It's kinda fascinating that older techs, a lot of it considered "obsolete" like flak guns, are making comebacks in front of our very eyes to deal with modern problems like drones.This is what people don't get, is the Abram's was designed to be used as part of a combined arms force, not the way the old Soviet school of thought treated armored warfare, and unfortunately a lot of Ukraine's older officer corp are still soviet stock.
Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive was a costly lesson on why you don't use equipment meant for combined arms warfare in a manner fitting of a soviet playbook.
However, until SHORAD catches up with the new drone threat environment, armor is not as useful as it once was in this fight.
Seeing Yak-52 with gunners in the back taking down drones is like the old bi-plane rear-seaters taking down blimps in WW1.
I think that maybe it's time to consider a high-low approach to Ukraine and warfare in the future. Prop-planes with turreted guns can do a lot of things it would be far more expensive to do for air defense, especially against near-ground drones, than with jet fighters.
Wonder what it would take to spin up a reproduction P-61 assembly line, or give Ukraine a bunch of air-to-air modified Super-Tacano's or AC-130's (FC-130?)?
A cheap, mobile platform would be a military truck or even technical to move with armoured divisions to shoot down drones. The cameras and optics would be simple enough.
It's like body armour all over again; plate and mail were made useless by guns, infantry went naked for like three centuries up until post-WW2, and then kevlar and ballistic plates.