The best armor on a modern tank is not steel. It shoots back

In short: active protection systems like Israel's Trophy detect an incoming anti-tank missile with radar and destroy it a short distance from the vehicle. They beat threats thicker armor cannot, but they add cost and weight, and they have clear blind spots against drones and attacks from directly above.

For most of the last century, the answer to a better anti-tank missile was more armor. Thicker plates, then layered composites, then reactive bricks. A shaped-charge warhead kept winning that race anyway.

Read also: Most interceptors never touch their target. They are not supposed to · Hypersonic speed is not what makes these missiles hard to stop · Stealth aircraft are not invisible. They shrink the radar's horizon.

So designers changed the question. Instead of surviving the hit, stop the missile before it arrives.

How Trophy works in a fraction of a second

Trophy, designed by Rafael and known in the IDF as Windbreaker (Me'il Ruach), mounts four flat radar panels around the vehicle for a full 360-degree view. When the radar picks up an incoming projectile, a computer calculates its path, type and time to impact.

If the threat will hit, one of two rotating launchers fires a tight pattern of small explosively formed penetrators into the space in front of it. The missile is broken up at a safe distance. If the radar decides the shot will miss, the system holds fire and simply reports where it came from.

That second job is underrated. Trophy shares the shooter's location with the rest of the unit, which ties into the point made in the system behind the missile: the sensor network often matters more than any single weapon.

Armor versus active protection

The intercept itself does not need a direct hit, which echoes why most interceptors never touch their target. Disrupting the warhead's jet is enough.

Where it falls short

No system is a force field. The known gaps are specific:

• A donut-shaped weak zone directly overhead, exploited in October 2023 when Hamas dropped grenades from cheap quadcopters.
• Slow objects, like a dropped grenade, can be filtered out as non-threats.
• Salvo tactics: Hezbollah's twin-Kornet launcher fires two missiles in quick succession to beat the reaction time.
• Risk to friendly infantry walking close to the vehicle when the countermeasure fires.
• Exposed radar panels that can be damaged in battle.

Then there is the bill. Adding the system makes every tank considerably more expensive, and armies weigh that against vehicles and crews saved, the same per-intercept cost question raised by laser air defense.

Scale of use

The first IDF production contract was signed in 2007, safety certification came in 2010, and Israel has reported operational intercepts since 2011, including Kornet missiles and RPG-29 rockets. By 2023, production had reached 40 systems and 500 countermeasures a month. The US Army fields Trophy on Abrams tanks.

Technical details, variants and limitations are collected in the Wikipedia entry on the Trophy system.

When you next read that a tank "survived a direct missile hit", check whether the missile ever reached the hull. Often, it never got within a few meters.