Belgian "FrankenTank" Heading to Ukraine: An Old Leopard With a New Trick

Are tanks obsolete? No. But they do need to evolve very quickly.

Leopard 1 tank with Cockerill 3105 turret. Photo credits: Cockerill

My acquaintance and former editor, David Axe at Forbes just broke an interesting story about a Belgian tank delivery to Ukraine… Just one tank.

How is one tank going to help the war effort?

So, I did a deep dive into what I’m now calling the “FrankenTank” – (let’s see if we can get it to stick.)

Belgium’s delivery is a deliberate test, and it might just be a sneak preview of the future of tank warfare in the drone age.

At the heart of this “FrankenTank” is an old German Leopard 1A5 chassis mated with Belgium’s Cockerill 3105 turret: A slick, automated killing machine that brings 21st-century fire control, indirect fire capability, and most importantly, anti-drone survivability to a tank that previously had the armor profile of a Diet Coke can.

Okay, Diet Coke can is an exaggeration, but its armor is relatively thin compared to modern MBTs.

The Cockerill turret is already in use in India and Indonesia, but this is its first battlefield debut against Russian FPV drones. And if it performs as advertised, this could be Ukraine’s first purpose-built counter-drone MBT: light, fast, and lethal.

Why One Tank Matters More Than a Hundred

It’s tempting to roll your eyes when you hear that a single tank is headed to Ukraine, as if this is a raffle prize or a bureaucratic oversight. But this tank isn’t meant to tip the scales in some traditional “armored division versus armored division” slugfest.

That playbook was shredded somewhere between Hostomel and Avdiivka.

This tank is a concept car. A test mule for the next generation of battlefield doctrine, where mobility, automation, and survivability are worth more than massed steel and body count.

It’s not about replacing what’s been lost. It’s about challenging the assumption that the battlefield is too chaotic, too cheapened by drones, for innovation to matter.

Belgium’s message with this one tank is clear: we're not done evolving armor yet.

One tank gives you something a hundred never could: room to experiment. When you ship a hundred of something, you're committing. You’re standardizing. You’re scaling up before you’ve even stress-tested your assumptions. But when you send one, you’re inviting the end user, Ukraine’s battle-tested crews, to poke it, prod it, break it, and tell you if it’s worth betting the future on.

This is a battlefield A/B test, live, lethal, and unforgiving.

And there’s something else one tank gives you that a hundred can’t: focus. A single prototype like this doesn’t just collect data, it draws attention. It becomes the focal point for engineers, tacticians, drone operators, and even Russian electronic warfare teams who suddenly have a new mystery to solve.

If it works, it becomes doctrine. If it fails, it fails loud and early, before Ukraine’s limited resources get poured into the wrong solution.

Yesterday’s $10,000 drone can kill today’s $10 million tank; this kind of targeted innovation is worth more than another dozen legacy systems stacked on the “to be blown up” list. Because at this stage in the conflict, quality doesn’t just beat quantity, it outlives it.

The question now isn’t whether Ukraine needs a hundred more of them. The question is whether this one tank just became the blueprint for every tank that comes after… around the world.

The Cockerill 3105: Belgium’s Answer to the FPV Apocalypse