After Losing 1,000 Tanks, Ukraine Is Rethinking How It Uses Them

The Ukrainian National Guard’s best brigades are getting some of Ukraine’s best tanks. Last week, Gen. Oleksandr Pivnenko—commander of the roughly 100,000-strong paramilitary force—announced some of his brigades had received German-made Leopard 1A5 and Leopard 2A4 tanks.

The four-person tanks “have already proven their effectiveness in combat conditions,” Pivnenko wrote. “They combine high mobility, firepower and reliability, which are critical on the modern battlefield.”

The 42-ton Leopard 1A5 packs a 105-millimeter main gun; the 61-ton Leopard 2A4’s gun is bigger at 120 millimeters. Both tanks have four crew, but the heavier Leopard 2A4 offers its crew much more protection.

It’s unclear which National Guard units will get the German tanks, but it’s likely the 12 so-called “offensive guard” brigades, each with at least 2,000 troopers, are first in line.

The offensive guard brigades are, like all Ukrainian guard brigades, made up of border guards, federal police and other internal security forces. But they’re trained and equipped to the same standards as the Ukrainian army, air assault forces and marine corps.

The guard brigades’ armor upgrade does not represent an expansion of the overall Ukrainian armor corps, however. Instead, it’s part of a total rewriting of Ukrainian tank doctrine for the drone era.

After losing more than 1,000 tanks, many of them to Russian drones, Ukrainian leaders have accepted that the heavy, powerfully armed fighting vehicles need to operate differently if they’re going to survive on a battlefield where tiny drones are everywhere all the time.

Tank crews should operate extremely carefully—hiding most of the time in barns, garages or dugouts and rolling out only occasionally to fire a few shells before scurrying back under cover.

It’s a new “era of the cautious tank,” David Kirichenko, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C., announced in September.

Functioning more like cautious artillery and less like the brazen, close-fighting assault vehicles they once were, tanks are losing some of their relevance. Embracing that new truth, the Ukrainian army is reorganizing its tank units.

The four active tank brigades, each with up to 100 tanks, are likely to disband. Some of the hundreds of tanks freed up by this reform—including potentially scores of Leopard 1A5s and Leopard 2A4s, out of 240 of the tanks Ukraine is getting from its allies—will cascade to new 30-tank battalions belonging to infantry and mechanized brigades and the new multi-brigade corps that the Ukrainian ground forces are organizing.

Ukraine’s tanks are dispersing on the battlefield—spreading out and hiding to avoid detection by drones—and also dispersing within the Ukrainian military’s force structure: playing more of a supporting role than a lead role in a war increasingly shaped by tiny, lethal robots.

The end result should be a somewhat smaller overall tank corps with fewer vehicles and fewer crews, but which is better suited for the kind of war Ukraine is waging.

Cutting tank units isn’t just a doctrinal imperative, however. It may also help the general staff in Kyiv solve one of its most vexing problems: a deep shortage of front-line infantry. By sending fewer new recruits to tank school, military planners could send more to infantry school.