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.
While the documents don’t describe exactly what the TAP system might look like, it is quite likely that it will share similarities with the so-called cope cages that began as ad-hoc additions to Russian tanks in 2021, and then were used by Russia, Ukraine and Israel in more standardized designs. They have since appeared on tanks and armored personnel carriers elsewhere around the world, too.
TAP “is a passive add-on armor to the base vehicle configuration,” according to the Army’s Fiscal Year 2026 Justification Book. “It is strategically placed over crew compartments and hatches, working in tandem with the base vehicle armor to mitigate damage from overhead threats. It is most effective against Explosively Formed Projectiles [EFPs] and Shaped Charge Jets.”
EFPs are basically projectiles turned into molten darts able to punch through any armor. Shape charges focus the kinetic energy of the munition in a single direction. Without seeing a rendering of the TAP system, it is hard to know just how they will defeat these kinds of weapons. One method could be what Ukraine has done with its donated Abrams. In addition to cope cages around the turret, they added more explosive reactive armor (ERA) to upper portions of the tank in addition to arrays of U.S.-standard M19 Abrams Reactive Armor Tiles (ARAT) along the sides of the hull as well as Soviet-designed Kontakt-1 ERA tiles on the fronts of both sides of the hull. We have also seen upper cope cages with ERA tiles installed atop them, which could help achieve the explosive resistance the U.S. is looking for.
We have reached out to the Army for more details about how the new TAP system will work.
The TAP kits are “intended to be installed on all combat vehicles with future expansion to other US Army vehicle systems,” the Justification Book added. “The Top Attack Protection (TAP) quantity per platform varies based on platform base armor and crew compartment locations.”
The Army is allocating about $92 million to install TAP systems on 1,528 vehicles, according to the budget documents. It is part of a $107 million Vehicle Protection System (VPS) package that also includes Laser Warning Receivers (LWR) and Signature Management Paint (SMP).
The LWRs are designed to provide early warning to armor crews about being targeted by laser range finders, laser target designators and Laser Beam Rider Air-to-Ground Munitions.
“The system will alert the crew to which of the three categories of threats are targeting the system and allow for the crew to respond based on that threat,” the budget documents explain.
SMP is a paint scheme that reduces the probability of thermal detection and is part of the Army’s “Camouflage, Concealment, Deception, and Obscuration layered survivability approach for ground combat vehicles.” The Army plans call for 389 vehicles across multiple ground combat platforms to receive the new camouflage. While this is a new buy, the Army has for years looked into better ways of helping reduce their armored vehicles’ infrared signatures to make them harder to detect.
These systems are in addition to the active protection systems (APS), like the Israeli-designed Trophy integrated onto a portion of its existing Abrams tanks since 2017.
From a previous story: “Trophy is a hard-kill APS designed primarily to protect against anti-tank guided missiles, as well as other types of infantry anti-armor weapons, such as shoulder-fired rockets and rocket-propelled grenades. The system uses an array of small radars positioned around the vehicle it is installed on to detect threats and cue pre-loaded launchers. The launchers use a small explosive charge to expel a burst of kinetic projectiles to defeat or at least disrupt targets through force of impact. Trophy’s manufacturer Rafael just recently unveiled a new version of the system that adds additional capabilities against top-down threats, including drones.”
While the Army Justification Book doesn’t offer any detailed physical description of the proposed TAP systems, cope caging used by Russia, Ukraine, and Israel ranges from hastily added armor plating to plates attached to poles on tank turrets to full-on enclosures by armor plating and metal mesh.
Russia and Ukraine have suffered heavy armor losses. Russia has seen the destruction, damage or capture of almost 20,000 armored vehicles, including at least more than 4,000 tanks, according to the Oyrx open source tracking group. The actual figures are higher because Oryx only tabulates losses for which it has visual verification. Ukraine has lost roughly 3,800 armored vehicles, including at least more than 1,200 tanks, Oryx states.
You can see how vulnerable tanks are to drones in the following video showing a Ukrainian Leopard 1A-5 tank being struck by several of them.
The Ukrainian tank losses include at least 22 of the 31 U.S.-donated Abrams tanks, the Oryx statistics show. These tanks proved so vulnerable to drone attacks that by April 2024, Ukraine began to withdraw them from the battlefield. After being modified with additional armor and other protective screening, they appeared once again on the front lines.
While these were not the most updated variants and only featured export-grade armor, the destruction of the tanks from top-down attacks likely helped inform the Army’s decision to install the Vehicle Protection Systems.
You can read about one Ukrainian tank commander’s thoughts on the vulnerability and advantages of the Abrams in our story here.
Adding to concerns about tanks on the battlefield, the war in Ukraine has shown that the days of achieving air superiority so that ground forces can move with relative freedom are over. Drones have democratized precision-guided munitions and traditional counter air capabilities can not overcome the problem. In other words, American troops will have to fight in the future with great fear of what threatens them from above. This is why hardening armor protection from this vector of attack is so critical.
Anticipating these threats, Russia began kitting out its armor with cope cages shortly before invading Ukraine. By 2023, Russia began marketing cope cages to other nations during the Army-2023 defense exhibition. As we described at the time: “There are clearly alternative configurations involving this tank cope cage, some featuring more supporting tubes and with more extensive corrugated metal. The ‘walls’ of the cage can also be covered with a hanging mesh to defend against attacks from the sides of the turret. The same mesh is found between the turret and the hull, to prevent the entry of drones in this potentially vulnerable area.”
Ukraine followed suit and by April 2024, standardized Cope Cages were being installed on its fleet of Abrams tanks.
Less is known about how many armored vehicles Israel has lost fighting Hamas in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, and then battling Hezbollah in Lebanon during a short-term ground invasion that began on Sept. 30, 2024. However, less than two weeks into the Israel-Hamas war, cope cages began to appear on Israeli Merkava tanks.
There are still several unanswered questions about the Army’s TAP passive armored add-on program. In addition to not knowing what they will look like, it is unclear from the budget documents exactly which vehicles will receive them. We’ve reached out to the Army and will update this story with any pertinent details provided.
It will be a few years before the Army’s armored vehicles will see the new TAP systems. A contract is not expected to be awarded until April 2026, with the first delivery anticipated by November 2027. In the meantime, the threat from drones and loitering munitions is only going to increase, especially in a potential high-end fight against an adversary like China or Russia.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com