Russia’s Drone-Proof Tanks Can Finally Rotate Their Turrets. Ukraine Took Note.
The best add-on anti-drone armor prevents a tank’s gun from turning. Russia and Ukraine are both working on solutions.
By now, it’s a time-honored tradition in Russia’s 47-month wider war on Ukraine. The Russians develop some new innovation to protect their tanks from the tiny explosive drones that are everywhere all the time along the 1,100-km front line.
Within weeks, the Ukrainians copy the innovation for their own tanks.
The latest is an add-on metal cage that helps protect a tank from attacking drones—but still allows the tank’s turret to rotate left and right so that it can aim its main gun.
The turret cage solves a persistent problem. Most field-installed anti-drone armor—the shells, spines, and screens that have become ubiquitous along the front—prevents a tank from fully rotating its turret. The gun can’t aim. The Omsk design, and now the Ukrainian copy, changes that.
A photo of a Ukrainian tank fitted with the boxy turret cage recently appeared online. The cage is fixed to the base of the turret rather than the tank’s chassis, “in a way that [the] tank gun still can move freely while being protected from the drone threats,” Ukrainian soldier Dimko Zhluktenko wrote.
