE framework.

Adding a C-UAS engagement table — or integrating C-UAS scenarios into existing tables — would create the formal crew qualification pressure that makes training persistent rather than episodic. The specific content would include air guard drills executed during standard gunnery tables under conditions where drone threats are introduced by an opposing force controller, immediate action engagement of Group 1 threats using canister rounds or assigned defeat systems, and passive air defense measure compliance verified by observer evaluators.

The 1st Cavalry Division’s June 2023 C-sUAS equipment fielding documented that over 80 Soldiers and leaders across all brigades received initial new equipment training on the Bal Chatri detection device, Modi jamming system, Smart Shooter fire control computer, and DroneBuster. The training format — two days classroom and one day range operations — represents a start, not the collective training integration that makes C-UAS a practiced combined arms task. Without explicit integration into TC 3-20.20, C-UAS training competes for time against gunnery qualification, maintenance, and administrative requirements — and loses that competition every time.

The Armored Force’s C-UAS capability mix is evolving rapidly but unevenly. At the organic crew level, the M1028 canister round, the DroneBuster, and the Smart Shooter system provide active defeat options. At formation level, the M-LIDS provides EW and kinetic defeat. The C-UAS DE Stryker prototype provides a directed energy-plus-rocket-plus-cannon capability with a 26-kilowatt LOCUST laser. The training challenge created by this diverse capability mix is the absence of a standardized crew qualification program for each system.

The Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning operates the SUAS Master Trainer course and the Maneuver Battle Lab’s Uncrewed Systems Experimentation Facility. The Joint Counter-small UAS University (JCU) at Fort Sill provides the primary C-UAS operator and planner courses across the joint force. These two institutional nodes are not currently connected by a formal shared curriculum development process. The combined arms requirement — training armored crews to both employ organic UAS and defeat adversary UAS — requires a curriculum that integrates both sides, and that integration has not been formally established.

The Maneuver Center of Excellence should direct development of a formal C-UAS crew qualification table under TC 3-20.31 authority. The qualification table should follow the structure of existing gunnery tables: defined conditions, standardized threat sets (Group 1 FPV, Group 1 ISR, loitering munition), required tasks (air guard employment, immediate action drill execution, passive measure compliance), performance standards with passing criteria, and observer-evaluator roles and responsibilities.

The qualification table should be integrated into the existing gunnery progression rather than created as a separate stand-alone event, so that C-UAS qualification becomes a prerequisite for gunnery advancement. A tank crew that cannot demonstrate air guard proficiency and immediate action drill execution under drone threat conditions should not be certified for advanced collective gunnery.

TC 3-20.20’s integrated weapons training strategy should be revised to include mandatory C-UAS collective training events at platoon and company level. The 3D-printed target drone program developed by the JCU, which reduced the cost of training targets by 91 percent, should be adopted by armor units for home-station C-UAS training, enabling live-fire C-UAS engagement training without requiring dedicated procurement budgets.

Once organizational designs are finalized through the Pegasus Charge working groups and subsequent TiC rotations, TRADOC must develop a Mission-Essential Task List for the new organizations that incorporates C-UAS as a primary assessed mission task. At NTC rotations, C-UAS must become a primary assessed training objective with observer-controller capacity to administer realistic drone engagements and provide post-action review against established performance standards.

The M1E3 Abrams development program — expected to include integrated C-UAS capabilities including kinetic interceptor options, active protection system adaptation for drone defeat, and AI-enabled threat detection — must include a concurrent training development effort in its capabilities development document that mandates concurrent development of crew training programs, qualification tables, and initial cadre training before fielding.

The Maneuver Center of Excellence and the Joint Counter-small UAS University represent the two institutional nodes that must coordinate to deliver a complete combined arms C-UAS training architecture for the armored force. Neither institution alone spans the full training requirement: MCoE owns the combined arms maneuver doctrine and crew training standards; JCU owns the C-UAS operator training and equipment-specific instruction.

A formal MCoE-JCU Partnership Agreement should establish three shared programs:

• A combined arms C-UAS curriculum track within the JCU’s existing course structure, specifically designed for armor-branch and cavalry students, that integrates C-UAS defensive training with organic UAS offensive employment and combined arms fires planning context.
• A JCU faculty exchange program that embeds JCU C-UAS instructors at Fort Benning’s Armor and Infantry schools for curriculum review and student instruction, and reciprocally brings MCoE armor doctrine experts to Fort Sill.
• A shared doctrine development program that produces C-UAS training and employment doctrine for the armored force under joint MCoE-JCU authorship.

The Maneuver Innovation Lab at Fort Benning, opened February 2025 in partnership with DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and Columbus State University, provides the experimental infrastructure for this partnership.

Armor has reinvented itself before. The transition from horse cavalry to mechanized forces in the 1930s and 1940s was not an incremental update; it was a fundamental redesign of doctrine, organization, and training. The introduction of anti-tank guided missiles in the 1970s required the same fundamental redesign: new active protection concepts, revised gunnery doctrine, and a reorganized combined arms team.

The drone threat is the third inflection point for Armor. The evidence from Ukraine is unambiguous: 42.47 percent of vehicle losses to drone strikes, 27 of 31 U.S. Abrams destroyed by drones, and the transparent battlefield that has forced armored vehicles behind the zero line rather than into the combined arms assault. The armored force that does not solve the drone problem cannot fulfill its operational mission, regardless of platform capability, crew skill in conventional gunnery, or doctrinal sophistication.

The Army’s response — through Transforming in Contact 2.0, the revised TC 3-20.31, the Pegasus Charge organizational redesign, and the Maneuver Innovation Lab — reflects genuine institutional urgency. The gap that remains is between recognized requirement and formal training standard. C-UAS is a Critical Tactical Task. It must become a qualified task, with a crew qualification table, a home-station training program, and a combined arms collective training event.