Are Drones the Future of Warfare?
Drones in the Ukraine War: A Quick Summary
I aim for this to be a quick entry guide to how drones are used in Ukraine. The news has talked a lot about drones being the future of war, but what does this mean, and what is the reality on the frontline right now?
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Other than large and expensive surveillance and precision strike drones (such as the American Predator and Reaper), drones were uncommon on the modern battlefield. But suddenly, in only a few years, modified commercial drones have become the cutting edge of warfare. They are now discussed as the future of war, as a game-changing technology. But much of this debate does not explore how they have actually been used on the frontline over the past few years.
In Ukraine there are essentially three main areas that drones have filled: surveillance drones, long-range strategic bombing drones, and tactical drones. There has also, very recently, been development of mid-range drones, designed to disrupt logistics farther behind the area immediately near the frontline.
Long-range/strategic drones:
Both the Russians and Ukrainians have engaged in strategic ‘bombing’ campaigns to disrupt the other’s economy, industrial capacity, and logistical capabilities. The Russians have mostly used their supply of missiles, with large numbers of large drones to saturate Ukrainian airspace and make it more difficult for Ukrainian air-defense.
The Russians use almost exclusively the Iranian-designed Shahed drone. The Russians have been using and modifying these drones for the last few years. Every night they send hundreds of these drones along with their missiles. These target Ukrainian cities, but they also provide more targets to overwork Ukrainian air defenses, with the goal of forcing the Ukrainians to miss some of the missiles. The numbers of both drones and missiles used in these attacks has increased over this year.
The Ukrainians, on the other hand, do not have anywhere near Russia’s missile capacity, so they have instead used large, long-range drones to attack targets much more selectively. They have been using these drones to degrade Russia’s economy. Some have targeted factories building key components for Russia’s military, and many others have destroyed oil refineries throughout Russia. (Oil exports are practically the only thing bringing in enough money to support Russia’s war.)
Operation Spider’s Web:
The most dramatic use of drones has been Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine’s daring June 1 attack on Russia’s strategic bombers. There has already been a lot of analysis of this, and I would particularly recommend two.
From The Cosmopolitan Globalist the day after:
Yesterday, Ukraine executed a meticulously planned and astonishing drone assault deep within Russian territory. It targeted five strategic airbases—Belaya, Dyagilevo, Ivanovo Severny, Olenya, and Ukrainka—and severely degraded one of the legs of Russia’s nuclear triad. These airbases are thousands of kilometers from Ukraine. Some are as far away as Irkutsk Oblast in Siberia and Murmansk Oblast in the Arctic. They were supposed to be completely impregnable.
And Phillips O’brien in The Atlantic on the specifics of the attack:
Images circulating immediately after the attacks appeared to show that Russian aircraft had been hit with remarkable accuracy at some of their most vulnerable points. The Ukrainians seem to have placed relatively small drone swarms in cavities built into the top of trailer trucks. Then, when the trucks were close to the targets, the trailer roofs opened up, and the swarms of drones flew out, surprising and overwhelming Russian defenses. Even how the drones themselves were operated represents something notable. In many cases, they seem to have been flying courses preprogrammed via the open-source software ArduPilot, which has proved effective in navigating unmanned aerial vehicles for hundreds of miles and precisely reaching targets.
Along with the danger of strikes with long-range drones, the threat of a similar sabotage operation creates serious problems for any country’s most valuable assets, and undermines nuclear deterrence.
Tactical drones:
The small drones used to attack right on the frontlines have been the most ubiquitous of all drones in Ukraine.
On the frontline, both sides mostly use both kamikaze and bomber drones. Kamikazes are cheaper and generally smaller drones, which are flown directly into enemy vehicles or infantry. Bombers can range from a similar small size, to much larger drones, such as the Ukrainian Vampire drone, nicknamed Baba Yaga after the mythical slavic monster. These drop explosive charges—often a grenade or mortar round. Since smaller rounds are less effective against armored vehicles, these are used more often against infantry, though the larger bombers can carry much larger explosives, meaning that they can be used against enemies in basements or dugouts.
The Ukrainians first started using First Person View (FPV) drones when they faced shortages in artillery shells in late 2023. These drones could attack similar targets, and lessened Russia’s numerical advantage in artillery. Since then they have increasingly taken on the same role as artillery, eclipsing it in numbers of casualties.
From my thesis:
The primary innovation in drones is the use of First Person View, or FPV drones to take on the traditional role of artillery. These are cheap drones—sometimes costing less than $500, significantly less than million-dollar jets or expensive artillery shells—originally made for civilian use, but which can be easily modified for military use. A cheap drone with explosives duct-taped to it can still destroy a tank, and, since the drone operator follows an individual target, it can do so more accurately than expensive artillery systems. It can be used by the soldiers on the front line. And drones can be used in cases where heavier artillery would be unavailable or unwieldy to use .
These drones see the most rapid innovation, with new designs and modifications coming, reportedly, every few weeks. They are also the most likely to change the future of wars, as they already have in Ukraine.
Surveillance drones:
These were the first drones to be used in combat in Ukraine. In the beginning of the war, there were reports of Ukrainian units using normal commercial drones to gather intelligence on Russian troop movements. Over the war they have been used more and more. The entire frontline, all the way from Kherson to Sumy, is now full of these drones flying about constantly. Commanders in bunkers, basements, and dugouts guide operations while watching video feeds from these drones. The entire battlefield is transparent. This constant surveillance complements the strike drones, and makes any movement near the front very dangerous.
The Response—Electronic Warfare:
Stopping drones has presented a new problem for militaries. Previously, threatening flying objects were expensive planes, helicopters, or missiles. Since interceptor missiles are cheaper than any of those, it made sense to shoot a bunch of missiles at them. But drones are much cheaper, and far too prevalent to destroy with interceptor missiles (though there have been experiments with interceptor drones).
Instead of destroying the drones, militaries instead try to stop the drones from communicating with their pilot, rendering them useless. This is Electronic Warfare (EW) at its simplest. Electronic Warfare is often used as a broader category, but in the case of drones, it’s basically just jamming. Against drones, this works by disrupting the communication between the pilot and the drone itself, causing the drone to crash or otherwise malfunction. This is usually done by sending out a bunch of interference on the same frequency the drone and its pilot use. This also works against anything else using radio or GPS, and Russian jamming against US-made GPS guided artillery systems has significantly decreased their effectiveness.
The problem with jamming is that it also blocks your own drones, and EW systems can be very expensive, while requiring lots of power. They can also be destroyed by artillery strikes, lucky drones, or simply a drone that uses a different frequency. This is the biggest competition, and the reason drones change to frequently. Each new drone design makes it slightly better against jamming, by changing the frequencies they can operate at, or adding a new system to rapidly change frequency, and then EW systems are adapted to compensate.
The Effects on the Battlefield:
The drone-infested battlefield has changed how warfare has been fought in Ukraine. It has made maneuver exceedingly difficult and traditional trenches equally dangerous.
As I wrote in April:
Since [the failed 2023 counteroffensive], Ukraine has moved to the defensive, and large trench systems and deep defensive positions have become the norm across the entire frontline. Combat moved from more fluid maneuver and counter-maneuver, with ambushes and armored attacks, to a static war of small advances and massive use of artillery, more like the First World War than any war since….
But as drones have become more prevalent and artillery fire more targeted, it has become more dangerous to fight in these comparatively open trenches. Through 2024 there has been an evolution away from trenches and towards underground positions. By the end of 2024, the frontline ceased to resemble the long static trench lines of 1917 and 2023. The open trench lines […] provide excellent cover against indirect fire, tank assaults, and most other artillery fire. But a drone can easily target soldiers in that trench, turning it from a vital protection to a possibly deadly trap. To avoid this, soldiers instead dig their positions farther underground. The front line has now become primarily small fighting positions spread out across a region, with soldiers in dugouts farther underground, or in basements when available.
Soldiers then only come up a few at a time to take their fighting positions, and move around trying to remain as hidden as possible, fearful of watching drones.
Even reaching these forward positions has become extremely dangerous. Getting to the frontline requires moving through the ‘grey zone’ where a drone strike is a constant threat. The grey zone has expanded and expanded, and now covers up to 70 kilometers behind the frontline. The Institute for the Study of War has a very useful analysis of this here.
Are Drones the future of warfare?
This is the big question militaries around the world have been asking. Many claim that drones, combined with Artificial Intelligence, are a revolution in warfare. And the answers to this question will determine military budgets and how forces prepare for future wars.
Despite how they have clearly changed tactics, this is not a ‘revolution.’ I would instead characterize it as a modification of normal artillery and missile systems (‘fires,’ in US Army doctrine). While drones have changed the composition of what we use for those strikes (drones still supplement normal artillery, rather than replacing them), they have not really changed the strikes themselves.
But while these are not a ‘revolution,’ they will only become more prevalent on the modern battlefield, and any military that wants to survive in the future must learn from these adaptations in Ukraine, and adopt this new technology.