Key Points
- Army officers argue in a Modern War Institute essay that armored formations remain viable despite drone and precision-strike threats reshaping the battlefield.
- The Army’s armor branch is testing new formation designs at units including the 1st Cavalry Division and 3rd Infantry Division under its transformation-in-contact initiative.
U.S. Army armor officers argue that armored formations remain viable on the modern battlefield despite the spread of drones and precision-guided weapons, according to an essay published by the Modern War Institute at West Point.
The piece, written by Lt. Col. Alan Hastings, Maj. James Casey and Capt. Elijah Leroux, responds to years of debate over whether tanks and mechanized formations still have a role given recent conflicts including the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia’s Surovikin Line and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, both cited as evidence that traditional maneuver warfare has grown harder to execute.
The authors identify two challenges limiting offensive maneuver today. The first is longstanding: peer adversaries can field armies large enough to man continuous, deep defensive lines, making penetration costly and raising the risk that an attacking force culminates before it can exploit a breakthrough. The second is newer, what the authors call a “reconnaissance-strike complex,” the fusion of pervasive sensors, drones and long-range precision fires that lets adversaries contest what the authors term the “air-ground littoral” even without traditional air power.
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“There is no formation better suited to these tasks than US Army armored formations,” the authors write, arguing that armor operating within a combined arms team can survive dense reconnaissance-strike networks, break through prepared defenses and push into an enemy’s vulnerable rear.
The authors point to Ukraine’s counteroffensives in Kharkiv in 2022 and Kursk in 2024 as evidence that gaps in enemy sensor and strike coverage still create openings for offensive maneuver, arguing that modern battlefield conditions “encourage positional warfare, but do not dictate it.”
The essay outlines four conditions the authors say are necessary for successful maneuver: reconnaissance, masking, suppression and isolation. They describe an approach in which sensing drones and electronic warfare identify gaps in enemy defenses, loitering munitions and artillery blind enemy sensors to mask friendly movement, and layered fires suppress and isolate enemy formations before an armored breakthrough.
The authors cite ongoing experimentation within the Army’s armor branch under its “transformation in contact” initiative. In October 2025, 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division tested organizational changes that added a multifunctional reconnaissance-strike troop along with heavy cavalry and armored strike troops equipped with drones, loitering munitions and counterdrone and electronic warfare systems. In May 2026, 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division tested a different design intended to sense and strike targets out to 40 kilometers (25 miles).
Other units have been assigned specific roles in the broader effort. The 4th Infantry Division is leading work on formation survivability standards. The 1st Infantry Division is developing training standards for small unmanned aircraft systems. The 1st Armored Division is setting counterdrone training standards, and the 1st Cavalry Division is writing the armor strike platoon manual. The U.S. Army Armor School and III Corps have partnered on what the authors call the Armored Transformation and Standardization Initiative to coordinate the effort across the force.
The Armor School has also introduced new training programs, including a Robotics Master Trainer Course and a Robotics and Autonomous Systems Tactics Leader Course, intended to train soldiers and leaders in the Army’s 19-series armor specialties.
The authors acknowledge the transformation remains incomplete. They write that Army experimentation with unmanned aircraft has not yet reached the scale seen in recent conflicts, and that armored formations remain vulnerable to drones and loitering munitions until investments in short-range air defense and counterdrone units mature.
Hastings serves as squadron commander for 3rd Squadron, 16th Cavalry Regiment at Fort Benning, Georgia. Casey serves as executive officer for 1st Battalion, 635th Armored Regiment of the Kansas National Guard. Leroux is currently attending the Harding Fellowship Program at the University of Kansas. The authors note that the views expressed are their own and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army or the Department of War.
