Automated aerial weapons are not a novelty, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the first war in which both sides have used swarms of small drones on the battlefield. And with American and central European defense start-ups working to bring Western militaries up to speed with drones, expect this only to be the first such conflict.
It’s not surprising that both sides have so aggressively embraced drones. Not only do they open strategic avenues that are impossible or impractical with more traditional arsenals, but they can be cheaper and faster to make than artillery shells or missiles. And, during war, the factory-to-battlefield pipeline is key.
“Traditional industrial bases were unable to build the number of artillery shells and missiles needed for the protracted conflict, forcing both sides to turn to new capabilities,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of the group’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, told TMD.
While the European Union provided approximately 500,000 artillery shells to Ukraine in 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that his country’s factories produced around 2.2 million drones the following year. In 2025, Ukraine aims to increase total drone production to 4.5 million. “The Ukrainians have demonstrated a tremendous energy in this area in terms of producing low-cost drones in very large numbers, which helps, in some respects, to make up for manpower shortages,” John Arquilla, a longtime defense analyst who previously had a small role in advising a Ukrainian military operation in the Black Sea, told TMD.
Russia has also ramped up production, focusing particularly on churning out long-range, one-way attack drones, such as the Iranian-designed Shaheds, which the Kremlin has previously purchased from Tehran but now manufactures on Russian soil, integrated with its own guidance technology. While total production figures are not publicly available, the country’s Alabuga Special Economic Zone has multiplied its production of Shahed drones by a factor of nine, according to the Russian company’s CEO, Timur Shagivaliev.
“There’s definitely economies of scale,” Jacquelyn Schneider, director of the Hoover Institution’s Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, told TMD. At the same time, cutting corners in production can come at a cost. “You can’t make something that is all-quantity and all-quality,” she added. “There is an inherent trade-off.”
According to a report from the Russian-based, Kremlin-banned media outlet, The Insider, school-age children in Russia are assisting in the effort. What reportedly begins as video game and coding competitions, according to one 16-year-old involved, leads to students becoming “actively involved in modeling system nodes for various drones.”
Beyond building them cheaply and at scale, the “real innovation,” as Schneider explained, is how both sides have applied drone technology to address numerous war challenges, including “intelligence, the logistics, and even the ability … to bring blood and supplies to the front line.” Alongside offensive drones, the Ukrainian military uses land drones—unmanned ground vehicles that resemble something between a tank and the Mars rover—as ambulances to quickly transport injured soldiers.
Militarized drones also come in a range of types, each suited for specific purposes. While Shaheds can traverse hundreds of miles—with some newer models capable of traveling more than 1,500 miles—other types are used in short-range combat. “I would probably categorize them as completely different military weapons,” Schneider said, outlining the four most significant differences as “the range, the control, the purpose, and then usually the cost.”
Long-range drones are “a little bit more like cruise missiles,” she added. Both are used to target critical infrastructure deeper within enemy territory, such as power plants or supply warehouses—though Russia has also notoriously fired Shaheds and missiles into Ukrainian cities, often targeting civilian homes. Samuel Bendett—an adviser to the Center for a New American Security and subject matter expert in Russian military autonomy and AI for the Defense Department’s Defense Systems Information Analysis Center—told TMD that Russia’s intent with these long-range strikes targeting cities is “to demonstrate that Ukraine does not have control of its airspace, and to demonstrate that Ukrainians could be hit at any point in given time.” He added, “These long-range attacks have always had the purpose of trying to break the population and its will to fight.”
Such long-range attacks are, Arquilla explained, “an attempt to use a very old paradigm, the strategic bombing paradigm, to say that somehow we’re going to break the will of our opponents by bombing these distant targets.” But he believes reliance on strategic bombing has always been “overrated and continues to be” in this case. “The idea that drones somehow give new energy to strategic bombing is a mistake,” Arquilla said. “The potential of drones, if it is to be optimized or actualized, will only be at the tactical level,” not long-range air strikes.
The contributions of short-range drones aren’t limited to providing additional firepower or defense. As with soldiers, drones are often specialized in specific roles and objectives. Some are designed solely for surveillance and reconnaissance work, while others support infantry and airborne units in battle. Others plant—or detect—land mines, and they’re also used in electronic warfare, jamming the communication of enemy drones (and, in some accidental circumstances, their own).
In many cases, such as first-person view drones, a human pilot steers the drone remotely, with one Ukrainian operator telling The Guardian that he is “killing at least three Russian soldiers” per day. But this digital connection can be easily jammed by identifying the drone’s radio frequency. “With the advent of widespread GPS jamming, the first generation of drones fielded in the war are now obsolete,” Clark noted. “Both sides had to invest in drones that use other sources of navigation like terrain mapping with cameras, using known TV or radio transmitters as reference points, or homing on GPS jamming signals themselves.”
Both sides have also invested in AI-powered navigation systems, allowing drones to automatically steer and identify potential targets—but AI technology has also made it easier to jam enemy drones. “We thought AI could change the fog of war,” Schneider said. “That seems to be, actually, one of the consistencies of warfare across time … The use of AI and other digital technologies to try to both encrypt and decrypt wireless transmissions, that’s been kind of remarkable watching the pace of innovation there.”
Another solution to the communication disruption problem—which Russia was the first to develop and deploy successfully—is to create drones that communicate via miles-long fiber optic cables instead of radio frequencies. While attaching a cord of up to 12 miles in length to a flying robot may not seem to be sophisticated military technology, it’s preferable to losing all communication signals to the drone, and jamming signals have proven easier than cutting a cord in mid-air. “That’s going to be a central issue in the future of drone warfare,” Arquilla observed. “Every time there’s some innovation in warfare, there’s always a counter-reaction to it.” In late May, Ukraine Minister of Digital Transportation Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted that 15 Ukrainian manufacturers “are already developing” fiber optic drones for military operations, with an additional 20 “working on components.”
In this sense, competitive advantages are achieved not just by having the most advanced technology, but also by swiftly and seamlessly adapting to the opposition’s own wartime tech. That “tit-for-tat in drone, counter-drone, [development] has been really, really remarkable in this conflict,” Schneider said.
Therefore, less important is “who can develop the drones that are the fastest or [has] the best precision,” she added. “It’s who can get them on the battlefield as quickly as possible.
