EMPs fall off with the square of the distance, there’s a reason the only ones with any kind of regional effect we’ve been able to produce were through the use of nuclear weapons. Even in the event that you had some non-nuclear means to produce them the cost of hardening your own equipment and producing the EMP would be way higher than the cost of the drones, and you’d also be putting a very high value target on the field to be taken out by artillery.

EM captured is proportional to area. An electric grid is big, so it’s easy to fry even from a distance. A drone isn’t really, so you need a ton of power, and:

with appropriate shielding on their own equipment

We’re talking about guys who don’t even use the armour they already have properly, remember. Custom EM shielding for their barely-refurbished 1960s radio or the civilian one they bought from more competent people in China is not really on the table.

Just more jamming is an option, but apparently they have trouble doing even that in a directed enough manner. Also, it’s pretty much certain Ukraine’s drones are getting more and more autonomous.

If it hits them, it hits you. Modern tabks rely on alot of electronic equipment, from sights to targeting and other systems. Are you going to shield all of them? How much would the tabk cost? What good is all that shielding if an artillery shell or atgm can take out the tank?

Its probably a question of:

• Cost
• Blasting your own systems
• Blasting your own comms

Can you even hear the whizzing of a drone from inside the tank?

Well in a nutshell, communication equipment is supposed to transmit electromagnetic waves to communicate with other equipment. What would “shielding” it mean? Its whole purpose is to send and receive. Preventing electromagnetic waves from getting to it would defeat the whole purpose of a communication device. If you only block most frequencies and leave some frequency open to communicate on, then the drones can use that frequency too. If you flood all frequencies with junk, than there’s no way any communication equipment could work because the signal will be overwhelmed by noise.

Anyone who knows more feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s the basic issue. Either everyone is blind or no one is.

The electronic warfare being used are basically all types of jamming, flooding frequencies with random noise, not really electromagnetic pulses in the sense of using electric waves to induce charges in an object to disable it. Something like that would take an immense amount of power.

Large, non-nuclear EMPs mostly use explosives. Covering a large battlefield means you’re essentially bringing a massive, single-use explosive charge to the battlefield, staying uncomfortably close enough to benefit from it, and trying to set it off at exactly the right time, because they’re not reloadable. And your enemy is probably thrilled you’re doing this, because it saves them from hauling their own explosives there. (On that note, why are you sitting on this thing instead of dropping it on the enemy?)

This is in addition to whatever shielding you brought, which is likely bulky and conspicuous. And you’re probably not doing combined arms, because shielding infantry and light vehicles from massive explosions is, it is fair to say, something of an unsolved problem.

But wait, you might be thinking. I know there are non-explosive ways to generate EMPs. Yes, there are, but you need a power source for those, and if you have a really good, portable one of those and a consistent supply of fuel to run it, you probably have better uses for it, like powering a modest laser. Oh, also, you’re 100% sure your shielding works perfectly, right? You’ll find out quick if you don’t.