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Analysis/0074/August/2026/London-Dialogue. 31 August 2026
Author: By Viktor Trumbetas
A Russian establishment analyst is arguing that Moscow should choose not to rebuild its armoured force and is proposing "drone fire superiority" as the organising principle of a restructured military and land forces. According to him, this is the one doctrine Russia is least equipped to execute, at least due to the mismanaging priorities of weapons production.
Ukrainian tank commander Valentyn Bohdanov recently said that the armour has been reduced to hidden, static artillery. When the argument comes instead from Ruslan Pukhov, the director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), a fixture of Russia's defence-analytical establishment and a member of the state-adjacent Russian International Affairs Council, it belongs in a different category. Pukhov's essay in Kommersant, bluntly titled "The time of the Guards Tank Divisions is gone forever", is not a battlefield lament about the supposed end of an era, an era of armoured warfare as the cornerstone of land and combined arms warfare, happening in front of his eyes. His commentary is a policy intervention aimed precisely at his own country's military and defence-industrial leadership, and it is worth reading by a Western audience as exactly that. Dressed as an obituary for the tank, he aims to spark an internal Russian debate over what to adapt to and build during and after the war in terms of armoured warfare and support of it.
The interesting fact is not that someone thinks the tank is obsolete. It is who thinks so and whom he is arguing against. Pukhov's explicit target is the faction inside Russia's military and industry that treats the war in Ukraine as an "anomaly", a temporary distortion after which military-technical development will "return to normal". By 'normal', the classical use of combined-arms manoeuvres and tanks as leaders of armoured spearheads followed by the infantry is implied. He calls that a dangerous illusion, one that risks perpetuating a technological backwardness the war has already exposed. To understand why an establishment analyst is picking this fight and why it matters beyond Russia, you have to follow both his doctrine and his budget maths – because, in his argument, the two are inseparable.
The Voroshilov move
Pukhov’s sharpest rhetorical weapon is a historical insult that a non-Russian reader will skim straight past. He mocks the statements coming from within the defence establishment as versions of the known phrase often mistakenly attributed to Marshals Kliment Voroshilov or Budyonny: “The horse will still show itself” or tanks or artillery will yet (again) prove their worth. For the reference, Voroshilov was the Soviet cavalry marshal who, in the 1930s, resisted full mechanisation of the Red Army, insisting that the cavalry should still have a solid place on the modern battlefield, although combined with the . History soon rendered its verdict quickly and brutally. By invoking him, Pukhov casts today’s tank advocates as the new cavalrymen, men defending a beloved platform against an unsentimental technological turn, in our case, unmanned aerial warfare. And he inverts the usual polarity of the metaphor. The tank was once the emblem of mechanised modernity that replaced the horse. In Pukhov’s framing, the tank has itself become the horse: the legacy system whose champions mistake sentiment and sunk cost for military logic. Everything else in his argument flows from that single reversal.
Cost-effectiveness, not vulnerability
Here is where Pukhov departs from the standard “drones killed the tank” thesis and where his argument becomes genuinely worth translating. He is explicit that the tank’s crisis is not at root its vulnerability to drones or anti-tank weapons. It is the collapse of its cost-effectiveness as a combat vehicle. As he states, “The crisis of the tank is not caused simply by its vulnerability to drones or anti-tank weapons, but by the fact that it no longer meets the fundamental cost-effectiveness criterion as a combat system.”
The distinction is doing real analytical work. If vulnerability were the core problem, the palliatives would eventually rescue the platform: active protection systems, “cope cages” and hedgehog wire, and escort drones and electronic warfare bubbles. Pukhov’s point is that even a survivable tank has become a bad deal. A modern main battle tank now approaches the cost of a fighter aircraft (certainly not the most modern 4th or 5th generation combat aircraft), can be produced only in small numbers because of that cost and complexity, and starts to deliver considerably less in return, an inadequately protected, direct-fire weapon with limited reach within the current realms of the war. And he dismisses the fashionable idea of the tank as a platform for drones or over-the-horizon precision fire with a simple question: why haul all that armour and weight to carry payloads a cheaper, longer-ranged unmanned system could carry instead? Why does this framing matter more than the usual one? Because vulnerability is in principle reversible, a vulnerability verdict is an argument for better defences. A cost-effectiveness verdict is an argument against investing at all. That is the radical move, and it is what lets Pukhov jump from “the tank is having a hard war” to “stop building them”. Pukhov’s implicit answer, which is worth making explicit on his behalf, is that the platform’s economics were already broken in a drone-free environment. In his words, the problem lies not so much in recognising the priority of developing new unmanned, digital, and network technologies and the solutions built upon them, but rather in actually ensuring that these priorities are upheld given Russia’s evident relative economic weakness as a state and, in many respects, the technological backwardness of its economy and industry. The attempt to develop all these areas despite limited resources risks ultimately leaving insufficient funding and capacity for the full-scale development of any of them. Russia’s flagship next-generation tank, the T-14 Armata, approached fighter-jet cost and never reached meaningful serial production, a fact confirmed not by Ukrainian propaganda but by Rostec chief Sergei Chemezov himself, who explained that the army would sooner just buy more T-90s because the Armata is simply too expensive. Two attempts at a new-generation tank over thirty-five years, the Object 195 and the Armata, both failed to deliver a fieldable, affordable vehicle. That failure predates the FPV drone. The economics, Pukhov implies, were rotten before the battlefield made them lethal.
"Drone fire superiority" as doctrine
Pukhov does not stop at demolition. He offers an organising concept for what should replace tank-centric ground warfare: the struggle for drone fire superiority. His picture of the future battlefield is one where miniaturised, cheaper, networked and increasingly autonomous drones become the primary means of warfare, fusing reconnaissance and strike and turning the front and its rear areas for tens of kilometres into a total “kill zone” where drones destroy essentially everything that moves. In that environment, clearing the sky of enemy drones and protecting one’s own becomes the decisive task. Combat becomes a fight for drone fire superiority, explicitly analogous to air or fire superiority, and only the side that wins it can advance and hold ground. The whole force; its organisation, equipment, and armament, must be subordinated to winning that fight and to operating under its conditions. This is the section where an explainer should stop transcribing and start testing, because the analogy is where Pukhov is most quotable and most contestable. Air superiority historically rested on scarce, expensive, hard-to-replace platforms and highly trained crews. One would win it by attiring a finite enemy air force and then controlling the medium for the duration of a campaign, a decisive and holdable condition. Drone fire superiority has none of those properties. It is contested by cheap, mass, attritable systems that cost a few hundred dollars and can be replaced in hours; the measure-countermeasure race between drones, jamming, spoofing, fibre-optic control, and interceptors resets constantly and reaches no equilibrium. So the verdict implied here would be that “superiority” is probably the wrong mental model, borrowed from a twentieth-century frame that Pukhov’s own premises undermine. He describes the as a continuously contested environment in which neither side can achieve lasting dominance. Instead, both seek to create temporary, localised advantages that are quickly eroded by the opponent’s countermeasures. That does not weaken his case for reorienting the force toward drones; if anything, it strengthens the case for mass and attritability over exquisite platforms. In a way, he has diagnosed a post-industrial battlefield and prescribed it an industrial-age slogan.
Where doctrine meets money
Strip away the futurism and Pukhov is, at bottom, making a budget argument, and this is where the political economy becomes impossible to separate from the doctrine. He states plainly that Russia cannot sustain its abnormally high wartime military spending once the fighting stops; that a dramatic contraction is coming; and that the country is, in his own framing, relatively poor and technologically backward (compared to the trends and the West). Under those constraints, he warns, the Russian state is trying to do two things at once; fund the digital-drone transformation and “replenish lost equipment” in the mechanised-era pattern. According to him, this guarantees that money runs short for both, with catastrophic results for readiness. Hence the ruthlessness: cut the legacy classes and concentrate resources on the drone-digital future. The same view was expressed in an earlier analytical paper on “digital war” co-authored with a former chief of the General Staff, Yuri Nikolayevich Baluyevsky, which, in that sense, could be interpreted also as the position of the higher thinkers within the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
The arithmetic makes his case for him. Western open-source analysts, tracking Russian storage bases by satellite, estimate that Moscow has drained significant part of its Cold War tank reserve, with only a fraction of the remaining hulls restorable, while new-build production sits far below Soviet-era rates and is straining to replace battlefield losses. On the other hand, the Russian sources have acknowledged since the autumn of 2022 that Russia increasingly relies on refurbishment of stored old Soviet vehicles such as T-62 tanks, which were supplied in the greatest numbers of all the “old school” tanks. But they do not claim the reserves are exhausted but rather say there is evidence that Russia heavily relies on modernisation and repair rather than only new production, which again implies that losses in equipment are inflicted and visibly need to be replaced and generally do not mention full depletion of the old Soviet tank stocks. In a sense this might be true up to an extent because, year after year, the prognoses among the Western and Ukrainian media and news outlets are that Russia is about to run out of tanks the next year, and yet it always manages to pull enough of them onto the battlefield year after year.
Set against that reality is the institutional resistance Pukhov is fighting, and it is formidable. Rostec’s public line is the direct opposite of his. In January 2026 the state conglomerate insisted that tanks, “contrary to today’s widespread opinion”, have not lost their role as the main breakthrough striking force, a claim echoed across state media. Months later, materials prepared for Chemezov’s meeting with President Putin declared the T-90M, T-72B3M and T-80BVM the best serial tanks in the world. This is not disinterested doctrine; it is the position of the industrial complex, Uralvagonzavod, Omsktransmash and the ministries around them, whose entire business is the T-72/80/90 family, which Pukhov calls a dead end. When the refurbishment lines fall silent, so does a large slice of Russia’s defence-industrial employment and prestige. That, not tactics, is the real battlefield of Pukhov’s essay, which raises the fair question: is this doctrinal foresight or a sophisticated rationalisation of a depletion Russia cannot reverse anyway? The most credible answer is both, and saying so is more honest than picking one. Constraint-driven insight is still insight. Russia’s relative financial strains may simply have forced its more clear-eyed analysts to see the attrition future before wealthier militaries, still able to afford exquisite platforms, are willing to. Necessity and vision are not mutually exclusive; here they are pointing the same way.
Why should the West Care?
The essay closes a loop that ought to trouble Western readers more than it comforts them. Pukhov’s prescribed future runs on drone swarms, autonomy, artificial intelligence, networking, and space-enabled systems, precisely the domains where he himself concedes Russia is poor and lagging primarily due to the poor organisation and managing of the funds and priorities. He is, in other words, prescribing the doctrine his own country is apparently least equipped to execute. If drone fire superiority is the future, Ukraine and NATO are more than better positioned to realise it than their Russian theorists are. Russia has taken an institutional half-step in his direction. In November 2025 it stood up a dedicated Unmanned Systems Forces branch after Defence Minister Andrei Belousov claimed drones already account for up to 80 percent of fire tasks in the war. But a new branch is not what Pukhov is asking for. A branch can just as easily compartmentalise drones into one organisational box while every other directorate defends its legacy budget. What is the opposite of the whole-of-force subordination he demands? Creating a drone branch is the easy part; deciding to stop rebuilding the tank fleet to pay for it is the argument Pukhov is actually having, and it is far from won. For Western defence establishments the mirror is uncomfortable. European militaries are, at this moment, buying tanks and standing up new armoured brigades, even as a Russian establishment analyst and Ukrainian frontline commanders independently argue the platform’s day is passing. Pukhov may be wrong, and his own institutions may bury his recommendations under Rostec’s press releases. But the question he is forcing onto Russia’s agenda is the same question every ground force now has to answer, and the fact that it is being asked, this sharply, from inside the Russian tent is precisely why translating him is worth the effort. This is not a curiosity from the other side. It is a debate the West is also having, whether it admits it or not.
Viktor Trumbetas
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