Stacie Pettyjohn is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Her areas of expertise include defense strategy, posture, force planning, the defense budget, airpower, and wargaming. Her current projects focus on the effect of drones on warfare, munitions stockpiles, and nuclear deterrence in a multipolar world. Pettyjohn also serves as the Chair for Total Force Integration Subcommittee on the Reserve Forces Policy Board, a federal advisory committee within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
EXPERT Q&A — In the nearly three years since Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, drones have played an increasingly critical role. Both Ukraine and Russia have used drones for attacks, intelligence and surveillance. Ukraine is rapidly fostering drone innovation to meet this demand, partnering with private companies in development and manufacturing.
The Cipher Brief turned to Stacie Pettyjohn, Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, to discuss Ukraine’s unprecedented innovation in drone warfare, and its impact in the current war. She said the scale and success of that innovation has “surprised everyone” – and that the U.S. has much to learn from the drone revolution playing out on the battlefield. Pettyjohn spoke with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can also watch their full discussion on our YouTube channel.
Nagorski: To what extent has Ukraine’s ability in drone warfare — its innovation, and its new industry in terms of drone manufacturing — surprised you?
Pettyjohn: I think it has surprised everyone — the scale of what we’ve seen and the fact that the Ukrainians have not only taken modified commercial drones and used them in combat, but also experimented with new uses for drones, finding new ways to weaponize them and building an entire arsenal of strategic strike weapons. A lot of these are long range kamikaze drones that they’ve been shooting into Russia that have sometimes targeted oil refineries and even air bases. And then there are the drone boats that have really allowed the Ukrainians to deny the Russians use of the Black Sea, which has probably been one of the biggest successes for drones. It’s the scale of it, and that they’re used in so many different missions and close-fight and strategic strikes.
Also, every single ground formation now has a drone. No one’s going out without them. They have really permeated at every echelon of the ground forces.
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Nagorski: You mentioned drone boats – or maritime drones. To what extent did those exist before this war? I assume the Ukrainians didn’t invent them out of whole cloth.
Pettyjohn: They sort of did. The U.S. has been working on uncrewed surface vehicles, and other countries have as well — I think there’s been some experimentation by Iranian proxies in the Middle East. But the Ukrainians, again, took this to a whole new level. It has developed in ways that were very unexpected. It started out as Sea-Doos, the jet skis that people use for recreation. They modified those platforms, putting remote controls and explosives and a sensor or camera on them, so that they could sail them out and threaten or attack the Russian Navy. But it’s evolved rapidly. They’ve become much more sophisticated, though they’re still simple, small boats. And the Ukrainians are building diverse groups of them now that are operating together.
The Russians have adapted to the kamikaze boat strikes and have fairly effectively employed their tactical aircraft and helicopters to counter them. They’ve been keeping a watch, and this is one area where Russia retains an advantage, just in terms of having some degree of control of the air in a way that the Ukrainians don’t; they’ve been able to come out and find the drone boats and intercept them.
What the Ukrainians did was they put some air-to-air missiles, two of them on a new version of the drone boat, and they’ve shot down at least one but probably more — Russian helicopters using that tactic. And they’re creating other ones where some of the drone boats are going to carry small FPV (first-person view) drones, the small kamikaze drones or quad copters, and other things. There are new tactics and they’re employing new technologies together in combinations all of the time.
Nagorski: Is all this, do you think, a function of just need and necessity? Is it Ukrainian ingenuity? Where do you give the credit and the explanation for all the things you’ve just run through?
Pettyjohn: I think it’s both. I think there’s definitely a lot of innovation and ingenuity on the part of the Ukrainians. They do have a strong IT sector that they’ve been able to draw on and [they’ve been able to] pull on parts of their civil society in a way to support the war effort that, frankly, it’s been harder for a country like Russia to do. It’s really disaggregated, though. So you find that a lot of the Ukrainian drone units, the most expert ones, have their own shop that produces those drones for them, like the small FPV kamikaze drones. There is a centralized system and delivery, but they tend to rely on this much more disaggregated network and different contexts that people have in the commercial and in the private sector to actually fulfill their requirements and generate these new needs.
You have seen a lot of actors realize the utility of small commercial drones. This goes back to ISIS in Iraq and Mosul in 2016, which I think was the first. And in Libya, which didn’t get a lot of play in the press, the GNA (Government of National Accord) and LNA (Libyan National Army) were both using a lot of the DJI Phantom quadcopters for ISR. They had fewer of them that were modified and actually armed, and probably didn’t employ them in as sophisticated of a way and integrate them with their other systems. But they were still there, and because they’re readily available and fairly affordable, people have found ways to use them.
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Nagorski: You wrote recently that there’s a limit to what the Ukrainians can do for all these successes. You can’t do everything with drones. What are the limitations, despite all the successful innovation and impact that they’ve had?
Pettyjohn: They’ve provided a tremendous new tactical strike weapon like the FPV, but they haven’t fully substituted for other systems. They’re more of a complement than a replacement. You can’t generate the volume of fire or as large fires [as other weapons]. The FPVs are very small. They have limited payload. The bombs that they carry tend to be under five kilograms. There’s a limited amount of damage that you can have.
And right now, because they’re using fairly cheap commercial subcomponents, they can only have so many flying within the same area — you can’t actually have a huge swarm, because their radio signals interfere with each other. That could be changed. They could buy better radios that don’t interfere, like our cell phones don’t, but that costs more money. So you’re not able to generate the volume of fire or as big of fires as you can with other weapons. They all also require a significant amount of training to operate effectively. And that’s another factor that limits how much they can be scaled.
Nagorski: We’ve had a lot of high ranking ex-military folks tell us that this kind of revolution in drone warfare in Ukraine carries necessary lessons for the United States. What are some of those lessons that the United States should draw from Ukraine’s experience?
Pettyjohn: I absolutely agree that there are important lessons. It’s also important not to draw the wrong lessons. I would argue that small commercial drones or commercially derived drones have profoundly transformed close combat, but they’re limited to fairly tactical ranges. So we’re talking 10, maybe 15, 20 kilometers at most. You haven’t seen the effects extend as far. So they’ve really made that close fight a lot more lethal, a lot more dangerous because you can be seen and reached and hit by any number of different systems.
The other factor is that right now this is largely a cost competition. You’re looking for the cheapest type of system that you can create and use effectively. And if you can impose costs on your adversary by forcing them to fire much more expensive defensive weapons, that in some ways is a victory. We’ve seen the Ukrainians have stopped shooting down some of the ISR drones that the Russians have, because the Russians have produced so many of them that they can easily replace them, and they’re not worth expending even a Stinger missile or another man-portable air defense weapon, which is what would be needed to take them down. So you need to find effective countermeasures.
Electronic warfare is another one. We’ve seen how commercial technologies and the availability of commercial jammers and antennas have really polluted the electromagnetic spectrum and created a lot of challenges, leading sometimes to simple things like using optical fiber to fly some of the drones. But again, at tactical ranges.
And the final thing is the speed of adaptation. You have to be able to change quickly. When I was talking to one unit in Ukraine, they said that they would order drones for a particular mission no more than one week in advance, so that they could be configured for the threat at that moment in time, and that if they were beyond that, they would likely need to be modified again or not be that effective. So we have to figure out how to adapt both the hardware and the software of our systems faster going forward.
Nagorski: Where do you grade the United States right now in terms of its ability in this space? Is it ready? You’ve written about what may loom in Taiwan. Where do you see the areas where the United States has to maybe up its game a little bit?
Pettyjohn: There are a lot of them. They need to figure out how to more effectively employ drones at all
echelons, especially in the ground forces, the Army and the Marines. But we also need to figure out how to defend against them, and to have enough defenses. Every system is going to need some sort of self protection, in addition to some of the air defenses that are more expensive and will guard larger areas.
The Army is working on this. General [Randy] George, the Chief of Staff [of the Army] has the “transforming in contact” [initiative], looking at how they experiment and adapt with commercial technologies now and begin to use them — buy some quadcopters, give them to soldiers. You also have actual requirements that have been issued for a range of different small drones. They have the short-range reconnaissance, the SRR drone, which has been awarded to Skydio, which is just a quadcopter for platoon level. You have a medium-range one – Anduril’s Ghost helicopter drone has been in the mix. Then there’s a long-range vertical takeoff and landing that they’re looking at for battalions. They’re trying to make sure those lower echelons all have that type of ISR and strike capability, but they’re a long way from being there yet.
And they’re going to have to figure out how they buy a drone that might not be effective in months or weeks or years and start replacing it. And I think this is what the department was trying to do with DIU and the Replicator program, but it’s not clear if they’ve actually worked out and made that process stick yet.
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