EXPERT INTERVIEWS – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced this week that Ukraine plans to take an already-booming domestic drone industry and boost it to “the maximum”. Zelensky used his nightly address to the nation Monday to announce a ramp up in production of a "full range of drones” – including fiber-optic and long-range drone weapons – along with an expansion of “our domestic capacity to produce ground-based robotic systems.” Earlier in the day, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said it had approved a new Ukrainian-made ground robotic system for military use.
The spike in high-quality drone production has been an almost unmitigated good-news story for Ukraine. In the space of three years, Ukraine has gone from reliance on other countries for its drone weapons to low-tech domestic production, to becoming a juggernaut that now manufactures drone weapons at a scale and quality that have drawn the attention, and even envy, of other countries in Europe and beyond.
That technological prowess has also been noticed by the United States military, as it seeks to draw lessons from the war, and pivot from an emphasis on large, traditional and hugely expensive weapon systems to smaller, unmanned and highly adaptive drones of its own.
The Cipher Brief turned to three experts in the field — Nick Thompson, a former CIA Paramilitary Officer and Naval Special Warfare Operator; Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn, Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security; and Samuel Bendett, Adviser with CNA Strategy, Policy, Plans and Programs Center, where he is a member of the Russia Studies Program — for their assessments of both these Ukrainian innovations and how they may serve as templates for others to follow.
The conversations have been edited for length and clarity. Watch the full discussions at The Cipher Brief YouTube channel.
THE EXPERTS
The Ukrainian innovations
Pettyjohn: There’s definitely a lot of innovation and ingenuity on the part of the Ukrainians. They have a strong IT sector that they’ve been able to draw on and pull on parts of their civil society to support the war effort.
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 are 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.
Thompson: The Ukrainians started out making a couple of hundred thousand drones [a year]. Now they're in the business of making millions of drones. Mass, low-cost systems are now challenging very high-end systems. You think about the FPVs – first-person view drones – the quadcopter, fixed wing, and let's not forget the maritime drones, unmanned surface vessels. So the shift has really been from expensive, boutique to mass and cheap systems.
As for maritime drones, hats off to the Ukrainians – very innovative. They've developed very effective systems at very low cost. They've decimated [Russia’s] Black Sea fleet, from actually destroying Russian vessels to making Russian vessels move and get out of the way. That is also very effective. But we've seen a number of systems with increasing distances, increasing payloads, incorporation of jet skis – all very effective unmanned surface vessels against Russian maritime infrastructure.
Bendett: It is now possible to saturate the battle space with all manner of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) at different altitudes that can provide data and rapid response to any movement in battle. So it has made it very difficult for either side to mass its forces in any large quantity.
Both sides are fielding a large number of tactical combat UAVs, usually one-way attack FPV-type drones, which are available in staggering numbers in the Ukraine war. So as soon as something is seen and observed, whether it's a vehicle or unit or soldier or a communication station or anything related to combat, it is tracked, it is observed and ultimately attacked. Such attacks are now happening to the depths of 10, 15, and even 20 kilometers from the line of contact. Any rear movements and developments are also subject to observation and attacks as well.
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The role of the private sector in the Ukraine drone boom
Bendett: A large number of these drones are enabled by inclusion of commercial technologies. In fact, many of these UAVs are built almost entirely from commercial components sourced from China. So there's a very interesting correlation here that enabled Ukraine to field over 1.4 million UAVs last year — the access to commercial technologies that coexist with, overlap, and sometimes replace military-grade systems. At the tactical battle space, it is these commercially-sourced technologies which often dominate.
It was in 2022 that it became apparent that there's a tactical gap that should be filled with a short-range drone for a range of options. That's when the volunteers, the startup communities on both sides — and of course in Ukraine first, because Ukraine is the first mover in this war when it comes to many drone-related developments — stepped up and started delivering commercial drones such as the Chinese-made DJI Mavic and Matrix series, which are now ubiquitous and still irreplaceable in many sections of the front. That's when volunteers and the startup community started manufacturing tactical drones for Ukrainian soldiers to use.
It is this vast ecosystem of volunteers and private sector enterprises that literally gave birth to a private sector defense industrial complex, something that didn't exist in Ukraine before. It is these private sector efforts, the sum total of thousands and thousands of different efforts, which have delivered a lot of key capabilities that we're seeing right now.
Ukraine was able to tap into this groundswell of activity. It established organizations that serve as intermediaries between these private sector efforts – some of which have never worked in the military space before – and the military proper, so that a lot of these technologies could be field tested by the military for selection into mass-scale application across the front.
There are different organizations that enable that. The most famous in Ukraine is Brave One, which is facilitating the development and fielding and acquisition of tactical drones, counter-UAS systems, unmanned ground vehicles and even unmanned surface vehicles.
Some of these efforts have since matured into actual small-scale defense enterprises that can manufacture weapons and systems at scale – obviously not on the same scale as the established defense industrial corporations in Ukraine and in Russia, but on a scale that is impactful at certain sections of the front, certainly impactful for units and forces which are directly communicating with these volunteer efforts.
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Lessons for the U.S. - and the world
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 or 20 kilometers at most. You haven’t seen the effects extend as far.
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.
And 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.
The [U.S. Military] needs 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.
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.
Thompson: The evolution has been extremely rapid, faster than people probably anticipated. I think Americans, we were used to owning the sky. We had SATCOM (satellite communications), and maybe limited EW (electronic warfare) jamming. And that's probably going to change. With drones, these are probably changes on the battlefield that are going to revolutionize warfare for a very long time. You just see constant technology changes being incorporated. It's kind of a cat and mouse game. We do this, they do this, and then it constantly just iterates from there.
I think we're going to get to mass and low-cost and we're going to get to the hardening of the navigation system, so that if you launch it, you have very high confidence that it's going to get to where it needs to go. I think we'll see that too. And now there's an equally important defensive side. How do we defend against that? Because frankly, there is near peer competition in the drone space.
Bendett: There's a lot of interest in the war in Ukraine and how certain aspects of drone warfare in Ukraine can be applied to different countries, different regions, different ways of fighting. For the Indo-Pacific region, the United States, Taiwan and other countries and China proper are looking at how a long range one way attack drone can be fielded in large numbers.
Each country is going to consider what it needs for its military, how it's going to fight the next war, what the adversarial capabilities are, what is the terrain and other features such as costs and the size of military budgets, which will all factor into their decision, what kind of weapons and systems they should be acquiring. But we are seeing the lessons of Ukraine actually spreading around the world.
Rapid innovation, rapid iteration at the tactical edge, is going to be very important as adversaries actually field a number of systems and tactics that can counter whatever advantage was perceived as important before the conflict started. So the ability for soldiers to iterate and innovate at the tactical edge is going to become essential. Each military is going to look at its own way of waging war and its own needs and requirements for a future drone force.
The key to Ukrainian combat is fielding large numbers of cheap, attritable [drone] systems – those that could be quickly fielded, lost in combat without impacting the overall operations and easily replaced. So we're not talking about expensive, exquisite systems, which still dominate many established military's rosters. We're talking about systems that could be quickly assembled, quickly repaired, quickly changed and modified if necessary. And if lost, quickly replaced.
So even for longer-range drones, even for one-way attack drones, the cost is still in the tens of thousands or maybe up to several hundred thousand dollars, but no more. The cost for heavy quadcopter and multi-rotor bombers is also in the tens of thousands, but it is not in the millions or even tens of millions. So fielding large numbers of systems, which are relatively cheap, is key for both sides. And we're seeing that in action every day in Ukraine.
Thompson: There are people [in the U.S. Military] that want to move smart, but also move very fast. Incorporating AI has been very successful in Ukraine. We need to take all those lessons learned and really apply them to where we're probably going to see them in use. INDOPACOM comes to mind right away. The loitering munitions or the one-way systems that we're seeing that the Russians use, the Lancet model and the Iranian Shaheed models. They're launching in the tens, maybe the hundreds. But imagine if we get to scalability and mass where people are launching thousands of these in swarms. I do think that the smart people in the U.S. government and the intelligence community recognize this, but it is very much a problem that is moving very quickly. The counter drone, how do you defeat that? That's very challenging. It's going to have to be multi-layered defense.
There is an arms race. And utilizing AI for data collection, processing, classification and recognition of what is out there, and then to target, prioritize, track and then eliminate – this all happens very fast. I think that we're doing quite well in this. You can always go faster, you can always be cheaper. But we really we're up against time. This is all time-sensitive right now.
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