The conventional wisdom since the start of the Ukraine war has been that drones are eating armoured vehicles alive. Cheap quadcopters carrying shaped charges have destroyed expensive tanks and infantry vehicles on video, and the footage has shaped Western military thinking.
A US Army captain is pushing back on that narrative. Captain Allan W. Watson, who leads Blackhawk Company inside the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, published an opinion piece in Task and Purpose about a spring training rotation held in Bavaria. In it, he argues that heavy platforms are not dead. They simply have to be used differently.
Key facts
- The piece was written by Captain Allan W. Watson, who commands Blackhawk Company in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment.
- The training event took place in April at a major US-led training ground in Germany.
- The opposing force combined the 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment with Ukraine's 412 Regiment, a drone warfare outfit nicknamed "Nemesis."
- US crews shifted how they positioned tanks and platforms along lines of terrain, hiding them in depressions and tree lines.
- Watson's column appeared on Task and Purpose on Friday, as reported by businessinsider.com.
What the training rotation actually showed
Reconnaissance drones followed Watson's soldiers throughout the fight, and they lacked the counter-drone tools they wanted. So they changed their habits. Bradley crews tucked into depressions and folds in the ground. Tanks used trees as overhead concealment. Routes were chosen to break the patterns that a watching drone operator would expect, and every convoy pause became a moment to ask how the unit appeared from above.
Standing at an angle inside a Bradley turret, calling out directions as platoons scrambled across steep hillsides, became routine for Watson. He would personally pick new paths toward each objective.
The opposing force still found them. Drones could spot a vehicle from the sky, but only soldiers on the ground could finish the kill. Vehicles were lost during the rotation, which Watson framed as part of the point of a demanding event.
Why Watson thinks heavy platforms survive
The losses, in his reading, did not prove heavy armour obsolete. They proved that heavy armour still delivers movement, protection, and firepower when crews plan around the drone threat. As he put it in the column, the systems he relied on did not turn his troops into easier targets. They kept his people fast, shielded, and lethal.
Our take: what it really means
The public argument over drones versus tanks has been loud and binary. Footage from Ukraine looks like an obituary for the tank. Watson's account is more useful because it is messier. Armoured formations did not vanish from the fight. They survived by changing how they trained, where they moved, and what they assumed about being watched.
For our readers in project management and agile teams, the parallel is direct. When a new tool or platform disrupts a workflow (AI features, a new regulation, a competitor's release), the instinct is to junk the legacy stack. Watson's story argues the opposite. Keep the stack. Change the operating manual. Adapt the workflow. The asset was rarely the problem. The way the team used the asset was the problem.
Worked example: a doctrine refresh
Imagine you run a five-year-old monitoring stack that colleagues keep calling obsolete because a newer observability vendor has arrived. The reflex is to scrap it. Watson's approach is to keep the platform and retool the playbook. Identify the threats you actually face, adapt the workflow to those threats, and run a controlled exercise to see if the adapted stack still holds. In most cases, it will.
What to watch next
Watch the US Army's next modernisation documents and budget justifications. The question is whether Watson's column is treated as an anecdote or as the leading edge of a doctrinal shift. Ukraine's frontline experience is the forcing function. Western doctrine usually follows a few years behind.
Bottom line: the tank is not obsolete. The old crew playbook is. The teams that rewrite their playbook will own the next fight.
Key takeaways
- Watson's column is the most grounded recent argument that heavy armour survives the drone era.
- Adaptation is a discipline, not a one-time pivot.
- The winning response to disruption is rarely to abandon the existing stack. It is to redeploy it under new rules.
Frequently asked questions
Who wrote the op-ed?
Captain Allan W. Watson, who leads Blackhawk Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment.
Where was the exercise held?
At a US training area in Germany, during April.
Which Ukrainian unit took part as the opposing force?
The 412 Regiment of the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Force, nicknamed "Nemesis."
Did US forces lose vehicles during the training?
Yes. Watson said vehicles were lost, which he described as expected for a demanding exercise.
Source: businessinsider.com