The world’s first drone war is happening in Ukraine

A lot of blame-shifting is happening about the failed Ukrainian military offensive. But strangely there’s almost no discussion of its real causes, which are the steep learning curve of the Russian army and the military technology revolution happening right now on both sides.

The Russo-Ukrainian war began as a classic artillery war. Now it is rapidly evolving into a drone war.

The drones are ubiquitous. They destroy everything. Small FPV (first-person view) drones, or “seeds” in battle slang, are already hunting individual soldiers. The Russian offensive in Avdiivka is a bloodbath, and 70 percent of Russian armor is taken out by drones (the rest by mines). And Ukraine has fewer drones than Russia.

There are already drone swarms, guided to the battlefield as a unit and then aimed separately; drones take out mine flails, making minefields impassable. But soon they’ll be taking out mines.

A 155 mm shell costs the U.S. Army $3000, and it can’t change course. An FPV “seed” costs $300 to 400 and can maneuver. Its payload is much smaller, six pounds max, but what if it is a cumulative charge that strikes a tank from its rear? Russian tanks are particularly vulnerable this way. They have thick frontal armor, with ammo stored in the back of the turret. An FPV can fly over and peck at the junction between the turret and the main body. What happens next is quite spectacular.

Another option is to damage a track. Then the tank is abandoned, and in the night an expensive $50,000 “bomber” quadcopter will total it with a 3D-printed bomb. The “bomber” is noisy and slow compared to a lightning-fast FPV that flies at 120 mph, but its payload is 40 pounds. So it flies at night.

There’s not much of a chance that a gun will hit an advancing tank. There’s a 30 percent chance that a good drone operator — a “dronedriver,” now — will hit a tank with an FPV. A drone will sometimes have an advantage over a Javelin anti-tank missile, too. A Javelin needs line of sight, but with the drone you just fly it until you see the target.

At the beginning of the war, the M777 howitzer was a gamechanger for the Ukrainian army. Now, the moment it fires a shell, a counterbattery radar will pinpoint its location, and a Russian Lancet UAV drone, loitering nearby, can take it out.

A Paladin, unlike an M777, is a self-propelled howitzer that can swiftly haul ass after the launch, but it’s on tracks. It can’t go far. And a Lancet, unlike an Excalibur, can look around.

The Swedish Archer is much better. It has wheels instead of tracks, and a multiple-round simultaneous impact mode, meaning that it launches several missiles in quick succession on different trajectories so that they will simultaneously hit one location. It makes itself scarce while the missiles are still in the air. In this new war, wheels have total advantage over tracks.

The stalemate is a direct result of the drone revolution. The infantry advancing en masse is still taken out by shells. But this is changing, too: small groups of soldiers are more and more hunted out by FPV “seeds.”

The drone revolution started out of desperation and the dearth of shells, with Ukrainian volunteers operating cheap “marriage drones.” On February 23, 2022, they were civilian photographers filming marriages. Next evening, they were coordinating barrages with the help of their private drones. Within weeks, they were fitting grenades and building homemade release mechanisms.

Drones were built in garages all over Ukraine. There are over 200 varieties of them, built with cheap Chinese assembly parts, queues lining up for the popular ones. The Russian army at first lagged behind, but now Putin is fully expanding his assembly capabilities, while Ukrainians are still playing amateurs.

“Drones were 10:1 last year in Bakhmut, with the advantage on our side, now it’s 1:5, the advantage to Russians,” said Yuri Lytsenko, 58. A former political prisoner and a former Attorney General of Ukraine, he volunteered on the first day of the war, soon after a successful cancer treatment, and spent months in the trenches in Bakhmut operating drones from the frontline.

Both sides still buy assembly parts from China, but China sells mostly to Putin. Nothing crude here. There’s no ban on selling to Ukraine. It’s just that the Russian buyers are sitting right at the Chinese factory purchasing the crop wholesale. Last year, one would wager that Ukrainian desperation would outperform the ossified Russian state machine, incapable of quick decisions. Right now, it is the state machine — proven to be neither ossified nor stupid — that is outperforming embattled Ukraine.

The biggest bottleneck right now is the production rate, and it goes exponentially up, with Chinese factories churning out the assembly parts. The battlefields of old were covered with buzzing flies; soon they’ll be covered by buzzing drones. Another bottleneck is that the drone is guided by a human driver and can easily succumb to electronic countermeasures. The implications are obvious. The next step is the creation of an AI drone that will pick the target all by itself, and will thus be impervious to electronic countermeasures and won’t demand extra manpower.

With the astonishing speed this revolution is taking place, I wager that we will see an AI drone taking out a tank in the Ukrainian steppes sooner than we will see a fully self-driving Tesla on the streets of Los Angeles. If the drone messes up and takes out the wrong target, nobody will sue.

Yulia Latynina, a writer and journalist, worked for Echo of Moscow radio station and the Novaya Gazeta newspaper until they were shut down as part of the current war in Ukraine. She is a recipient of the U.S. State Department’s Defender of Freedom award.