- The threat of drones has forced both Ukraine and Russia to adapt, including welding cages onto their tanks.
- Soviet-style tanks are known for being smaller and harder 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 bombs on unsuspecting crews.
For the Russians, which really only operate Soviet-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 drones are an ever-present threat 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 American Abrams or the British Challenger tanks, where the emphasis is on heavy armor and combat power.
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 Soviet-style tanks and US tanks. US tanks are much taller, but they have range and greater firepower. Russian tanks, Soviet tanks are harder 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 cages offer some protection against one-way attack drones, but they also make the tanks easier to spot.
"In a certain sense, it negates one of the strengths of the Soviet-style tank, which is that they're small and harder to see and harder 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 flying into exposed and opened hatches of tanks or causing massive damage when exploding on impact with a vehicle's more vulnerable areas.
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.
One of the more unusual designs to show up in this war is the odd-looking Russian "turtle tank" cage armor, which looks a bit like someone stuck a big garden shed over the top of a tank, leaving the front open for the main gun to stick out.
The name is because the cage resembles a turtle with its head poking out of its shell.
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 Soviet-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 fight 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 enemy 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 Soviet-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, changing the roles of tanks and other armored vehicles on the battlefield.
Ryan Pickrell contributed to this report.