Arena-M: Russia’s Unique Javelin-Stopping Active Protection System

Russia’s defense minister visited military factories in Moscow region this week to audit the production of promising weapons systems. During the trip, he was shown a modernized variant of the Arena-M active protection system (APS).

“This active protection complex, designed to protect against enemy anti-tank weapons, has been submitted for qualification tests. At the same time, we’re working to improve the complex for protection against loitering drones,” Valery Kashin, chief designer at the Mashinostroyeniya Construction Bureau, creators of the Arena-M, told the minister.

Active protection is any defensive system developed for use by military vehicles - tanks, armored transports, aircraft, etc., and designed to prevent enemy projectiles from striking and destroying vehicles, either by interfering with (kinetically or by other means), destroying or greatly weakening their striking power.

The earliest active protection measures were developed during the Second World War, with Nazi Germany deploying Nebelwurfgerät turret-mounted smoke grenade launchers on some tank models from 1942 onward, and Soviet heavy tanks starting with the IS-3 appearing in 1945 fitted with rear-mounted smoke dispensers designed to shield their fellow tank companies and advancing troops.

The USSR created the first truly modern hard-kill active protection system, the Drozd (lit. ‘Thrush’) in the late 1970s. Development was spearheaded by the Tula-based KBP Instrument Design Bureau. The Drozd uses a 24.5 GHz Doppler radar working in combination with an onboard computer to detect incoming enemy projectiles in the 70-700 meters per second range (to avoid fire against faster but less dangerous incoming fire like small arms bullets) at distances up to 330 meters, at an azimuth of 80 degrees and an elevation angle of 20 degrees. Readiness time for the system was 0.35 seconds.

The Drozd’s kinetic complement consists of eight guides, four apiece on either side of the tank’s tower, with munitions meant to defeat enemy anti-tank projectiles consisting of a 9 kg 107 mm fragmentation warhead fired when the enemy projectile approaches to within 6-8 meters of the tank, meeting it head on and destroying it before it can hit the vehicle. Calculations for fire were carried out automatically by the system’s onboard computer.

The Drozd passed military tests in 1983 and began to be installed en masse aboard the T-55A medium tank, seeing limited action in Afghanistan, but began to be discontinued and eliminated after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which ultimately led to the liquidation of the USSR’s T-55 inventories.

The Drozd would ultimately be displaced by the Shtora-1 (lit. ‘Curtain-1’) electro-optical active protection suite, which featured a combination of a smoke screen dispenser, laser warning system to detect laser-guided missiles, and pulsed infra-red jamming system.

Unlike the Drozd, the Shtora-1 is a soft-kill APS, with no kinetic protection to speak of. That means that if an enemy projectile is sophisticated enough to overcome its various passive defense means, the tank becomes a sitting duck.

This made it necessary to create a new generation of active protection, with the Mashinostroyeniya Construction Bureau taking on the lead on the project in the late 1980s. The Arena APS was unveiled in 1997.

Like the Drozd, the Arena is programmed not to react to small arms fire, as well as low-speed objects like birds, debris or clumps of earth (like the Drozd, targeting projectiles in the 70-700 meters/second range). The system provides all-round protection at elevation angles from -6 to +20 degrees.

The Arena’s anti-projectile rounds are situated around the perimeter of the tank’s turret in special shafts. The all-weather system remains operational while the tank is on the move and while turning its turret. The Arena is also designed to protect nearby friendly infantry by reducing the danger zone from its operation to distances of about 20-30 meters, with a signal light warning troops nearby when the system is turned on.

The Arena-M (‘M’ for ‘Modernized’) is an upgraded variant of the Arena whose development began in the early 2010s. Operating along the same kinetic principles as the base model, the Arena-M’s innovations are thought to include a number of important differences, including:

Additional details on the improved Arena-M are hard to come by. It also remains unclear when the system will be introduced into service (plans include equipping them in T-72B3M, T-80 and T-90M series tanks).

Russia’s innovative active protection systems for tanks are unique in the world, with NATO countries’ forays in the area slowing to a crawl after the collapse of the USSR and the disappearance of fears of hordes of Soviet tanks streaming into West Germany and marching toward La Manche. The US began equipping its Abrams series tanks with the Israeli Trophy kinetic active protection systems only in 2018, with Germany signing a contract with Israel to purchase the Trophy for its Leopard 2 tanks in 2021.

Western MBTs equipped with the Trophy have not been seen so far in Ukraine, with the system first used during Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ in Gaza in 2014. The system’s performance in the ongoing Gaza war leaves many questions unanswered, with dozens of Israeli Merkava Mk 3 and Mk 4 tanks confirmed lost or heavily damaged against lightly-armed Hamas fighters. It’s unknown how many of them were armed with Trophies.