Surviving Ukrainian M-1s are beginning to sport anti-drone cage armor
David Axe
Forbes
May 24, 2024
The United States gave Ukraine 31 M-1A1 Abrams tanks. They equip a single battalion in the Ukrainian army’s 47th Mechanized Brigade, which has been fighting a defensive campaign west of the ruins of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine.
In several months of hard fighting, the 47th Mechanized Brigade has lost as many as eight of the 69-ton, four-person M-1s—to Russian drones, mostly. The brigade is finally doing something about its drone problem: adding cage armor that can help detonate incoming explosive drones at a safe distance.
The losses around Avdiivka compelled the brigade to withdraw its surviving tanks in late April, the Associated Press claimed, quoting—among others—U.S. Navy admiral Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But one Ukrainian M-1 crewman told Ukraine’s Army T.V. two weeks later that wasn’t true. “Full of lies,” the tanker said.
Instead, the 47th Mechanized Brigade is being careful with how it deploys its undamaged M-1s, the tanker explained. “The situation is very difficult, because the Russians are superior in terms of personnel, equipment and everything, so we have to adjust our actions.
The 47th Mechanized Brigade sends out M-1s only when there’s an opportunity to “go out and destroy the opponent’s vehicles,” the crewman said. The implication is that M-1s aren’t sitting in some revetment among the outermost trenches, waiting for the Russians to attack; rather, they form a kind of reaction force that normally waits behind the front line.
The Ukrainian tanker conceded that the brigade might deploy the M-1s differently if they were better protected against Russia’s explosive drones—something that’s finally happening, if that one application of anti-drone armor is any indication.
But the locally installed cage armor wasn’t the only option. There was a bespoke American option, too. While Ukraine’s M-1A1s wear the standard M-19 Abrams Reactive Armor Tiles along the sides of their otherwise thinly-protected hulls, they don’t wear reactive armor on their turrets.
Reactive armor contains small explosive plates that explode outward when struck, partially deflecting an incoming munition. “We as a crew and as a battalion in general would like from our American partners to provide us with dynamic armor,” the tanker said, “so that we have not only the flanks protected, but also the turret.”
The U.S. Army remedied this problem with their latest M-1A2s by adding extra “passive”—that is, non-reactive—armor to their turret faces. But this armor likely includes depleted uranium, which the United States doesn’t export, as a matter of policy. Before shipping M-1A1s to Ukraine, the Pentagon paid contractors to open up the tanks’ turrets, remove the uranium and replace it with tungsten.
It’s not impossible to hang ARAT armor on an Abrams’ turret. California-based Ensign-Bickford Aerospace and Defense, which manufactures the ARAT bricks, specifically described the bricks as “hull, skirt or turret armor.”
But the bricks attach to racks that tank maker General Dynamics welds onto the M-1. It’s unclear what it would take for contractors to modify Ukraine’s surviving Abrams with the racks, and for the Pentagon to ship reactive armor kits.
At the very least, it would take time—perhaps months. And the 47th Mechanized Brigade surely can’t spare its tanks for that long. The brigade apparently got tired of asking and waiting—and welded on cage armor, instead.
David Axe – Forbes Staff. Aerospace & Defense. He is a journalist, author and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. Axe founded the website War Is Boring in 2007 as a webcomic, and later developed it into a news blog. He enrolled at Furman University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. Then he went to the University of Virginia to study medieval history before transferring to and graduating from the University of South Carolina with a master’s degree in fiction in 2004.