While bomb-laden unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and loitering munitions have certainly presented a new threat on the battlefields of Ukraine in recent years, the role of heavy armour still remains vital, while development of an overall ‘recce strike complex’ is essential, the head of the British Army has asserted.
Speaking on 21 January at Defence iQ’s 2025 International Armoured Vehicles (IAV 2025) conference, held at the Farnborough International Exhibition Centre, British Army Chief of the General Staff (CGS) General Sir Roly Walker asserted that, while “there are lots of dead tanks littering Ukraine, the tank is not dead” and that armour “remains critical” as a battle-winning asset.
“If you mass armour to move it in a not particularly sophisticated way, you get stuck, mainly on obstacles, and you get struck quickly from distance by an increasingly high/low mixture of indirect fires, missiles, rockets and drones, and that’s before you close into the direct combat zone, which is equally infested with fires, missiles, drones and mines,” the CGS asserted.
According to a recent study, said the general, in 2024 alone Ukrainian forces “have destroyed or damaged three and a half thousand Russian tanks, nearly 9,000 armoured vehicles and over 13,000 artillery systems”, adding that the Russians “lost as many systems in 2024 as they lost in 2022 and 2023 combined”.
“Conversely,” he added, “we saw that with the Ukrainian [August 2024] incursion into Kursk, with skilful use of Challenger 2 tanks that have been gifted amongst other armoured systems, you can advance rapidly and transition to the defence to hold with confidence”.
Gen Walker further noted that both Russian and Ukrainian forces “have arguably shifted from where the weighting of their lethality is in the business of close combat to an integrated recce strike system operating over ever-increasing ranges, and it’s proving to be extraordinarily effective in the hands of competent and creative operators”.
This, the CGS asserted, is a vital lesson in the effective application of modern technology, such as networking and the use of artificial intelligence (AI), that can speed up the ‘observe, orient, decide, act’ (OODA) loop and “reduce the cognitive burden of sensing and shooting faster.
“The armoured vehicle, the attack helicopter, the underground bunker, all the fast-moving assault section, are all now becoming effectively nodes on a highly dispersed and distributed network that is the foundation of modern all-domain fighting power,” he said.
One consequence of this, noted Gen Walker, is that Ukrainian forces, who arguably cannot sustain losses to match the Russians’ ‘meatgrinder’ approach to the war in Ukraine, in which personnel losses are of little consequence, are placing a premium “on developing more attritable and consumable technologies, which sharpens up their lethality even more and generates combat mass”.
As an example of this, Gen Walker noted an action on 20 December 2024, when “a Ukrainian attack on a Russian position in the vicinity of Kharkiv used both uncrewed ground vehicles in conjunction with first-person-view drones. The ground vehicles, uncrewed, conducted the full spectrum of missions, including surveillance, mine clearance and direct fire, and they did so with close co-ordination and support from uncrewed aerial systems. To our mind, this tactical air-land operation represents one of the first instances of a successfully uncrewed battle fought by one side: a footnote, arguably, in the daily report, but perhaps in hindsight a seminal moment in the changing character of conflict.”
The CGS emphasised that “to fight and win on and from the land it is still true that you must be able to seize and hold ground. It follows, therefore, that our land forces must be able to close with and kill the enemy in the most dangerous and difficult circumstances. And the front lines of modern battlefields show you what that looks like and feels like in the close fight – and it is utterly terrifying for the soldiers that have to work there. Without armour, you are just not in the business of fighting and winning in the most dangerous and difficult circumstances.
“We will need armoured vehicles to fight from, no question,” said Gen Walker. “And we will face armoured vehicles en masse, no question, but I’m with the Ukrainian way when it comes to the balance of the survivable, the attritable and the consumable platforms within that system. And that is exactly what we are doing. Indeed, the NATO family of plans are explicit in assigning a task to the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, one of the two strategic reserves for the Alliance, that they must be able to restore territory. In layman’s terms, they’ve got to be able to attack, to take ground. And for that reason alone we must retain combined arms armoured formations for both offensive and defensive action, but perhaps not as once they were conceived.
“My contention,” the CGS explained, “is that there are now many more arms to combine in that battle, such as the uncrewed air systems, the electronic warfare systems, as well as the information systems, and much more can be done to kill the enemy from distance and in the deep – and so we should.”
The general then added, “I’m glad to report that the British Army was early to recognise this, and had in fact developed an operating concept that addressed this based on the recce strike [complex] at every level, long before the Russian invasion [of Ukraine], and since then we have seen many of the principles of this operating concept completely validated in practice in Ukraine, from both sides.”
