Although drones have struck every conceivable target on the battlefield, even in depth, observers note that they cannot match artillery for a cost-effective volume of firepower. While there is almost no available direct data linking drone-directed precision artillery kills of armored vehicles as a proportion of the totals, it is pervasively present. UAVs (such as the Russian Granat-4) are instrumental in the reconnaissance, fire correction, and battle damage assessment of Ukraine’s and Russia’s precision artillery arsenal, which includes the Kitolov round, the laser-guided 120mm KM-8 Gran mine, and the fifty-five to sixty-km-range 152mm 3OF39 Krasnopol round. 

The U.S. equivalent used in Ukraine is the fifty-kilometer-range M982A1 Excalibur precision-guided 155mm artillery projectile, although jamming reduced its accuracy from 55 to 6 percent against point targets. Extended artillery bombardments hoping for a low-probability hit against an armored vehicle are especially vulnerable to precision counter-battery fire. According to a Russian estimate, thirty precision 152mm shells are the equivalent of 600 to 800 unguided indirect conventional munitions for counter-battery suppression. An alternative to precision shells is the 152mm round with forty sub-munitions, capable of penetrating 110mm of top armor, which can defeat any current NATO tank. 

Of the fourteen disabled U.S. M1 Abrams tanks (of the thirty-one delivered to Ukraine), methods of destruction include drone strikes, portable anti-tank rockets, T-72B3 gunnery, and at least one destroyed by a 2K25 Krasnopol precision-guided artillery round fired from a 152mm SP 2S19 Msta-S howitzer. Russian analysts assert that ATGM (anti-tank guided missiles) are the most effective tank killers of all of the competing systems, and their tandem missile Kornet is more effective than the Javelin. Ukrainians, in contrast, have found that ATGMs are far more likely to mobility kill because of tactical and technical countermeasures.

While Electronic Warfare (EW) was used intensively in the air wars over Vietnam and Iraq and against remote explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan, the reliance on radios for artillery direction and heavy use of drones in the Russo-Ukraine War has made EW unprecedentedly salient for ground combat. Russia inherited the world’s largest ground-based mobile EW assets from the Soviet Union, which, from the 1970s, had focused its efforts on jamming NATO’s significant advantage in responsive artillery and close air support. Following the 2008 reorganization of the Russian army, each brigade was assigned an organic EW company comprising twelve vehicle-mounted EW platforms, typically the Krasukha-4 truck-mounted jammer and fifteen smaller soldier-portable jammers. 

The Krasukha-4 operates on the X-band with a range of up to 300 km and is capable of scrambling Low Earth Orbit SIGINT satellites and U.S. J-Stars, as well as disrupting remotely controlled drones. It was used successfully against U.S. sensors and radars in Syria. In conjunction with the R-330Zh Zhitel truck-mounted jammer, it can interfere with the signals necessary to operate drones from the simpler FPV DJI Mavic to the TB2 Bayraktar. The truck-mounted Leer-3 EW system, when operating in conjunction with Orlan-10 UAVs, can selectively jam up to 2,000 cellphone users out to thirty kilometers without impeding friendly telecommunications.

The local threat of drones has pushed portable EW assets down to the company level. Whereas some Ukrainian portable jammers are effective out to three kilometers, most Russian-used systems are carried by individual soldiers or are fitted to tanks and create zones of several yards where drone signals are interrupted, disrupting dive attacks. The Russians are primarily relying on inexpensive Chinese-manufactured portable jammers, such as the Tx-Fq-01 signal jammer gun. Russian jammers have significantly degraded the accuracy of Himars’s GPS-guided projectiles. Reduced NATO’s 155mm Excalibur shells’ precision down to ten percent and raised the JDAM-ER bombing error from five to thirty meters. EW systems are more difficult to deploy during an advance, and so Russian jamming was lighter than expected in the early months of the 2022 invasion. The prevailing static attritional combat in Donetsk puts Ukraine in closer proximity to Russia’s EW systems, which severely hampers drone operations. There is substantial mimicry, as the Russians have copied Ukrainian acoustic drone detectors.

Ukraine’s EW, air defense, anti-drone, and aerospace systems are a cross between NATO and Russian systems in their performance, function, and portability, but fewer. There are over forty varieties of Ukrainian anti-UAV systems. The U.S. and NATO have prioritized jam-proof communications, such as in the SINCGARS portable VHF combat radios supplied to Ukraine (capable of over 100 frequency hops per second) and SpaceX’s Starlink Terminals. The problem is that because the bulk of the U.S. Military’s EA capabilities is carried by airborne platforms, such as the Navy and U.S. Marine Corps EA-18 “Growler” aircraft or the U.S. Air Force EC-130H Compass Call, the army does not have its own sustained ground-based EW support. In contrast, the U.S. Marine Corps possesses nine EW platoons equipped with the AN/ULQ-19 EAsystem, but these are only sufficient for three battalion-sized Marine expeditionary forces. In July 2024, the U.S. Army purchased the Stryker and AMPV-mounted TLS-BST jammer and the TLS-Manpack. 

So long as countermeasures can limit drone attacks to attritional effects of striking individual vehicles rather than whole platoons or batteries, the armored offensive can, in principle, be restored. Technical, but primarily doctrinal, and organizational changes were responsible for breaking the First World War tactical stalemate of trench warfare, the latter characterized by deep entrenchments and thick wire obstacles, slowly advancing artillery, and ease of relocating blocking reserves. As drones can be used for both offense and defense, it is the lack of sufficient Ukrainian combined arms rather than the drones themselves that is the cause of the current attritional warfare.

Kyiv claims that Russia has more than twice the number of tanks in service as Ukraine, at 3,500. Though Kyiv received deliveries of over 700 tanks from its allies, Russia is being reinforced by 1,200 refurbishments from its storage stock of 6,000 this year despite having lost 8,691 tanks thus far in the war. Even if a single decisive offensive is unlikely under these disparities, Guderian would argue that armor in the concentrated counter-attack role is still more effective than penny-packed for the attritional defense, even if part of a strategic plan. The Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region demonstrates all of Guderian’s principles of armored warfare. 

The Ukrainians, while cognizant of the political benefits of a conquest of Russian territory, focused on the destruction of the enemy in both the offense and now in the defense against desperate Russian assaults rather than sacrificing scarce lives and equipment to capture the limitless terrain of Russia. The operation was conducted with tactical surprise and mass on good terrain, and combined arms were utilized to the extent of Ukrainian training. The key difference between the failed summer 2023 offensive to Mariupol and the Kursk operation is surprise with the focus on destroying the enemy. The experience of conducting these operations is critical in turning the Ukrainian army away from its Soviet past.

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University and the author of Militarization and War (2007) and Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer of the 3rd Field Engineer Regiment from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11. He tweets at @Ju_Sp_Churchill.

Maximilien Hachiya is a War Studies scholar at King’s College London.

Ulysse Oliveira Baptista is a Political Science student at Concordia University Montréal. He is an associate researcher at the Canadian Center for Strategic Studies.

Image: Melnikov Dmitriy / Shutterstock.com.