Army Wants Cope Cage-Like Armor To Protect From Drone Attacks On Its Tanks
With the threat of drones rapidly changing the realities of warfare, the Army finally requests overhead armor on 1,500 tracked vehicles.
Howard Altman
Updated Jul 1, 2025 5:38 PM EDT
The U.S. Army wants its armored vehicles to begin sporting top attack armor protection by 2027.
A Ukrainian Abrams tank with added metal protection.
Metinvest
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To better protect its armor from top-down attacks by drones and, to a lesser extent, anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM), the U.S. Army wants to buy more than 1,500 passive Top Attack Protection (TAP) add-on armor systems for its tracked combat vehicles. The systems are designed to protect the top of vehicles, where there is less armor protection, from overhead attacks. The request for TAP systems in the Army’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget plan comes as Ukrainian, Russian and Israeli armored vehicles have proven especially vulnerable to attacks by loitering munitions, drone bombers, and first-person view (FPV) drones that transformed the nature of modern warfare.
The budget announcement comes after many have raised the alarm that the U.S. is not moving fast enough to adapt its armor capabilities and tactics based on lessons learned from the war in Ukraine. This is especially so when it comes to adding overhead protection for its highest-risk armored vehicles — those that will likely be at the forward edge of a future ground battle.
“Currently, there are no tanks in the world, to include the M1 Abrams, that have the effective passive armor protection needed to defeat modern top attack threats,” retired Army Maj. Michael Liscano Jr., a former Abrams Tank and Bradley Fighting Vehicle Capability Manager, told us. “Future next generation tanks are being designed with this protection along with active protection systems, such as the M1E3 for the United States Army, but for now you will see top turret mounted cope cages, top turret mounted multilayer explosive reactive tiles, and armor plates on top of the turret, and other methods to reduce damage of top attack systems.”
You can see one U.S.-donated Abrams tank being attacked by Russian FPV drones in the following video.
https://www.twz.com/land/army-wants-new-armor-to-protect-from-overhead-drone-attacks-on-its-tracked-vehicles
