Turtle Tanks: From Their Evolution to Why They are a Dead End

For those following the war in Ukraine, they’ve become a familiar sight: lumbering beasts resembling moving piles or scrap or garden sheds. Known as “turtle tanks”, they are the result of a constant evolutionary race between protection and firepower that continues on the Ukrainian battlefield. But just as biological evolution throws up occasional dead-ends, so too does modern warfare - and there are good reasons to believe that turtle tanks will end up being one of those dead-end solutions, one that will soon be surpassed by a far more promising evolutionary adaptation to the drone spam saturating the Ukrainian battlefield (something which is likely to spread to other current and future conflicts).

First, some explanations and history that will help readers to understand how we got to “turtle tanks”, but also why they are likely a dead-end solution.

Traditionally, tanks and other armored fighting vehicles are mostly armored to resist frontal hits on the hull and turret, with sides being significantly less protected and rear and top armor being minimal. Multiple anti-tank weapons developed since the late 20th century have exploited this vulnerability, along with the miniaturization and availability of modern sensors and guidance systems, to achieve their desired result by attacking the weak top armor.

Ways of increasing the protection of fighting vehicles are generally split into 2 categories. First, passive protection, which means adding more armor, adding or improving reactive armor (which is only possible on vehicles with thick armor), improving armor materials, changing or adding vehicle structures to better resist being hit, or some combination of those measures.

Alternatively, designers can plump for the second category: active protection systems, which try to do a fair few things. For one, they might detect and warn the crew about being targeted or shot at - giving them time to react (hide, shoot at the attacker, etc.), like laser warning receivers. For another, they might try to hide the vehicle from attackers' sensors - from deploying smoke screens that hide the vehicle to various jammers and lasers that blind infra-red sensors on some missiles. If all that fails, then there are also hard-kill systems, which basically do what they say on the tin: try to destroy incoming enemy munitions.

Adding passive protection tends to be much easier, faster, and cheaper. As a result, it is far more likely to be selected as the preferred solution by actors who either lack the time or the resources. And in many cases, these solutions can be good enough - especially against less powerful opponents.

While active protection systems can be much more effective, they are correspondingly much more complex and expensive. And if the opponent finds a way to attack for which they are not designed, they can become ineffective or useless. Integrating active defenses on existing vehicles also tends to involve significant redesign work, and resulting upgrades usually take a long time to do on a large vehicle fleet.

How we got to “turtle tanks”

Even as Russia was preparing for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, commanders of Russian tank units realized that their tanks’ existing protection would be insufficient against modern anti-tank weapons, some of which (like Javelin ATGM) Ukraine already had in its arsenal in limited numbers.

While Russia had developed a domestic hard-kill APS called “Afghanit”, which was supposed to be effective against ATGMs, it was present on only a small number of new T-14 Armata tanks, and those were not assigned to participate in the invasion (and there are serious doubts about “Afghanit” effectiveness based on the available information about it). Given the limited amount of time, this made installation of additional passive protection the most attractive option, especially as the Ukrainian military was not seen as sufficiently strong to pose a real challenge to the Russian invasion force.

The result: the creation and installation of so-called “cope cage” structures on top of many Russian tank turrets. These were metal structures that were supposed to cause top-attack munitions to explode too high above the tank turret and hit the “cope cage” first - both things that could reduce the effectiveness of the top-attack munition.

Unsurprisingly, these “cope cages” turned out to be ineffective in their initial purpose to mitigate modern Western top-attack anti-tank munitions. To at least mitigate the threat of less powerful anti-tank munitions in urban combat, additional ERA (explosive reactive armor) blocks started to be added to the Russian tanks at that time. But after the initial large-scale advances (and retreats) in early parts of 2022, the frontline movements slowed over time, and drones started to play a larger role. One of the first offensive uses of drones was to carry grenades that would be dropped into open hatches of abandoned or disabled combat vehicles (crews of vehicles that were just hit were clearly more concerned about surviving, so they almost never took the time to close hatches) to cause secondary fire or explosion to destroy the vehicles.

The much-ridiculed cope cages actually turned out to be at least somewhat effective in preventing these grenade-drop attacks, and so they have, over time, started to get larger and larger in order to cover additional vulnerable parts of the tanks, countering the evolution of “bomber” drones and munitions dropped by them.

Over 2024, partially due to a decline in the supply of ammunition for artillery and delays in the US military aid package, which resulted in the need to find alternatives, FPV drones started becoming one of the main Ukrainian counters to Russian mechanized assaults. As the numbers of these cheap “kamikaze” drones has increased over time to hundreds of thousands and now millions being used (by each side) per year, it became clear that the use of tanks and other AFVs in assaults was becoming unacceptably ineffective. Russian mechanized assaults were being spotted by drones long before reaching the frontline and often degraded or destroyed before reaching Ukrainian positions, or when retreating back.

Two different solutions to this “drone spam” appeared around the same time. The first were powerful jammers mounted on top of the tanks - those were at first effective at making drones likely to either fail or hit the tanks inaccurately. But as drones either improved their radio controls or moved to being controlled via optical fibers in 2025, the effectiveness of jammers significantly dropped off.

The second solution was to evolve cope cages into what we now call turtle tanks, by adding improvised sheets of metal all around the vehicle, except the front (which is best protected anyway and contains the tank's main gun). The purpose was both to add space between where the enemy warheads would hit to lower their effectiveness and, in later variations, to try to prevent drones from detonating their warheads on impact, but also to reduce the drone's ability to effectively target the most vulnerable parts of the tank.

Similar but smaller and lighter protective structures on top or around lighter armored fighting vehicles like BMP-1/2 and MT-LB were also adopted. These structures are often combined with the installation of jammers and demining rollers.

Turtle tanks: benefits and problems

As a result of these modifications, “turtle tanks” in many cases can withstand 10-15 FPV strikes before being disabled, and 30-50 before being fully destroyed - which is about two to five times as many as normal tanks usually take - with smaller numbers for lighter “turtle” variants of infantry fighting vehicles like BMPs and BTRs. On one hand, that is a noticeable survivability improvement over normal tanks, but given the large numbers of drones on the current battlefield in Ukraine, it mostly allows them to function for a longer amount of time, not protect them from being destroyed. And the effort it takes to destroy “turtle tanks” is mitigated by the fact that after the vehicle gets disabled (unless it is quickly recovered) its final destruction can happen at the leisure of opponents' drone teams.

As is typical for an improvised protection scheme, “turtle tank” designs come with a set of downsides that reduce their usefulness. Most obviously, the increased weight and size of the vehicles reduce their mobility, makes the vehicles easier to detect, and can degrade the reliability of the vehicle's propulsion system. But crews also have to contend with further reduced situational awareness (it is often already poor on tanks and other AFVs before you start blocking sights and other sensors with extra armor), difficulty of evacuating the vehicle if it is disabled, and the inability to use some defensive tools like smoke grenade launchers; plus annoyances like the main gun being either completely immobilized or greatly limited in its range of movement - something which reduces the tank's ability to suppress or destroy enemy positions.

Some of the current survivability benefits of “turtle tanks” are also being degraded by the adoption of more effective munitions designed specifically to be used by drones.

These downsides make “turtle tanks” a relatively unattractive option for most armies when the cost of these vehicles and the relatively small number of them in most armies are taken into account. But the main reason why turtle tanks most likely can't be adopted by armies in the long term is the fact that such tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in-effect stop fulfilling the roles for which they have been designed. Tanks are all about armored mobility, take that away and - while you may better survive a swarm of drones - you also lose most of the advantages that make a tank worthwhile in the first place.

A better solution?

Given the number of drones present on the Ukrainian battlefield (likely totalling around 10 million in 2026 for both Ukraine and Russia combined) and the high likelihood that this will be be replicated in other future conflicts, any serious solution has to be able to reliably deal with dozens of targets per day, be reasonably easy and cheap to build, install, deploy, and maintain at a large scale.

As a result, many have been looking towards existing hard-kill active protection systems - like the Israeli Trophy APS, which have, in some armies, started to be installed on tanks in recent years to protect them against higher-end threats like anti-tank guided missiles and rockets. The Trophy APS has demonstrated its ability to effectively protect Israeli Merkava tanks in intense urban combat. While these systems could, at least in some cases, be reconfigured to work against drones, they usually have only a relatively small number of shots (which is insufficient for dealing with large numbers of drones), and are expensive and complex to integrate.

There are some proposals for lasers, or other directed energy weapons to be used for this task, but they currently still lack the level of reliability in harsh conditions that is necessary. And they are too expensive and hard to maintain to be equipped at the relevant scale.

This has motivated multiple governments to invest in new development in the area of hard-kill defense systems, aiming to develop something that would be able to destroy significant numbers of attacking drones while making those intercepts affordable - and preferably achieve that result with a system that would be cheap, easy to manufacture, and can be mounted on many platforms lighter than tanks.

Since 2025, the first systems from both domestic Ukrainian and Western companies (for example, Ukrainian company DONS, which was one of the winners of the relevant JATEC innovation challenge) that match these requirements have started to appear for testing, so their designs can quickly evolve into something that can be mass-manufactured and deployed into combat. These systems are in effect fully autonomous machine-gun turrets, either resembling or repurposing existing remote weapons stations, which are already present on top of turrets of many current combat vehicles. Their ability to intercept drones using cheap, easily available ammo, which can be carried in sufficient quantity to destroy dozens of drones before needing reload, is a significant advantage over most alternatives - and they can still serve as general-purpose machine guns controlled by the vehicle crew when necessary.

In order to turn remotely controlled machine guns into effective systems against drones, more cameras and computers have to be installed, and software capable of quickly and autonomously detecting, tracking, and engaging small drones needs to integrate them together into a functional system. The advantage of this concept is that most physical components (and ammo) are already common and affordable, so that once a design performs sufficiently well, it can start being produced and deployed at scale relatively quickly. And that production scale will really be necessary because pretty much every vehicle, from tanks to logistics trucks, that is moving within 20km of the frontline in Ukraine is in serious danger of being attacked by enemy drones.

One aspect that is likely to be controversial, but is necessary, is the ability to enable such systems to operate fully autonomously, because the human ability to quickly and accurately detect and shoot down multiple small drones in a short amount of time is simply insufficient. But at least flying drones are distinct-enough targets that incidents of these counter-drone systems shooting at anything else, except maybe birds, should be rare.

A complication for some vehicles will be that such a system will be another among the ever-growing number of components and systems that need to be powered by vehicles' electrical systems - encouraging the already ongoing shift towards electrified powertrains or at least auxiliary power units, so that the vehicle's main engine doesn't need to constantly be running. The increased need to rely on active protection systems due to modern weapons targeting weak points in vehicles' protection scheme will also likely mean that the thickness of usually very heavy frontal armor on tanks and other AFVs will be reduced, so at least the installation of the additional equipment shouldn't result in additional weight growth.

At the end of the day, no single system will be perfect, newly designed vehicles and those undergoing deep modernization are likely to implement a muilti-tier protection schemes involving autonomous RWS turrets, regular APS like Trophy (which will primarily serve to protect against high-end threats but could engage drones that get past autonomous RWS turrets) and improved coverage of explosive reactive armor tiles over the most vulnerable parts of vehicles that can carry them.

Exactly how the new and improved protection systems will be implemented remains to be seen, and a lot will depend on future improvements of drones and other weapons, but one thing seems sure: the days of the turtle tank lumbering across the battlefield - itself a relatively new adaptation - are already numbered.