Europe is right to focus on air defense and long-range strike capabilities. The wars in Ukraine and the Gulf have shown that no state can prevail in modern conflict without the ability to intercept incoming threats, strike the enemy’s rear, and impose costs far beyond the front line. Yet as Europe strengthens its deterrence by punishment, it should remember (as an earlier age had to understand about air power) that missiles can do serious damage, but they cannot hold ground.
Europe’s armies should step up efforts to rebuild heavy mechanized forces, including main battle tanks, capable of sustaining high-intensity warfare. This will require an industrial base that can move beyond boutique production runs toward large-scale manufacturing with significant surge capacity. It will also require greater investment in automation, unmanned systems, and the technology that protects tanks from aerial reconnaissance and attacks.
Ukraine has not made tanks obsolete, as it is sometimes claimed. It is true that anti-tank mines, omnipresent drones, and an increasingly transparent battlefield have made armor far easier to detect and destroy. However, tanks have still played a crucial role in helping Ukrainian forces to advance, support infantry, deliver protected firepower, and hold or retake ground. Even when the conflict became more static, tanks were used for indirect fire to replace the artillery.
Both Ukraine and Russia have modified their tanks to adapt to the realities of the modern battlefield. Early improvised “cope cages” were widely mocked, but they reflected a real need to protect tanks from top-attack drones and loitering munitions. Since then, both sides have experimented with additional armor, camouflage, electronic jammers, and counter-drone systems.
Various tank adaptations also suggest that the current dominance of drones should not be treated as permanent. As Lieutenant Colonel Trygve J. Smidt of the Norwegian Military Academy notes: “We should expect the introduction of further counter-UAV systems which, together with tactical adaptation, will reduce the apparent dominance of aerial attack systems.”
Some scenarios for a future Russia-NATO confrontation revolve around a swift Russian incursion into one of the Baltic states, aimed at seizing a limited piece of territory and presenting the alliance with a fait accompli. Such a move could be designed to test NATO’s cohesion, delay its response, and create political pressure for de-escalation before reinforcements arrive.
As Smidt notes, NATO’s challenge in the Baltics is to field forces capable of surviving initial missile and drone strikes, slowing an advancing force, and then counterattacking to restore lost territory in a very limited geography. To achieve this, heavy armor, and in particular main battle tanks, would play an indispensable role.
On paper, Europe still has around 5,000 main battle tanks, compared with Russia’s roughly 3,460 active tanks and more than 2,100 older vehicles in storage. But this comparison is misleading. While Europe’s tank fleet is technologically advanced, it remains fragmented, unevenly maintained, and dispersed across national armies.
Russia also has a significant advantage in its ability to lose tanks, repair them, refurbish Soviet-era stocks, and return them to the battlefield at wartime speed. For instance, the IISS think tank estimated that Russia lost around 1,400 main battle tanks in 2024 alone, yet it has continued to sustain the war through stockpiles and repair capacity.
Europe’s storage depots are shallower, production lines are scattered, and factories are still geared mainly toward limited national orders rather than mass output. Therefore, Europe cannot afford the same level of attrition. Also, several production lines, including those for the French Leclerc and British Challenger, have either closed or significantly slowed, making it difficult to restart large-scale production or refurbishment quickly.
European output, currently estimated in the low tens of new tanks per year, must rise substantially to meet the demands of high-intensity warfare and attrition. However, the answer to this challenge does not lie in copying Russia’s highly centralized and attritional industrial model of tank production.
First and foremost, joint procurement should be encouraged. Germany’s Leopard 2A8 framework agreement, joined by countries such as the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Croatia, and the Netherlands, is a useful step in this direction. Unlike Russian tank models, Leopard 2 production does not depend on a single industrial site but is spread across a broader European network of assembly and manufacturing facilities.
However, increasing the capacity of European tank production via decentralized manufacturing will only succeed if governments resist the temptation to excessively customize their vehicles for national preferences. In addition to scaling production, this would facilitate the pooling of maintenance, spare parts, and repair capacity, allowing damaged equipment to return to service more quickly during high-intensity conflict.
Europe should make better use of automation and unmanned systems, both to compensate for shortages in heavy armor and to ease pressure on limited military personnel. As Smidt notes, unmanned systems should be used wherever possible “to reduce platform size, cost, and personnel vulnerability.”
In practice, this means using drones and autonomous systems for reconnaissance, logistics, mine clearing, or even certain strike missions that would otherwise expose soldiers and expensive armored platforms, such as main battle tanks, to unnecessary risk.
The main lesson of Ukraine is not the obsolescence of tanks and heavy armor, but the fact that no side can achieve its political objectives with missiles and drones alone. If deterrence fails, NATO will need to stop Russian forces, push them back, and defeat them on the ground, an impossible task without tanks and heavy armor.
Juraj Majcin is a Policy Analyst with the European Policy Centre. He works mainly on European and transatlantic security and defense cooperation, as well as hybrid threats. He was also a 2024 James S. Denton Fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
