--- title: "Death of the Tank? The Ukraine War's Biggest Myth" description: "It was the hot take that took over the internet. Back in the spring of 2022, you could hardly read about the Ukraine War without finding someone confidently asserting that the carnage inflicted on Russian forces showed that tanks were now obsolete. That the future of warfare lay not in expensive platforms, but in cheap, hi-tech weaponry fielded by small units.\n\nWhile much of that discourse has grown quieter since those early months, it is still out there, seemingly backed up by vast, ongoing tank losses. The open-source intelligence group Oryx confirmed in late March that Russia had lost at least 1,900 tanks, well over half of Moscow's pre-war operational fleet. Ukraine, too, has seen significant losses, somewhere between 450 and 700. For many casual observers, Elon Musk likely summed up the prevailing mood when he tweeted in January that \"tanks are a deathtrap now.\"\n\nYet for all the persistence of this take, there is one major problem with it. It is utter nonsense. Since March 2022, experts and military analysts have been cautioning against declaring the death of the tank. Somehow the idea has stumbled on regardless, a zombie take that refuses to die, born of the incredibly specific circumstances of Russia's unprovoked invasion.\n\nThose circumstances reward close analysis, because they reveal a very different story than the one that went viral. The collapse of Russian armor in Ukraine was not the death of a weapons system. It was a demonstration of what happens when an army abandons the fundamentals of combined arms maneuver warfare.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Oryx documented at least 1,900 confirmed Russian tank losses, more than half of Moscow's pre-war operational fleet, while Ukraine lost somewhere between 450 and 700 tanks.\n- The \"death of the tank\" narrative was primed by pre-war NATO disarmament trends, the falling cost of military drones, and Azerbaijan's destruction of an estimated 255 Armenian tanks in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War.\n- The majority of early Russian tank losses around Kyiv were actually inflicted by old-fashioned artillery, not the shoulder-fired Javelin missiles that dominated social media perception.\n- History shows the pattern repeating: the 1973 Sagger and the 9M133 Kornet of the Second Lebanon War both prompted obituaries for the tank, only for technology and tactics to adapt.\n- Russia's catastrophe stemmed from treating the invasion as a military demonstration, with no logistics, no combined arms planning, and secrecy so extreme that commanders were not warned in advance.\n- Defense figures including Ben Wallace, Ben Hodges, and Antony Beevor agree the main battle tank retains an irreplaceable role, especially for offensive operations and retaking captured territory.\n- Ukraine's own counteroffensives, from Kharkiv to Kherson, relied on armor, which is why the international coalition rushed to deliver over 100 NATO-standard tanks including Leopard 2s.\n\n## Primed to Believe\n\nEven now, well over a year into the Ukraine War, most people still remember those first weeks. The images of Russian tanks burning in the suburbs of Kyiv. The videos of Ukrainian irregulars unleashing hell with shoulder-mounted Javelins. The sight of Russia's 64-kilometre-long armored convoy trapped and under heavy fire, smoke billowing as drivers tried desperately to escape.\n\nComing at the beginning of a war many pundits had predicted Russia would win in mere days, these images seared themselves onto the collective consciousness. They were evidence not just of Ukrainian bravery, but also of the shocking flaws in Moscow's once-vaunted army. Yet while there were indeed serious tactical failures on display in those videos, they were not what most casual observers took away. Rather, many were convinced the Ukraine War had spelled the end of the tank.\n\nThe reality of Russia's failed assault on Kyiv comes later. First, it is worth answering a more fundamental question: why? Why were so many otherwise bright people ready to accept this conclusion at face value? Why were scores of armchair experts primed to believe that the era of the tank had gone the way of the mounted cavalry charge?\n\nTo understand, you have to look back at the years immediately before the war. This was a period when politicians were pushing hard to phase out what they saw as old-fashioned military concepts. The oldest of them all was the main battle tank. In the run-up to Russia's invasion, many NATO countries were shedding their heavy armor capabilities, instead preferring to focus on lighter, faster armored fighting vehicles.\n\nFor America, that meant downsizing tank formations as part of an overhaul of the Marine Corps. For the British, it meant announcing plans to mothball the Challenger 2 and focus instead on the Ajax fighting vehicle. For the Dutch, it meant giving up on heavy armor altogether. While controversial, these decisions were often backed by both the defense establishment and the political elite.\n\nAs late as November 2021, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was able to sit before a Defence Select Committee and declare that \"the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on European landmass are over.\" That he was not immediately laughed out of the room was down to what many had recently seen with their own eyes: the arrival of new, disruptive technologies that seemed to have scrambled old certainties about warfare.\n\n## The Rise of the Cheap Drone\n\nThe most disruptive of these new technologies were cheap military drones. The keyword there is \"cheap.\" While well-funded militaries like the US had been fielding drones for decades, those had been expensive, hi-tech machines out of the reach of most. As the 2010s progressed, though, prices started falling. While top-end Reapers might cost over $32 million, Turkish TB2s were going on sale for less than a sixth of that.\n\nAt the same time, the possibility of turning commercial drones into mini-weapons was becoming obvious. ISIS, for example, deployed bomb-holding drones in its battles. Although these were mostly ineffective, they pointed to a coming era when even non-state actors could easily exploit the vulnerability of modern tanks to top-down attacks. For those whose job it is to worry about such things, the warning signs were stacking up alarmingly.\n\nIn Libya, TB2s made mincemeat of General Haftar's forces. In Syria, they took out regime tanks with ease. But it was what happened in the autumn of 2020 that really shook up military planners. The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan was a shock to everyone. In six short weeks, Azerbaijan used Turkish drones to annihilate Armenian forces, destroying an estimated 255 tanks.\n\nVideos of helpless tank crews being obliterated by fire from the heavens convinced many that warfare had been transformed, that the calculus had fundamentally shifted between expensive and inexpensive weapons platforms. It was material like this circulating in the background as Russia made plans for its invasion. A mood music that primed everyone to believe that relying on tanks could lead a modern army to disaster. And the Kremlin was about to give them exactly the kind of disaster they had been waiting for.\n\n## Russian Catastrophe\n\nBy now, the sheer catastrophe of Moscow's initial run at Kyiv is almost legendary. When morning dawned on February 24, 2022, with Russian armor pouring over the border, it seemed safe to assume that this was it, that the Kremlin's overwhelming firepower would quickly shatter Ukraine's defenses. Instead, pretty much the exact opposite happened.\n\nThe level of losses Russia suffered in northern Ukraine that March remain head-spinning. Before the month was out, intelligence services were estimating that Moscow had already lost more troops than in the entire ten-year Soviet-Afghan War. Images circulated of dead Russian soldiers, their bodies abandoned in the snow. If anything, the tank losses were even more striking. By March 14, the Telegraph was reporting that Moscow had lost over 200 tanks. By the time of the retreat in early April, that figure may have been as high as 400.\n\nJust as with the human casualties, emblematic pictures of this disaster appeared online. Explosions rocking the trapped Russian armor column. Ukrainian troops walking calmly through the skeletons of dozens of tanks outside Bucha. Unlike in Nagorno-Karabakh, though, it had not been drones that unleashed such devastation. Rather, the Ukrainians had seemingly created this hellscape with anti-tank guided missiles.\n\nThe word \"seemingly\" matters, because it would later turn out that the majority of losses had been inflicted with good, old-fashioned artillery. But perception is what shaped the narrative. And the perception, fueled by videos on TikTok, was of small Ukrainian units using cheap, shoulder-mounted weapons to send their invaders to hell.\n\nThe king of these was the \"fire and forget\" Javelin missile. Like a drone, it comes down from above, adjusting its trajectory to hit the weak spot at the top of a tank. Able to lock on and automatically home in, it allows units to fire and quickly move away. Most importantly, a single Javelin in 2022 cost just $176,000. A great deal of money for most of us, but a mere fraction of the cost of the T-72 tanks they were taking out.\n\nJust as with drones in Nagorno-Karabakh, the opening weeks of the Ukraine War only seemed to confirm that an epochal shift was underway, one towards inexpensive, hi-tech kit. Just three years prior, Dominic Cummings, then chief adviser to the UK prime minister, had pooh-poohed spending money on aircraft carriers, declaring that \"a teenager will be able to deploy a drone from their smartphone to sink one of these multibillion-dollar platforms.\" Now it looked like, where ground-based expensive platforms were concerned, he had been right.\n\n## The Losses That Kept Coming\n\nIf you have only been keeping one eye on the war since, you might still have that impression. Although dramatic images of burning Russian tanks faded from the news after the retreat from Kyiv, that does not mean losses tapered off. By early 2023, Oryx had documented over 1,000 confirmed Russian tank losses, a number that would soon be supercharged by a series of dramatic failures.\n\nThe most dramatic of all was likely the Battle of Vuhledar, which has been called \"one of the most embarrassing defeats suffered by Moscow in the entire war.\" Across January and February, Russian forces attempted to advance on the Donetsk mining town of Vuhledar, only to suffer catastrophic losses. Funnelled into a \"kill zone\" between two minefields, the tank columns became sitting ducks as the Ukrainians picked the lead and rear vehicles off with Javelins and then let artillery do the rest. Up to 130 of Moscow's tanks are thought to have been lost in this single action.\n\nThen there was the similar assault the Kremlin tried on the city of Avdiivka. That attack led the UK's Ministry of Defence to declare, with remarkable understatement, that \"Russia's 10th Tank Regiment has likely lost a large proportion of its tanks while attempting to surround Avdiivka from the south.\"\n\nThe pattern is clear. Time and again, Russian heavy armor has rolled into battle, only to be annihilated by Ukrainian defenders. Even the state-of-the-art T-90 main battle tank has recorded around 56 losses. Yet despite the eye-watering numbers, there is a good reason nearly all experts disagree with the idea that we are witnessing the death of the tank. Instead, they argue that we are witnessing something less sensational but still vital: a real-time lesson in the continued importance of combined arms maneuver warfare.\n\n## Inside the Errors\n\nIf you want to understand tracked killing machines, you could do worse than asking David Willey. As curator at Britain's Tank Museum, Willey is a font of knowledge about mechanized maneuver warfare, and not afraid to share his opinions. So when the BBC interviewed him about the death of the tank, he was bluntly dismissive. \"This is a story that comes around every time a tank gets knocked out,\" he told the broadcaster. \"Because the tank is such a symbol of power, when it's defeated people jump to the conclusion it's the end of the tank.\"\n\nHistory bears this analysis out. Back in 1973, the Yom Kippur War terrified global militaries when the Sagger anti-tank guided missile turned dozens of tanks into rolling death traps. Twenty-three years later, another Israeli conflict, the Second Lebanon War, shocked everyone with the sight of 9M133 Kornets zooming five kilometres to punch flaming holes in armor with laser precision. In both cases, the arrival of a cheap, easy-to-use weapon seemed to have rendered tanks as suddenly useless as muskets or men carrying pikes.\n\nQuickly, though, changes in technology and tactics caught up with these breakthroughs. Units operating Saggers could be taken down by supporting fire. The Trophy active protection system could intercept Kornets. Perhaps more importantly, armies could learn to adapt to and prepare for a new threat.\n\nIt is worth returning to the war that really worried all those NATO planners: the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. Respected military analyst Rob Lee did a piece on the conflict and concluded that, rather than spell the death of the tank, it in fact showcased its utility. Over the course of six weeks, Azerbaijan retook hundreds of square kilometres of territory from Armenia. The key to this devastating victory was a tank breakthrough that smashed Armenia's defensive lines and allowed Azeri armor to cover and hold swathes of land.\n\nOf course, Azerbaijan was also the side fielding the drones. Perhaps you could argue that, had Armenia been equipped with TB2s, the Azeri tanks would also have been obliterated. But Lee's piece does not think so. In it, he notes how Azeri forces destroyed 60 percent of Armenian air defenses around Nagorno-Karabakh within an hour of the war starting. With air superiority achieved, Baku could then send in the TB2s. Lacking air defenses, Armenia's tanks became sitting ducks.\n\nThe correct conclusion from that war, then, was not that drones are some sort of tank-killing superweapon, any more than Saggers were in the 1970s or Javelins are today. Rather, the conflict showed the ongoing importance of combining layered air defense with heavy armor formations. The Azeris were able to do this effectively, and thus won the war.\n\n## The Real Lesson From Ukraine\n\nAll of this is a roundabout way of coming back to the lessons from Ukraine. Lessons based not on the superiority of new, cheap weapons, but on the Russian military's spectacular incompetence.\n\nWhen planning to drive columns of armor deep into enemy territory, you need to be prepared for that enemy to try and take your heavy armor out. That means having backup to protect your tanks. It means air support and artillery fire that can suppress units wielding Javelins. It means infantry formations who can take out survivors, allowing your army to safely proceed.\n\nAs War on the Rocks wrote in disbelief of the failed Russian advances: \"Where is the accompanying infantry with the tank formations, who are supposed to bust the ambushes executed by Ukrainian forces? Where are the suppressive mortar, artillery, and close air support fires?\" The publication summed up Moscow's problems with a single damning phrase: \"The Russian Army has shown that it is not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver.\"\n\nThe strangest part is that all of this is exactly what Russian military doctrine calls for. There is no part of Russia's doctrine that says, in effect, \"just drive a bunch of unsupported tanks at the enemy. It'll probably be fine.\" Yet that is exactly what happened. And figuring out why is key to understanding how the lessons from this particular war may not be applicable to many future conflicts.\n\n## How the Kremlin Got It So Wrong\n\nToward the end of March 2023, the analysis group RUSI published a long-format report into Russian preparations for war with Ukraine, and how the Kremlin got things so catastrophically wrong. It is a fascinating piece that goes deep on the agents Moscow had planted throughout Ukrainian society and the jaw-dropping assumptions made by Putin's circle of advisers.\n\nThe most interesting part, though, covers the sheer incompetence of the full-scale invasion. The RUSI report concludes that \"the lack of proper logistics, the lack of fuel and ammunition, the vulnerability of long Russian convoys (...) all indicate that Russia carried out the invasion as a military demonstration, without seriously considering the need to conduct full-fledged long-term combat operations.\"\n\nIn other words, the invasion force was just a bigger version of the parades that drive through Red Square. Intimidating, sure, but not intended to actually engage in a shooting match. Moscow thought it had infiltrated Ukrainian society to such a degree that its agents would be able to spread enough chaos that the government would collapse on its own. It was from this original, mistaken belief that all of Russia's other failures flowed.\n\nWith the Kyiv government expected to collapse, and Ukrainians in the east and south expected to welcome the Russians as liberators, no planning was put in place for combined arms operations. Because surprise was a key component, the Kremlin's planners kept it secret even from their own military commanders. That meant logisticians were given no advance warning to prepare for high-speed tank advances.\n\nThis is vitally important, because tanks are, to quote Rob Lee, \"among the most logistics-intensive pieces of equipment. They require routine maintenance, spare parts, and substantial fuel to keep them operational.\" Good preparation is therefore essential. The Russians did not have it, and so the world was treated to the sight of tanks running out of fuel and breaking down, snarling up roads.\n\nThe surprise component explains other failures, too. Where the Russians did have assets like artillery and air defense, tank commanders were often ordered to move so fast that they left those assets behind, leaving heavy armor exposed and vulnerable. Where they did have support infantry, in the form of motorized rifle battalions, those units were often operating at only two-thirds strength, on top of suffering recent personnel cuts.\n\nBasically, if a military analyst had sat down to plan the most reckless, kamikaze way to invade a country, they might have come up with something like the Kremlin's war plan. The entire thing hinged on the Ukrainians not fighting back. When they did, it fell apart.\n\n## What the World Saw Instead\n\nThat, however, is not what the world saw on social media. No, the world saw tanks trapped and being blown apart on clogged-up roads. It saw lone Ukrainians with cheap missiles taking out heavy weapons platforms without breaking a sweat. In our hyper-visual culture, it is perhaps no surprise that what most people took from these videos is exactly what Elon Musk later tweeted: that tanks are deathtraps, and that we are in a new era of warfare.\n\nThe same dynamic applies to the other major Russian screw-ups at Vuhledar and Avdiivka. In the Vuhledar debacle, Russian armor repeatedly drove into a narrow kill zone between two minefields where the Ukrainians could pick them off at leisure. In such circumstances, any vehicle would be a death trap. As a disbelieving former British tank commander told The Telegraph of the Vuhledar disaster: \"Repeating the same thing time after time and hoping for a different outcome is a sign of madness, or deficiency in capability and initiative.\"\n\nAvdiivka offered a similar lesson. The 10th Tank Regiment of the 3rd Army Corps was decimated in a series of head-on tank assaults. Shortly after, Ukrainian intelligence claimed most of those in the regiment were undisciplined, suffering from low morale, and, most stereotypically Russian of all, drunk.\n\nThese are very specific circumstances. They were born of Putin's micromanaging of the war from afar, of political pressure trumping military doctrine, and of the psychological toll that a year of fighting had taken on an unprepared Russian army. That means anyone hoping to draw conclusions for future conflicts needs to keep in mind that the American or Chinese militaries are unlikely to operate like this. Which means tank losses are unlikely to be so catastrophic in a better-fought war. And, as it turns out, that is probably for the best, because tanks still have a specific, vital role to play in warfare.\n\n## The Tank Is Dead, Long Live the Tank\n\nTo gauge the future of the tank, post-Ukraine War, just look at what important people in the national security community are saying about it. According to UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace: \"Ukraine has shown that armor is important.\" Or, as retired US general Ben Hodges told the BBC: \"There will always be a need for protected mobile firepower.\"\n\nPerhaps the best line goes to Australian Major General Kathryn Toohey. Originally made in 2019, it has since been reposted by military analysts commenting on the Ukraine War: \"Tanks are like dinner jackets. You don't need them very often, but when you do, nothing else will do.\"\n\nThese quotes pile up not because the analysts are secretly on the payroll of some Big Tank lobby, but because those who know anything about warfare will happily tell you that, far from being obsolete, main battle tanks have an irreplaceable role to play. Former US Marine Corps colonel Mark Cancian put it this way when speaking to Insider: \"Tanks provide mobility, firepower, and protection (...) offering soldiers the luxury of moving and shooting at the same time.\"\n\nWriting in the Washington Post, Antony Beevor explained their utility in even starker terms: \"Offense is the realm where main battle tanks, when used correctly, can produce unrivaled results. Much depends on how they are deployed in combined arms operations, preferably with drone support and air cover from fighters.\"\n\nThese are all people who know warfare. And what they are saying is that, when it comes to offensive operations, there is simply nothing else that does what main battle tanks can do. Armored fighting vehicles like Bradleys can provide speed and protection to quickly move infantry around the battlefield, but they lack the heavy firepower and punch that a main battle tank like an Abrams can bring. That makes such tanks ideal for retaking captured territory.\n\nWe have already seen this in the Ukraine War. While the Kharkiv counteroffensive was characterized by fast-moving armored vehicles breaking through thin Russian lines, Ukraine's liberation of Kherson required heavy armor backed by artillery and infantry to grind forward. Future Ukrainian counteroffensives might help put the \"tank is dead\" myth to bed once and for all.\n\nAs of mid-2023, Russia's spring offensive appeared to be petering out, and most observers were waiting for a major Ukrainian counteroffensive to begin. To have any chance of succeeding, analysts agree, Kyiv would need to field an enormous number of heavy tanks. Tanks that would be instrumental in liberating fortified cities in key locations in the east and south. Hence the pressure campaign in January for Germany to deliver Leopard 2s. Hence the international tank coalition trying to boost Ukraine's stocks with over 100 NATO-standard main battle tanks. No one thinks the tank is so dead that Ukraine can retake all its territory with just some light armor and a bunch of TB2s patrolling the skies.\n\nInstead, Kyiv's forces will need to master the sort of combined arms warfare the Russians failed so spectacularly at. With enough support and enough massed armor, they might just punch a hole through Moscow's defenses. If that happens, it would obviously be a major cause for celebration, a sign that Ukraine may be able to expel the Russians for good. It might also, at last, puncture the myth that the tank is obsolete. Rather than ruined Russian T-72s outside Bucha, our social media feeds might fill instead with videos of Leopard 2s and Challengers rolling across the Ukrainian steppe, bringing liberation to millions now suffering under Moscow's tyrannical rule.\n\n## Why the Myth Matters\n\nIt could be those images, more than anything else, that finally kill this zombie idea about the death of the tank. In today's visual age, it is breathtaking how quickly distortions and bad takes can grip the public imagination. How filtering the world through an algorithm can give us a warped idea of what our military priorities should be.\n\nWhile it is comforting to know that experts are not usually suckered in by this, it is sobering how easily everyone else is. And not just regular people, but those with power and influence. People like Elon Musk. People like politicians. People who can sway the public, and even make decisions on what money should be spent on which weapons systems.\n\nIn this way, it is of vital importance to try and dispel such myths. To fight back against lazy narratives that would prefer to talk up the utility of Javelins and drones, or the failure of tanks, rather than focus on the harder lessons of tactics and logistics. Because, like it or not, there may come a time when it is our own societies fighting a war against some genocidal power. And if that does come to pass, it is better that we go in with our eyes open, and not clouded by myths spread on social media.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### How many tanks has Russia lost in the Ukraine War?\n\nThe open-source intelligence group Oryx confirmed at least 1,900 Russian tank losses, well over half of Moscow's pre-war operational fleet. By early 2023, Oryx had documented over 1,000 confirmed losses, a figure that climbed further after disasters at Vuhledar and Avdiivka. Even the state-of-the-art T-90 main battle tank has recorded around 56 losses. Ukraine, too, has lost somewhere between 450 and 700 tanks.\n\n### Why did Russia's tanks perform so catastrophically in Ukraine?\n\nRussia treated the invasion as a military demonstration rather than a serious combat operation. According to the RUSI report, there was a lack of proper logistics, fuel, and ammunition, and the Kremlin kept the plan secret even from its own commanders. Tanks ran out of fuel, outran their artillery and air defense, and advanced with support infantry operating at only two-thirds strength. The entire plan hinged on Kyiv collapsing on its own; when Ukraine fought back, the improvised invasion force fell apart.\n\n### What is combined arms warfare and why does it matter here?\n\nCombined arms warfare means using tanks alongside protective backup: air support and artillery to suppress anti-tank units, and infantry to clear ambushes and take out survivors so armor can advance safely. War on the Rocks concluded that the Russian Army was \"not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver.\" When armor operates without this support, as at Vuhledar where Russian columns were funneled into a kill zone between two minefields, almost any vehicle becomes a death trap.\n\n### Has the tank been declared obsolete before?\n\nYes, repeatedly. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War terrified global militaries when the Sagger anti-tank guided missile turned dozens of tanks into rolling death traps. In the Second Lebanon War, 9M133 Kornets punched holes in armor from five kilometres away. Each time, technology and tactics adapted. Saggers could be suppressed with supporting fire, and the Trophy active protection system could intercept Kornets. Tank Museum curator David Willey told the BBC: \"This is a story that comes around every time a tank gets knocked out.\"\n\n### Why does Ukraine still need heavy tanks if they are so vulnerable?\n\nBecause nothing else does what a main battle tank can do on offense. Ukraine's liberation of Kherson required heavy armor backed by artillery and infantry to grind forward, while the faster Kharkiv counteroffensive relied on armored vehicles breaking through thin lines. To retake fortified cities in the east and south, analysts agree Kyiv needs an enormous number of heavy tanks, which is why the international coalition rushed over 100 NATO-standard main battle tanks, including German Leopard 2s, into the fight. As Antony Beevor wrote, \"Offense is the realm where main battle tanks, when used correctly, can produce unrivaled results.\"\n\n## Sources\n\n1. Elon Musk tank tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1611669863097069569\n2. Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/20/tanks-ukraine-war-missiles-mobility/\n3. War on the Rocks: https://warontherocks.com/2022/04/the-tank-is-dead-long-live-the-javelin-the-switchblade-the/\n4. Rob Lee, War on the Rocks: https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/the-tank-is-not-obsolete-and-other-observations-about-the-future-of-combat/\n5. Telegraph, kill zone at Vuhledar: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/02/how-ukraine-used-mines-fool-russia-humiliating-defeat/\n6. Politico: https://www.politico.eu/article/why-tanks-are-back-in-fashion-in-21st-century-warfare-ukraine-russia/\n7. Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ukraine-tank-force-western-dumb-mistakes-tip-scales-2023-3\n8. Stephen Biddle, War on the Rocks: https://warontherocks.com/2022/11/ukraine-and-the-future-of-offensive-maneuver/\n9. RUSI overview of all Russian combat operations: https://static.rusi.org/202303-SR-Unconventional-Operations-Russo-Ukrainian-War-web-final.pdf.pdf\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/death-of-the-tank-ukraine-war-biggest-myth.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/death-of-the-tank-ukraine-war-biggest-myth datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/LxY_oIohm-c/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 3cd361e33733d0381a77c3921c3493e0a4f5b766bca27f7662c6f221f9af052e tokens: 7376 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/death-of-the-tank-ukraine-war-biggest-myth.md.summary.md --- It was the hot take that took over the internet. Back in the spring of 2022, you could hardly read about the Ukraine War without finding someone confidently asserting that the carnage inflicted on Russian forces showed that tanks were now obsolete. That the future of warfare lay not in expensive platforms, but in cheap, hi-tech weaponry fielded by small units. While much of that discourse has grown quieter since those early months, it is still out there, seemingly backed up by vast, ongoing tank losses. The open-source intelligence group Oryx confirmed in late March that Russia had lost at least 1,900 tanks, well over half of Moscow's pre-war operational fleet. Ukraine, too, has seen significant losses, somewhere between 450 and 700. For many casual observers, Elon Musk likely summed up the prevailing mood when he tweeted in January that "tanks are a deathtrap now." Yet for all the persistence of this take, there is one major problem with it. It is utter nonsense. Since March 2022, experts and military analysts have been cautioning against declaring the death of the tank. Somehow the idea has stumbled on regardless, a zombie take that refuses to die, born of the incredibly specific circumstances of Russia's unprovoked invasion. Those circumstances reward close analysis, because they reveal a very different story than the one that went viral. The collapse of Russian armor in Ukraine was not the death of a weapons system. It was a demonstration of what happens when an army abandons the fundamentals of combined arms maneuver warfare. ## Key Takeaways - Oryx documented at least 1,900 confirmed Russian tank losses, more than half of Moscow's pre-war operational fleet, while Ukraine lost somewhere between 450 and 700 tanks. - The "death of the tank" narrative was primed by pre-war NATO disarmament trends, the falling cost of military drones, and Azerbaijan's destruction of an estimated 255 Armenian tanks in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. - The majority of early Russian tank losses around Kyiv were actually inflicted by old-fashioned artillery, not the shoulder-fired Javelin missiles that dominated social media perception. - History shows the pattern repeating: the 1973 Sagger and the 9M133 Kornet of the Second Lebanon War both prompted obituaries for the tank, only for technology and tactics to adapt. - Russia's catastrophe stemmed from treating the invasion as a military demonstration, with no logistics, no combined arms planning, and secrecy so extreme that commanders were not warned in advance. - Defense figures including Ben Wallace, Ben Hodges, and Antony Beevor agree the main battle tank retains an irreplaceable role, especially for offensive operations and retaking captured territory. - Ukraine's own counteroffensives, from Kharkiv to Kherson, relied on armor, which is why the international coalition rushed to deliver over 100 NATO-standard tanks including Leopard 2s. ## Primed to Believe Even now, well over a year into the Ukraine War, most people still remember those first weeks. The images of Russian tanks burning in the suburbs of Kyiv. The videos of Ukrainian irregulars unleashing hell with shoulder-mounted Javelins. The sight of Russia's 64-kilometre-long armored convoy trapped and under heavy fire, smoke billowing as drivers tried desperately to escape. Coming at the beginning of a war many pundits had predicted Russia would win in mere days, these images seared themselves onto the collective consciousness. They were evidence not just of Ukrainian bravery, but also of the shocking flaws in Moscow's once-vaunted army. Yet while there were indeed serious tactical failures on display in those videos, they were not what most casual observers took away. Rather, many were convinced the Ukraine War had spelled the end of the tank. The reality of Russia's failed assault on Kyiv comes later. First, it is worth answering a more fundamental question: why? Why were so many otherwise bright people ready to accept this conclusion at face value? Why were scores of armchair experts primed to believe that the era of the tank had gone the way of the mounted cavalry charge? To understand, you have to look back at the years immediately before the war. This was a period when politicians were pushing hard to phase out what they saw as old-fashioned military concepts. The oldest of them all was the main battle tank. In the run-up to Russia's invasion, many NATO countries were shedding their heavy armor capabilities, instead preferring to focus on lighter, faster armored fighting vehicles. For America, that meant downsizing tank formations as part of an overhaul of the Marine Corps. For the British, it meant announcing plans to mothball the Challenger 2 and focus instead on the Ajax fighting vehicle. For the Dutch, it meant giving up on heavy armor altogether. While controversial, these decisions were often backed by both the defense establishment and the political elite. As late as November 2021, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was able to sit before a Defence Select Committee and declare that "the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on European landmass are over." That he was not immediately laughed out of the room was down to what many had recently seen with their own eyes: the arrival of new, disruptive technologies that seemed to have scrambled old certainties about warfare. ## The Rise of the Cheap Drone The most disruptive of these new technologies were cheap military drones. The keyword there is "cheap." While well-funded militaries like the US had been fielding drones for decades, those had been expensive, hi-tech machines out of the reach of most. As the 2010s progressed, though, prices started falling. While top-end Reapers might cost over $32 million, Turkish TB2s were going on sale for less than a sixth of that. At the same time, the possibility of turning commercial drones into mini-weapons was becoming obvious. ISIS, for example, deployed bomb-holding drones in its battles. Although these were mostly ineffective, they pointed to a coming era when even non-state actors could easily exploit the vulnerability of modern tanks to top-down attacks. For those whose job it is to worry about such things, the warning signs were stacking up alarmingly. In Libya, TB2s made mincemeat of General Haftar's forces. In Syria, they took out regime tanks with ease. But it was what happened in the autumn of 2020 that really shook up military planners. The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan was a shock to everyone. In six short weeks, Azerbaijan used Turkish drones to annihilate Armenian forces, destroying an estimated 255 tanks. Videos of helpless tank crews being obliterated by fire from the heavens convinced many that warfare had been transformed, that the calculus had fundamentally shifted between expensive and inexpensive weapons platforms. It was material like this circulating in the background as Russia made plans for its invasion. A mood music that primed everyone to believe that relying on tanks could lead a modern army to disaster. And the Kremlin was about to give them exactly the kind of disaster they had been waiting for. ## Russian Catastrophe By now, the sheer catastrophe of Moscow's initial run at Kyiv is almost legendary. When morning dawned on February 24, 2022, with Russian armor pouring over the border, it seemed safe to assume that this was it, that the Kremlin's overwhelming firepower would quickly shatter Ukraine's defenses. Instead, pretty much the exact opposite happened. The level of losses Russia suffered in northern Ukraine that March remain head-spinning. Before the month was out, intelligence services were estimating that Moscow had already lost more troops than in the entire ten-year Soviet-Afghan War. Images circulated of dead Russian soldiers, their bodies abandoned in the snow. If anything, the tank losses were even more striking. By March 14, the Telegraph was reporting that Moscow had lost over 200 tanks. By the time of the retreat in early April, that figure may have been as high as 400. Just as with the human casualties, emblematic pictures of this disaster appeared online. Explosions rocking the trapped Russian armor column. Ukrainian troops walking calmly through the skeletons of dozens of tanks outside Bucha. Unlike in Nagorno-Karabakh, though, it had not been drones that unleashed such devastation. Rather, the Ukrainians had seemingly created this hellscape with anti-tank guided missiles. The word "seemingly" matters, because it would later turn out that the majority of losses had been inflicted with good, old-fashioned artillery. But perception is what shaped the narrative. And the perception, fueled by videos on TikTok, was of small Ukrainian units using cheap, shoulder-mounted weapons to send their invaders to hell. The king of these was the "fire and forget" Javelin missile. Like a drone, it comes down from above, adjusting its trajectory to hit the weak spot at the top of a tank. Able to lock on and automatically home in, it allows units to fire and quickly move away. Most importantly, a single Javelin in 2022 cost just $176,000. A great deal of money for most of us, but a mere fraction of the cost of the T-72 tanks they were taking out. Just as with drones in Nagorno-Karabakh, the opening weeks of the Ukraine War only seemed to confirm that an epochal shift was underway, one towards inexpensive, hi-tech kit. Just three years prior, Dominic Cummings, then chief adviser to the UK prime minister, had pooh-poohed spending money on aircraft carriers, declaring that "a teenager will be able to deploy a drone from their smartphone to sink one of these multibillion-dollar platforms." Now it looked like, where ground-based expensive platforms were concerned, he had been right. ## The Losses That Kept Coming If you have only been keeping one eye on the war since, you might still have that impression. Although dramatic images of burning Russian tanks faded from the news after the retreat from Kyiv, that does not mean losses tapered off. By early 2023, Oryx had documented over 1,000 confirmed Russian tank losses, a number that would soon be supercharged by a series of dramatic failures. The most dramatic of all was likely the Battle of Vuhledar, which has been called "one of the most embarrassing defeats suffered by Moscow in the entire war." Across January and February, Russian forces attempted to advance on the Donetsk mining town of Vuhledar, only to suffer catastrophic losses. Funnelled into a "kill zone" between two minefields, the tank columns became sitting ducks as the Ukrainians picked the lead and rear vehicles off with Javelins and then let artillery do the rest. Up to 130 of Moscow's tanks are thought to have been lost in this single action. Then there was the similar assault the Kremlin tried on the city of Avdiivka. That attack led the UK's Ministry of Defence to declare, with remarkable understatement, that "Russia's 10th Tank Regiment has likely lost a large proportion of its tanks while attempting to surround Avdiivka from the south." The pattern is clear. Time and again, Russian heavy armor has rolled into battle, only to be annihilated by Ukrainian defenders. Even the state-of-the-art T-90 main battle tank has recorded around 56 losses. Yet despite the eye-watering numbers, there is a good reason nearly all experts disagree with the idea that we are witnessing the death of the tank. Instead, they argue that we are witnessing something less sensational but still vital: a real-time lesson in the continued importance of combined arms maneuver warfare. ## Inside the Errors If you want to understand tracked killing machines, you could do worse than asking David Willey. As curator at Britain's Tank Museum, Willey is a font of knowledge about mechanized maneuver warfare, and not afraid to share his opinions. So when the BBC interviewed him about the death of the tank, he was bluntly dismissive. "This is a story that comes around every time a tank gets knocked out," he told the broadcaster. "Because the tank is such a symbol of power, when it's defeated people jump to the conclusion it's the end of the tank." History bears this analysis out. Back in 1973, the Yom Kippur War terrified global militaries when the Sagger anti-tank guided missile turned dozens of tanks into rolling death traps. Twenty-three years later, another Israeli conflict, the Second Lebanon War, shocked everyone with the sight of 9M133 Kornets zooming five kilometres to punch flaming holes in armor with laser precision. In both cases, the arrival of a cheap, easy-to-use weapon seemed to have rendered tanks as suddenly useless as muskets or men carrying pikes. Quickly, though, changes in technology and tactics caught up with these breakthroughs. Units operating Saggers could be taken down by supporting fire. The Trophy active protection system could intercept Kornets. Perhaps more importantly, armies could learn to adapt to and prepare for a new threat. It is worth returning to the war that really worried all those NATO planners: the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. Respected military analyst Rob Lee did a piece on the conflict and concluded that, rather than spell the death of the tank, it in fact showcased its utility. Over the course of six weeks, Azerbaijan retook hundreds of square kilometres of territory from Armenia. The key to this devastating victory was a tank breakthrough that smashed Armenia's defensive lines and allowed Azeri armor to cover and hold swathes of land. Of course, Azerbaijan was also the side fielding the drones. Perhaps you could argue that, had Armenia been equipped with TB2s, the Azeri tanks would also have been obliterated. But Lee's piece does not think so. In it, he notes how Azeri forces destroyed 60 percent of Armenian air defenses around Nagorno-Karabakh within an hour of the war starting. With air superiority achieved, Baku could then send in the TB2s. Lacking air defenses, Armenia's tanks became sitting ducks. The correct conclusion from that war, then, was not that drones are some sort of tank-killing superweapon, any more than Saggers were in the 1970s or Javelins are today. Rather, the conflict showed the ongoing importance of combining layered air defense with heavy armor formations. The Azeris were able to do this effectively, and thus won the war. ## The Real Lesson From Ukraine All of this is a roundabout way of coming back to the lessons from Ukraine. Lessons based not on the superiority of new, cheap weapons, but on the Russian military's spectacular incompetence. When planning to drive columns of armor deep into enemy territory, you need to be prepared for that enemy to try and take your heavy armor out. That means having backup to protect your tanks. It means air support and artillery fire that can suppress units wielding Javelins. It means infantry formations who can take out survivors, allowing your army to safely proceed. As War on the Rocks wrote in disbelief of the failed Russian advances: "Where is the accompanying infantry with the tank formations, who are supposed to bust the ambushes executed by Ukrainian forces? Where are the suppressive mortar, artillery, and close air support fires?" The publication summed up Moscow's problems with a single damning phrase: "The Russian Army has shown that it is not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver." The strangest part is that all of this is exactly what Russian military doctrine calls for. There is no part of Russia's doctrine that says, in effect, "just drive a bunch of unsupported tanks at the enemy. It'll probably be fine." Yet that is exactly what happened. And figuring out why is key to understanding how the lessons from this particular war may not be applicable to many future conflicts. ## How the Kremlin Got It So Wrong Toward the end of March 2023, the analysis group RUSI published a long-format report into Russian preparations for war with Ukraine, and how the Kremlin got things so catastrophically wrong. It is a fascinating piece that goes deep on the agents Moscow had planted throughout Ukrainian society and the jaw-dropping assumptions made by Putin's circle of advisers. The most interesting part, though, covers the sheer incompetence of the full-scale invasion. The RUSI report concludes that "the lack of proper logistics, the lack of fuel and ammunition, the vulnerability of long Russian convoys (...) all indicate that Russia carried out the invasion as a military demonstration, without seriously considering the need to conduct full-fledged long-term combat operations." In other words, the invasion force was just a bigger version of the parades that drive through Red Square. Intimidating, sure, but not intended to actually engage in a shooting match. Moscow thought it had infiltrated Ukrainian society to such a degree that its agents would be able to spread enough chaos that the government would collapse on its own. It was from this original, mistaken belief that all of Russia's other failures flowed. With the Kyiv government expected to collapse, and Ukrainians in the east and south expected to welcome the Russians as liberators, no planning was put in place for combined arms operations. Because surprise was a key component, the Kremlin's planners kept it secret even from their own military commanders. That meant logisticians were given no advance warning to prepare for high-speed tank advances. This is vitally important, because tanks are, to quote Rob Lee, "among the most logistics-intensive pieces of equipment. They require routine maintenance, spare parts, and substantial fuel to keep them operational." Good preparation is therefore essential. The Russians did not have it, and so the world was treated to the sight of tanks running out of fuel and breaking down, snarling up roads. The surprise component explains other failures, too. Where the Russians did have assets like artillery and air defense, tank commanders were often ordered to move so fast that they left those assets behind, leaving heavy armor exposed and vulnerable. Where they did have support infantry, in the form of motorized rifle battalions, those units were often operating at only two-thirds strength, on top of suffering recent personnel cuts. Basically, if a military analyst had sat down to plan the most reckless, kamikaze way to invade a country, they might have come up with something like the Kremlin's war plan. The entire thing hinged on the Ukrainians not fighting back. When they did, it fell apart. ## What the World Saw Instead That, however, is not what the world saw on social media. No, the world saw tanks trapped and being blown apart on clogged-up roads. It saw lone Ukrainians with cheap missiles taking out heavy weapons platforms without breaking a sweat. In our hyper-visual culture, it is perhaps no surprise that what most people took from these videos is exactly what Elon Musk later tweeted: that tanks are deathtraps, and that we are in a new era of warfare. The same dynamic applies to the other major Russian screw-ups at Vuhledar and Avdiivka. In the Vuhledar debacle, Russian armor repeatedly drove into a narrow kill zone between two minefields where the Ukrainians could pick them off at leisure. In such circumstances, any vehicle would be a death trap. As a disbelieving former British tank commander told The Telegraph of the Vuhledar disaster: "Repeating the same thing time after time and hoping for a different outcome is a sign of madness, or deficiency in capability and initiative." Avdiivka offered a similar lesson. The 10th Tank Regiment of the 3rd Army Corps was decimated in a series of head-on tank assaults. Shortly after, Ukrainian intelligence claimed most of those in the regiment were undisciplined, suffering from low morale, and, most stereotypically Russian of all, drunk. These are very specific circumstances. They were born of Putin's micromanaging of the war from afar, of political pressure trumping military doctrine, and of the psychological toll that a year of fighting had taken on an unprepared Russian army. That means anyone hoping to draw conclusions for future conflicts needs to keep in mind that the American or Chinese militaries are unlikely to operate like this. Which means tank losses are unlikely to be so catastrophic in a better-fought war. And, as it turns out, that is probably for the best, because tanks still have a specific, vital role to play in warfare. ## The Tank Is Dead, Long Live the Tank To gauge the future of the tank, post-Ukraine War, just look at what important people in the national security community are saying about it. According to UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace: "Ukraine has shown that armor is important." Or, as retired US general Ben Hodges told the BBC: "There will always be a need for protected mobile firepower." Perhaps the best line goes to Australian Major General Kathryn Toohey. Originally made in 2019, it has since been reposted by military analysts commenting on the Ukraine War: "Tanks are like dinner jackets. You don't need them very often, but when you do, nothing else will do." These quotes pile up not because the analysts are secretly on the payroll of some Big Tank lobby, but because those who know anything about warfare will happily tell you that, far from being obsolete, main battle tanks have an irreplaceable role to play. Former US Marine Corps colonel Mark Cancian put it this way when speaking to Insider: "Tanks provide mobility, firepower, and protection (...) offering soldiers the luxury of moving and shooting at the same time." Writing in the Washington Post, Antony Beevor explained their utility in even starker terms: "Offense is the realm where main battle tanks, when used correctly, can produce unrivaled results. Much depends on how they are deployed in combined arms operations, preferably with drone support and air cover from fighters." These are all people who know warfare. And what they are saying is that, when it comes to offensive operations, there is simply nothing else that does what main battle tanks can do. Armored fighting vehicles like Bradleys can provide speed and protection to quickly move infantry around the battlefield, but they lack the heavy firepower and punch that a main battle tank like an Abrams can bring. That makes such tanks ideal for retaking captured territory. We have already seen this in the Ukraine War. While the Kharkiv counteroffensive was characterized by fast-moving armored vehicles breaking through thin Russian lines, Ukraine's liberation of Kherson required heavy armor backed by artillery and infantry to grind forward. Future Ukrainian counteroffensives might help put the "tank is dead" myth to bed once and for all. As of mid-2023, Russia's spring offensive appeared to be petering out, and most observers were waiting for a major Ukrainian counteroffensive to begin. To have any chance of succeeding, analysts agree, Kyiv would need to field an enormous number of heavy tanks. Tanks that would be instrumental in liberating fortified cities in key locations in the east and south. Hence the pressure campaign in January for Germany to deliver Leopard 2s. Hence the international tank coalition trying to boost Ukraine's stocks with over 100 NATO-standard main battle tanks. No one thinks the tank is so dead that Ukraine can retake all its territory with just some light armor and a bunch of TB2s patrolling the skies. Instead, Kyiv's forces will need to master the sort of combined arms warfare the Russians failed so spectacularly at. With enough support and enough massed armor, they might just punch a hole through Moscow's defenses. If that happens, it would obviously be a major cause for celebration, a sign that Ukraine may be able to expel the Russians for good. It might also, at last, puncture the myth that the tank is obsolete. Rather than ruined Russian T-72s outside Bucha, our social media feeds might fill instead with videos of Leopard 2s and Challengers rolling across the Ukrainian steppe, bringing liberation to millions now suffering under Moscow's tyrannical rule. ## Why the Myth Matters It could be those images, more than anything else, that finally kill this zombie idea about the death of the tank. In today's visual age, it is breathtaking how quickly distortions and bad takes can grip the public imagination. How filtering the world through an algorithm can give us a warped idea of what our military priorities should be. While it is comforting to know that experts are not usually suckered in by this, it is sobering how easily everyone else is. And not just regular people, but those with power and influence. People like Elon Musk. People like politicians. People who can sway the public, and even make decisions on what money should be spent on which weapons systems. In this way, it is of vital importance to try and dispel such myths. To fight back against lazy narratives that would prefer to talk up the utility of Javelins and drones, or the failure of tanks, rather than focus on the harder lessons of tactics and logistics. Because, like it or not, there may come a time when it is our own societies fighting a war against some genocidal power. And if that does come to pass, it is better that we go in with our eyes open, and not clouded by myths spread on social media. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How many tanks has Russia lost in the Ukraine War? The open-source intelligence group Oryx confirmed at least 1,900 Russian tank losses, well over half of Moscow's pre-war operational fleet. By early 2023, Oryx had documented over 1,000 confirmed losses, a figure that climbed further after disasters at Vuhledar and Avdiivka. Even the state-of-the-art T-90 main battle tank has recorded around 56 losses. Ukraine, too, has lost somewhere between 450 and 700 tanks. ### Why did Russia's tanks perform so catastrophically in Ukraine? Russia treated the invasion as a military demonstration rather than a serious combat operation. According to the RUSI report, there was a lack of proper logistics, fuel, and ammunition, and the Kremlin kept the plan secret even from its own commanders. Tanks ran out of fuel, outran their artillery and air defense, and advanced with support infantry operating at only two-thirds strength. The entire plan hinged on Kyiv collapsing on its own; when Ukraine fought back, the improvised invasion force fell apart. ### What is combined arms warfare and why does it matter here? Combined arms warfare means using tanks alongside protective backup: air support and artillery to suppress anti-tank units, and infantry to clear ambushes and take out survivors so armor can advance safely. War on the Rocks concluded that the Russian Army was "not competent in combined arms fire and maneuver." When armor operates without this support, as at Vuhledar where Russian columns were funneled into a kill zone between two minefields, almost any vehicle becomes a death trap. ### Has the tank been declared obsolete before? Yes, repeatedly. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War terrified global militaries when the Sagger anti-tank guided missile turned dozens of tanks into rolling death traps. In the Second Lebanon War, 9M133 Kornets punched holes in armor from five kilometres away. Each time, technology and tactics adapted. Saggers could be suppressed with supporting fire, and the Trophy active protection system could intercept Kornets. Tank Museum curator David Willey told the BBC: "This is a story that comes around every time a tank gets knocked out." ### Why does Ukraine still need heavy tanks if they are so vulnerable? Because nothing else does what a main battle tank can do on offense. Ukraine's liberation of Kherson required heavy armor backed by artillery and infantry to grind forward, while the faster Kharkiv counteroffensive relied on armored vehicles breaking through thin lines. To retake fortified cities in the east and south, analysts agree Kyiv needs an enormous number of heavy tanks, which is why the international coalition rushed over 100 NATO-standard main battle tanks, including German Leopard 2s, into the fight. As Antony Beevor wrote, "Offense is the realm where main battle tanks, when used correctly, can produce unrivaled results." ## Sources 1. Elon Musk tank tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1611669863097069569 2. Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/20/tanks-ukraine-war-missiles-mobility/ 3. War on the Rocks: https://warontherocks.com/2022/04/the-tank-is-dead-long-live-the-javelin-the-switchblade-the/ 4. Rob Lee, War on the Rocks: https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/the-tank-is-not-obsolete-and-other-observations-about-the-future-of-combat/ 5. Telegraph, kill zone at Vuhledar: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/02/how-ukraine-used-mines-fool-russia-humiliating-defeat/ 6. Politico: https://www.politico.eu/article/why-tanks-are-back-in-fashion-in-21st-century-warfare-ukraine-russia/ 7. Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ukraine-tank-force-western-dumb-mistakes-tip-scales-2023-3 8. Stephen Biddle, War on the Rocks: https://warontherocks.com/2022/11/ukraine-and-the-future-of-offensive-maneuver/ 9. RUSI overview of all Russian combat operations: https://static.rusi.org/202303-SR-Unconventional-Operations-Russo-Ukrainian-War-web-final.pdf.pdf <!-- youtube:LxY_oIohm-c -->