(KIEV, Ukraine) — As Russia wages a protracted war of attrition, the Ukrainian military says it has made the most of U.S.-supplied Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles.

As the massive use of drones has become a feature of the Ukrainian-Russian war, soldiers and engineers said they had found a new way to make their most valuable vehicles even more protected and efficient on the battlefield. Videos posted on social media appeared to show the vehicles and their crews surviving in heavily mined fields.

“Bradley is the best vehicle I’ve ever driven,” Oleksandr Shyrshyn, a soldier with the elite 47th Mechanized Brigade, told ABC News. “It’s accurate, it’s safe, it’s super cool. Given the number of impacts on the battlefields, if we were still using our old IFV-1s or IFV-2s, the losses would have been two to three times higher.”

US authorities said they would send 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine in 2023. More than 100 Bradley vehicles have also been delivered to Ukraine to help it fight Russia, the White House said.

But as the brigade’s soldiers continued to fight, they said they realized they needed to upgrade the machine.

“Most injuries and damage occur during crew boarding and disembarkation or from FPV and other drones,” Shyrshyn said, referring to commonly used first-person view drones. “We can’t do anything about the first factor, but we can compensate for the second with a metal net.”

The latest additions are designed to protect against modern drone technology, but such modifications have long been common, said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy secretary of defense, retired CIA officer and U.S. Marine, and national security and defense analyst at ABC News.

“Throughout history, tanks and tank drivers have used additional equipment to defend themselves against all these anti-tank systems,” Mulroy said. “Fence mesh, reactive armor and even chain-link fences have been used.”

The area where Shyrshyn’s unit operates has been the focal point of the Eastern Front in recent weeks, according to reports from the Ukrainian General Staff. In recent days, Russian troops have advanced several kilometers. Shyrshyn said his soldiers are exhausted, need more vehicles and are trying to hold on to the ones they have.

A Ukrainian steel manufacturer has developed special steel screens that it says are installed on top of the active armor. According to Shyrshyn, the screens increased the crew’s chances of survival and protected the vehicle from the first-person-view drones used by Russia.

It takes a week to produce a steel umbrella and about 12 hours to assemble, said Oleksandr Myronenko, COO of Ukrainian steelmaker Metinvest Group. The non-commercial project is part of the “Steel Front,” a military initiative by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest businessman.

Shyrshyn, an engineer with 20 years of experience, said he had to transform himself into a defense specialist overnight.

“We started the project on the first day of the invasion,” he said. “Monday through Friday I do my normal work. On weekends I go east to oversee what we are doing for the troops.”

Other non-commercial projects of the Steel Front military initiative include the production of anti-tank hedgehogs, body armor, and some innovative things like the construction of fortifications in the most hotly contested areas in the east and even an underground field hospital.

While the Bradleys have only just begun testing their custom-made steel shields, the Abrams tanks have been running in them for several months. Ukrainian troops began using them in February this year near Stepove, Avdiivka and Berdichev in the east.

“With the latter, we understood what was going on. A very precise and cheap FPV drone can easily hit and jam the turret of a tank, for example, and that’s it, no matter how good the vehicle is,” Shyrshyn told ABC. “The drone threat is even greater because the tank is quite large and not so easily camouflaged.”

In addition, Shyrshyn said, Abrams tanks are best suited to defeating other vehicles because they fire armor-piercing rounds, not high-explosive ones. And most of the battles involving Abrams have taken place between buildings and in forests, places where infantry troops usually hide with drones, he said.

“We basically took a standard NATO manual and adapted it,” said Myronenko of Metivest.

“Now we see that we could have avoided the losses we had suffered before,” said Shyrshyn. “I saw this tank for the first time during training in Germany and I was really very excited. I wish at least a third of all our brigades had such a tank. We really need more, otherwise we will have to leave.”

Mulroy, an ABC News analyst and former tank and infantry Marine, said tanks and other armored vehicles have long been the target of less costly lethal countermeasures such as man-portable rockets and missiles – and now drones. The innovations the Ukrainians are making are similar to what he has seen in the past.

“In my experience, these efforts are effective,” he said. “If they deploy them across their entire tank fleet, they’ve probably proven themselves.”

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