"When Russia widened its war on Ukraine two years back, tanks led the attack – and led the defense, too. The Russian army that rolled farther into Ukraine included as many as 2,000 tanks including some of the latest T-72 and T-90 models. Each had three crew and a 125-millimeter stabilized main gun and weighed more than 40 tons. Ukrainian tanks, around a thousand of them including locally-made T-64s – also with three crew and a stabilized 125-millimeter gun – met the Russian force and first battled it to a standstill before counterattacking and, over the next nine months, driving the Russians back to the current front line in southern and eastern Ukraine. The fighting was brutal, and it didn’t spare the tanks despite the vehicles’ hundreds of millimeters of steel and composite armor. From the start of the wider war until the culmination of Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensive, when the front line froze around their present positions, the Russians lost around a thousand tanks – and the Ukrainians a couple of hundred. The weapons that killed those tanks were, for the most part, the weapons everyone expected from decades of warfare: mines, artillery, anti-tank missiles and – yes – other tanks. But then, as the war ground on, something changed. Both sides, and the Ukrainians in particular, began weaponizing small drones. The kind you can buy online for a few hundred dollars."