A U.S.-made Bradley armored vehicle is seen being fitted with a metal addition.

Trump rolled into a press gaggle in Qatar earlier this year and bellowed, “Nobody can beat us. We have the strongest military in the world, by far. Not China, not Russia, not anybody.”

Half right. We’ve got muscle. But it’s muscle trained for the wrong fight. The war we’re set up to win is a museum piece. The one we’d actually get is already here, and we’re not ready for it.

It’s not about hardware. We’ve got jets, ships, tanks — plenty of things that look great in a parade. The problem is we don’t know how to use them in a world where a $500 drone can wreck a $10 million vehicle in seconds. Boots on the ground still decide who holds dirt, but those boots now move under a constant swarm of eyes and teeth in the sky — and we’re amateurs in that fight.

Ukraine and Russia have learned in blood. Drones aren’t some magic weapon. It’s the mix: kamikaze FPVs, bomb droppers, missile haulers, and recon birds working together. They’ve killed the tank charge, made every trench a trap, and turned “stepping outside” into a death sentence.

And the battlefield’s changed so much that even U.S.-provided Abrams M1A1s can’t play the role we imagined. Ukraine has sidelined them — $10 million apiece — because Russian drones make it suicidal to move them without detection. Five of the 31 are already gone. A senior U.S. defense official summed it up: “There isn’t open ground that you can just drive across without fear of detection.” If Abrams can’t survive against today’s drones, no amount of “shock and awe” is going to save them.

We? We’re still stuck on 2003 thinking. The Pentagon didn’t even start talking seriously about drones until after Azerbaijan gutted Armenia’s armor in 2020. Now it’s 2025, and we’re still behind.

And then came the Army’s big idea: shoot drones with tanks. Problem solved, right?

Last month the Army rolled out its updated “Tank Platoon” manual — ATP 3-20.15. In the appendix: diagrams of Abrams tanks blasting drones out of the sky with 120mm canister rounds. The advice? Lead a straight-flying drone by “one-half football field” and fire a shell that scatters a thousand tungsten balls. There’s even a diagram for quadcopters: aim “slightly above the helicopter body.” That’s it.

The manual also lists “passive” defenses: smear mud on headlights, park under a tree, throw out decoys. And “active” ones: lasers, radar-guided rockets, 30mm autocannons. On paper, drones now get two of a tanker’s twelve “critical tactical tasks.” Sounds good until you realize those diagrams make drone killing look easy. It isn’t.

On paper, the Army’s new manual shows Abrams tanks swatting drones like flies. On the ground in Ukraine, Abrams are parked, hiding from the very drones the manual claims they can kill. Five are already smoking wrecks. The diagrams look good in a classroom; in a war zone, they’d get you burned alive in $10 million worth of steel.

Before the ink dried, the battlefield had already moved on. The manual reads like it was written for Desert Storm, not Donbas. No plan for swarms. No tactics for surviving constant aerial surveillance. No answer for an enemy who can see and hit everything you roll. Ukrainian officers literally laughed — said it’s so far from their reality it might as well be science fiction. In their war, following that manual will get you killed.

This isn’t about mocking soldiers. Tank crews will follow orders and fight with what they’ve got. This is about leadership — the gap between what the Army is teaching and what modern war demands. We don’t have years to close it. The next fight isn’t going to wait for our doctrine to catch up.

The Army’s drawing cartoons. The enemy’s drawing blood. That gap will be paid for in American lives.