Tanks Still Matter When Drones Rule The Sky

Send us Fan MailEurope looks peaceful right up until you inventory what’s actually ready to fight. After spending months in Europe, Professor Andrew Michta joins us to lay out a sober strategic picture: a continent still disarmed, a defense industrial base that will take years to rebuild, and a NATO alliance split by radically different threat perceptions from the Baltic Sea to the Sahel.We get specific about what modern war is teaching in Ukraine. Drones are changing everything, but Andrew explains why tanks and armor still matter because wars are ultimately decided by mobility and control of terrain. The real breakthrough, he argues, is not just more unmanned systems, but restoring maneuver through electronic warfare and spectrum dominance so soldiers can move without being hunted on a transparent battlefield. We also unpack the hard math behind “arrow vs arrow” economics and what that means for sustainable deterrence.From there, we zoom out to NATO’s Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative and the urgent need for allies to take ownership with concrete regional planning, exercises, and capabilities. Andrew connects that to a bigger US problem: a crisis of simultaneity across Europe, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and Korea, at a time when force structure and supply chains are stretched thin. We close with a plainspoken answer to the question many Americans ask: why should anyone in a town far from Europe care about Poland, Finland, or the Baltics? Because Europe and Eurasia shape US prosperity, shipping lanes, and homeland security, and because strong alliances are how democracies avoid fighting alone.If this conversation sharpens your thinking, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.