Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has promised that in 2024 the country’s military will have a million drones. His nation already deploys hundreds of thousands of small drones, but this is a major change – a transition to a military with more drones than soldiers. What does that mean for the future of war?
This technology has already transformed the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “At this point in Ukraine, anything that moves – a soldier or a vehicle – can be identified, tracked and ultimately hit with a drone,” says , adviser to the think tank. “This is a major change from previous conflicts even a few years ago.”
Small drones, many of them quadcopters that are available to consumers, have played a key role. From not long after Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukraine has used the drones as scouts, to direct artillery fire and to drop small grenades. They are often known as Maviks after the common . Russian soldiers soon copied these tactics.
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These consumer drones have been supplemented with smaller numbers of and , as well as single-use attack drones that are essentially small cruise missiles. Ukraine now fields .
“Before the war, the common thinking was Ukraine would get demolished,” says at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank. That didn’t happen. “Although a range of causes, from international support to Ukrainian courage, helped them mount a historic defence, drones no doubt were a big factor.”
The drone war accelerated in late 2022, with the introduction of . The powerful motors of these versions mean they can carry an anti-tank warhead 20 kilometres to destroy tanks, artillery and other targets. FPVs can chase down speeding trucks, enter buildings and bunkers through windows and doorways, or dive into trenches, and they have been built in large numbers.
Commanders on both sides were initially sceptical about using consumer drones on the battlefield, and procurement has largely been via volunteer groups, donors or soldiers buying drones themselves. But governments are now driving the efforts.
“This war has demonstrated an unprecedented use of commercial drone technology by state militaries,” says Bendett.
Ukraine deployed an estimated 200,000 of them in 2023, mainly FPVs and Mavik types, something made possible by the low-cost, off-the-shelf nature of the technology, in contrast to the usual slower military procurement process.
“,” according to one volunteer quoted by United24, a fundraising initiative set up by Zelensky that has helped buy the devices.
It was also initially thought that drones would be very vulnerable to radio-frequency jamming, which blocks communication between them and the operator. But while thousands of drones have succumbed to such electronic attacks, operators continually such as filters and receivers working on different frequencies, and the machines remain more present than ever.
“Jamming and other countermeasures do have an effect on drones, but there is an adaptation-counter-adaptation race taking place in Ukraine, with new counter methods and technologies appearing constantly,” says Bendett.
Autonomous attacks
One response to jamming is to make drones more autonomous so they can navigate and carry out attacks without continuous control. The operator just indicates a target and the drone does the rest. Kallenborn says these systems, often using artificial intelligence, are currently quite brittle and prone to failure.
“I expect both sides to experiment with and field autonomous systems, but still probably at a more limited scale or for more narrow functions,” he says.
Kallenborn and Bendett both say this war is likely to set the pattern for future conflicts. A key factor to the rise of the drones has been the fast speed with which new ones can be deployed and how $400 FPVs can be fielded in a much larger numbers than .
“We can absolutely expect to see extensive drone use in future conflicts,” says Kallenborn. “Other states will look for lessons learned.”
“The war has demonstrated that a military that wants to field many drones need not spend a lot on their development, procurement and use,” says Bendett. “We are seeing this pattern already in the Israel-Hamas war, Sudan civil war, Syria civil war and the use of drones by drug cartels in Latin America.”
The US Department of Defense is also attempting to capitalise on Ukraine’s success with a .
Although the use of drones is becoming frequent in many conflicts, the ways they are put to work can be very different, says Kallenborn. “I suspect the debate will shift to what specific types of drones are useful in which roles, in what quantities.”
