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The True Genius of Ukraine’s Drone Warfare is “Compression of the Kill Chain”
Last year, Ukraine hit its stride in using small, consumer drones to combat their Russian invaders.
The evolution of this technology on the modern battlefield has been both astonishingly fast and extremely deadly.
A far cry from the large US drones and UAVs that dominated the skies during the Global War on Terror, Ukraine adapted commercially available drones that cost as little as $1,000 and hung Soviet-era grenades to their underbelly.
Ukraine then dropped this ordinance on expensive artillery pieces or took whole patrols of Russian invaders by surprise, with devastating effect.
As 2023 progressed, we watched as Ukraine’s small consumer drones expanded into a menagerie of remote killers, such as the Black Hornet which has a wingspan of only 12 centimeters — to drones with wingspans of over 15 meters.
Small systems play a particularly important role in Ukraine. Quadcopters and other rotor drones are mainly produced by commercial firms such as the Chinese company DJI and are among the most common. Armed systems, such as the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2, also proliferated.
In fact, so far in 2024, the first-person view (FPV) drone has become one of the most lethal delivery systems for…
