Over the past three years of war an unlikely weapon - the humble first-person view (FPV) drone - has driven an order-of-magnitude, once-in-a-century revolution in battlefield lethality.
Cheap, ubiquitous and precision-guided, the swarms of little quadcopters buzzing over Ukraine’s battlefields have perhaps not made legacy-tech armored vehicles and artillery completely obsolete – but it’s been a close-run thing.
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At the very least, an ungainly aircraft about the size of a dinner plate has become without a question the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU) most deadly weapon. By any measure, Ukrainian FPV drones have changed the way battles have to be fought and how soldiers die - in a technical revolution comparable to the arrival of the tank and machine gun during World War One.
The AFU, unlike in legacy armies that rely on rigorous government contracting, established military institutions and politicized arms acquisition, shifted from conventional tactics and its arsenal of inherited weapons to a drone-led military, in a transformation that has come almost completely from the bottom up.
Drones make their first appearance
Thanks to Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and active battle lines formed in Ukraine’s eastern regions during the subsequent eight years, by February 2022 the AFU was already an energetic user of battle drones - for the most part Chinese Mavic drones bought by donations and flown by enthusiasts.
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In a few formations the Mavics were sometimes modified to drop hand-grenades. At the same time Ukrainian “cottage industry” factories made about 5,000 drones, mainly using imported Chinese components in 2022 in the first year of the war.
Ukrainian drone development underwent an enforced jump-start in the latter half of 2023 when European allies proved unable to deliver the promised big volumes of artillery ammunition and the US embargoed arms deliveries to Ukraine for the first half of the following year because Congress had tied military assistance legislation to border reform legislation.
Meanwhile the Russian army kept on attacking.
Drone production “takes off”
By 2024 Ukraine’s overall drone production had exploded with around 2.5 million units being manufactured by a de facto coalition of state-financed companies, drone technicians embedded in about half of the AFU’s 110 plus combat brigades, and tens of thousands of volunteers assembling aircraft in garages and apartments.
Ivan Havryliuk, First Deputy Minister of Defense, in comments earlier this month said production at the start of 2024 was about 20,000 drones a month but, a year later, there was a flood of around 200,000 drones a month were reaching Ukrainian combat units.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha in mid-February said production volumes hadn’t reached their limit, and predicted 2025 production would get to around 4 million drones.
The only drone parts routinely imported from China to Ukraine these days are circuit boards and engines, and to a lesser extent rotors, but all those components can now also be made in Ukraine, it’s just that Chinese parts are cheaper and easier to order in quantity, one drone-building team told Kyiv Post.
… and so do the tactics and strategy
Ukrainian drone tactics have accelerated, if anything, faster than production. In the early days, a single drone operated on its own with the pilot only linked to other units by voice was the norm.
Now AFU video feeds are integrated into data centers, ground commanders are plugged into the feeds, and battle tactics are, to a large extent, built not around traditional infantry or armor forces, but the availability of drones.
A typical tactical template for a Ukrainian combat brigade operating in defense places long-range observation drones over probable attack routes. If the enemy is spotted FPV drones are called in for strikes. Once a Russian assault column is in range shorter-range observation drones will call in artillery or mortars, while heavy drones with armor-piercing munitions concentrate their attacks on tanks, other armored vehicles or air defense platforms.
Priority is always given to bringing vehicles to a halt because stationary equipment becomes easy meat for follow-up strikes. Abandoned vehicles are set afire by big hexa- or octo-copters operating at night and dropping thermal grenades. Individual Russian soldiers are hunted down ruthlessly day and night. Surrender to a Ukrainian drone has taken place, but it has been rare.
Proof of the pudding:
A Russian assault into the teeth of a Ukrainian drone-buttressed defensive position took place in mid-February when elements of Russia’s elite 155th Guards Marine Infantry Brigade launched an armored assault on Ukrainian positions inside Russia’s Kursk region, by Ukraine’s 47th Mechanized Brigade, a seasoned unit. Video released by the Ukrainian army documented more than a dozen tanks and infantry fighting vehicles incinerated in about an hour of fighting.
Some of the tanks were stopped because a Ukrainian drone dropped a mine in the tank’s path. After the vehicle stopped one was set on fire by a kamikaze drone which was flown into an evacuated tank’s open hatch. Dozens of graphic images of the battle seemed to show around 50 Russian survivors of those attacks being hit as they retreated or tried to hide from swarms of Ukrainian kamikaze drones.
During mobile engagements, Russian and Ukrainian medics estimate that two thirds of every combat injury are caused by drones. In static battles the figure can rise to 80 or 90 percent. An AFU 2024 end-of-year battle damage statement claimed that of the kills and hits of Russian equipment throughout the year, 53 percent were by drones and 47 percent by everything else.
Dominating the electronic battlefield
Along with human blood and material destruction, an increasingly complex electronics battle between the sides has been fought to allow them to field better directional antenna, power sources, frequency-hopping transmitters, direction finders and on-board jammers than the enemy.
The latest widely fielded upgrade is drones equipped with drums carrying 15-20 kilometers (10-20 miles) of fiber-optic links allowing a pilot to ignore the detection and jamming threat, because his aircraft inputs are made by wire. Some Ukrainian units are already manufacturing their own fiber optic cable spools.
The commander of one of those units, Robert Brovdi, a leading Ukrainian drone commander and boss of the 414th Separate Unmanned Aircraft Brigade “Ptachki”, in a Feb. 1 combat report said his men and drones flew 12, 697 sorties which hit 4,387 targets during January alone.
Russian equipment damaged or destroyed in those strikes included 79 tanks, 108 self-propelled guns and mortars, 3 rocket artillery systems, 519 trucks or light vehicles, 196 cameras or antennas, 53 fuel storage sites, 28 enemy drones, and 1,935 fortified positions. Video recordings confirmed that 830 Russian soldiers died and at least 298 were wounded in those attacks.
Ukraine establishes a separate “Drone Formation”
In February 2024 the AFU became the first military in the world to establish a separate combat branch solely focused on operating drones – The Unmanned Systems Force. A year later, by doctrine, every one of Ukraine’s 110-120 combat brigades was supposed to contain at least a drone company and ideally a drone battalion - an organizational scheme probably not currently replicated by any other army on Earth.
Ukrainian open sources show that the AFU has established at least six regiment or brigade sized units supplied and kitted out solely to operate drones tactically, among them Brovdi’s 414th Brigade. All but one of the others (the 20th K-2 Regiment, the 429th Achilles Regiment, 427th Rarog Regiment) were born in the early days of the war as hobbyist drone sections that have gradually expanded and have now been reflagged as major attack drone units.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced in December 2024 it was planning to field its own dedicated large-scale drone unit - 7th Separate Reconnaissance and Strike Drone Regiment within the Central Military District (CMD).
Technology development continues
Special modifications dreamed up by Ukrainian builders are too numerous to fully list. Modified drones, that have not yet been widely deployed, include claw-armed drones to pick up enemy mines, abandoned rifles or other equipment, delivery drones to carry food or ammo to front-line troops, mother ship drones to carry multiple attack drones deep into Russian territory, and air-to-air drones designed to chase and knock down enemy drones.
Valery Churkin, a Ukrainian Defense Ministry official speaking at a weapons technology expo in Kyiv on Wednesday, said “New tactics are driving innovation, and innovation takes place on the battlefield. And the pace of innovation is incredibly fast.”
Oleksiy Cherniuk, deputy CEO of the drone development company Kvertus, said that technically Ukrainian drone-builders are capable of fielding and operating a close-to-autonomous by drone monitoring zone that would network direction-finders, movement sensors and jamming detectors across a 100-kilometer (62.5 miles) stretch of the front.
It will identify targets and pass on targeting data to drones to attack targets that enter the monitored area. Developers would need at least $140 million and about a year to get the network going, he said on Wednesday.
Many observers are pointing to drones using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify targets automatically, currently a technology that is in use but isn’t efficient because it still has trouble picking out a tank or a soldier in wartime conditions, but promises to be the next big tech jump on the horizon leading to the appearance of smart drone swarms which probably won’t be exactly like Hollywood has portrayed them, some say.
“It may seem like we are building the Terminator or the Skynet… but really all these upgrades are only refinements, there can’t be a moment when the drones suddenly become sentient,” Serhy Kuprienko, CEO of the drone development company Swarmer says. “Yes, there is a fear of advanced technologies here… But in any case, our Russian enemies don’t care. They will just field whatever weapon they can.”
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