Russia’s throwing away an advantage of the Soviet-style tank by building weird cage armor to shield them from drones

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Russia’s throwing away an advantage of the *******-style tank by building weird cage armor to shield them from drones

The threat of drones has forced both Ukraine and Russia to adapt, including welding cages onto their tanks.

*******-style tanks are known for being smaller and ******* to hit, but the cages, especially the weirder ones, can remove that advantage.

Russia may consider that an acceptable trade-off since tank-on-tank battles are rare but drones are everywhere.

Russia and Ukraine have been welding cages on their tanks to shield them from drones that explode on impact or drop ****** on unsuspecting crews.

For the Russians, which really only operate *******-style tanks, the cage armor add-ons can take away one of the advantages of this design by eliminating its low profile and making it easier to detect and engage. The unusually towering, bulky cage designs the Russians have employed are especially problematic in this regard.

But that may be a trade-off that Russia is willing to make, especially in this war where tank-on-tank battles are rare but

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to infantry and vehicles alike.

Russian tanks are smaller by design, with an emphasis on massed armor and mobility. Their design also gives them a lower profile than bulky Western tanks like the ********* Abrams or the British Challenger tanks, where the emphasis is on heavy armor and combat power.

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A Russian T-72 main battle tank.Contributor/Getty Images

The designs give the different tanks certain advantages in tank-on-tank combat.

While the M1 Abrams is pretty tall, “a Russian tank is fairly easy to hide,” Jeffrey Edmonds, a national security expert and former Abrams tanker, told Business Insider. “That was a serious comparison between *******-style tanks and US tanks. US tanks are much taller, but they have range and greater firepower. Russian tanks, ******* tanks are ******* to hit. They’re small.”

Or that was the case until the Russians began welding unusual cage armor, like the “turtle tank” armor, onto its tanks in response to the growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles on the battlefield. The

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, but they also make the tanks easier to spot.

“In a certain sense, it negates one of the strengths of the *******-style tank, which is that they’re small and ******* to see and ******* to hit,” Edmonds said.

The drone threat to tanks

Throughout much of the war, there have been countless videos from both sides of first-person-view drones

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of tanks or causing massive damage when exploding on impact with a vehicle’s more vulnerable areas.

Donetsk Oblast, a Ukrainian drone drops an M67 hand grenade into the driver’s hatch of a Russian T-90M, setting it ablaze.

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— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical)

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Cage armor began appearing on main battle tanks and other armored vehicles in Ukraine last year as a solution to that problem.

Some of the earliest photos of the added protection, which showed a Russian MT-LB and a T-72B tank with large, irregular screens for countering unmanned aerial vehicles, emerged online around June 2023.

At first, the designs appeared relatively crude, but the designs have evolved over time.

Ukraine, for instance, created the following sturdier, more sophisticated screen for its Abrams, offering better coverage of areas like the vulnerable turret, where the armor is weaker.

US-supplied M1A1 Abrams MBT in Ukrainian service, sporting a significant number of field modifications, including Kontakt-1 ERA bricks and improvised cage armor.

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One of the more unusual designs to show up in this war is the

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, which looks a bit like someone stuck a big garden shed over the top of a tank, leaving the front open for the main **** to stick out.

The name is because the cage resembles a turtle with its head poking out of its shell.

Video of an armored ******** by Russia’s 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade on Krasnohorivka, and another appearance of a tank with a massive counter-FPV shelter and EW jammer, which continues to driving after a DPICM strike. It looks like the lead tank in the first video has a…

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This bizarre design may be an effective solution to the UAV problem, though some have still gotten through its defenses, but it means the turtle tank sticks out like a sore thumb. Ukraine operates *******-style tanks alongside the tanks sent by its Western partners, but it has not created anything quite like Russia’s turtles.

It is a “giant target,” Edmonds said. “What is that giant thing moving over there? Oh, it’s a tank with a 10-foot cage on top of it.”

Trading a low-profile for protection

That’s not particularly ideal if it suddenly finds itself in a ****** with a tank or even an infantry fighting vehicle.

While cages and other similar protective measures have seen some use in previous conflicts, such as the US employment of cages around Strykers in Iraq and Afghanistan to defend against ****** rocket-propelled grenades, they have exploded in use during the war in Ukraine war due to the extensive use of drones.

For Russia, its more unusual adaptations to the ubiquitous drone threat mean potentially sacrificing one of the limited advantages of the *******-style tank design.

But in the Ukraine war, that may be an acceptable trade-off, especially as tank-on-tank battles have been and continue to be rare but drones continue to threaten vehicles,

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.

Ryan Pickrell contributed to this report.

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#Russias #throwing #advantage #Sovietstyle #tank #building #weird #cage #armor #shield #drones

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