The Most Important Drone Battles Are Yet To Come. Is Ukraine Ready?

The appearance of enemy FPV attack drones with fiber optic cable control in August is an absolutely expected event, and the same drones will soon be added (or are already being added as you read these lines) to the armory of the Ukrainian Defense Forces. This, however, will happen not because they were purchased in time under state contracts but because volunteers and concerned citizens decided to contribute their effort and money. This story reflects all the strength and weakness of the Ukrainian high-tech defense industry. Let us delve into it.

In the spring of 2022, the Ukrainian military began to extensively use kamikaze drones based on Chinese racing drones armed with grenade launcher projectiles, grenades or improvised explosive devices. Such drones are controlled by an operator via radio channel in first-person view, hence their name: FPV drones.

The state paid no attention to “dabbling” with fpv-drones, considering even the necessary reconnaissance ones (Mavics) as “wedding drones.” At that time, our enemy had an overwhelming advantage in medium-range reconnaissance drones like Orlan, an undeniable advantage in medium-range attack drones (Lancet), was preparing to use Shaheds, and was equally dismissive of small reconnaissance and attack drones.

In the fall of 2022, the first Shaheds had already arrived, and FPV drones began to be widely used on the battlefield. At that time, the only channel for supplying such drones to both us and the enemy were volunteer organizations and private enterprises working on donations. At the same time, the Ukroboronprom state concern solemnly promised to issue the Ukrainian analog of the Shahed by Christmas, but did not specify what year.

In the spring and summer of 2023, when every TV box was talking about the upcoming great Ukrainian counteroffensive, FPV drones were already dominating the battlefield, replacing artillery, mortars, anti-tank weapons and snipers. As the state continued to ignore “small artillery,” and drones of all calibers — small FPV attack drones, small attack drones with payload release mechanism, large bomber drones (like Baba Yaga), and “wedding” reconnaissance drones (Mavics) — continued to arrive at the front, most often not at public expense. Responsible military officials preferred to be photographed riding a Leopard rather than holding drones.

By the fall of 2023, right in the midst of the “great counteroffensive,” the enemy began to use its FPV drones on a massive scale, and the Ukrainian army’s advantage in this weapon ended, along with two army corps buried in the Zaporizhzhia steppes, with shells that were sorely lacking and hopes for a quick access to the Sea of Azov and Crimea dwindling. The Russians, as is well known, “are slow to mount, but then they ride fast.” While our officials were waving away drones like pesky flies, our enemy built drone factories, employed thousands of people, bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of components and began to saturate the troops with new types of weapons.

The Ukrainian leadership noticed the problem when the U.S. Senate blocked aid to Ukraine, the army was completely out of shells, almost out of men, and there was nothing left to fight with. It was then that President Zelenskyy promised a million FPV drones in 2024. No one cared to explain the figure, which surely is beautiful. At the same time, Oleksandr Kamyshin, Minister of Strategic Industries, promised hundreds of thousands of medium-range attack drones and tens of thousands of long-range drones.

The winter and spring of 2024 were particularly difficult. The enemy was putting pressure, weapons were in short supply, drones were in catastrophic shortage, and the first government contracts for a million FPV drones and a few other attack drones began to be signed only by the end of the first quarter, when Avdiivka was lost under guided aerial bomb strikes and Ukrainian officials finally established a “government procurement mechanism.” The bureaucrats have their own war, which correlates poorly with what is happening on the battlefield.

Now the enemy has FPV drones controlled by fiber optics. The technology is simple and has been known for a long time. Instead of a radio channel, which is vulnerable to electronic warfare and depends on the nature of radio waves, the drone is equipped with a small coil with fiber optics, and control and video signals are transmitted through the cable just like the Internet comes to your home. The most important advantage is complete invulnerability to electronic warfare; all jammers become useless against such weapons; there is only one last resort — a smoothbore shotgun with buckshot. Such fiber-optic drones also have disadvantages, such as shorter flight range due to the heavy weight of the cable reel and risks of breaking the cable by snagging it on trees or buildings. But as an addition to the familiar FPV drones controlled via radio channel, such attack drones are a formidable weapon.

There is no doubt that we will soon eliminate the lag, but here we are trying to understand why this has happened. The answer is simple: we did not and do not have any coherent, verified, scientifically based state policy in the field of drones, and there is no state body to implement this policy. The emergence of FPV drones with fiber optics was an obvious step in the development of attack drone technology, this step was predicted by many, many were ready to establish production of such drones, but no one allocated money for them, they were not included in the “million drones” program, and today you can’t do much by volunteering, hence the lag. Which, of course, has already cost us very dearly.

Since we do not have a single unified government body for drones (indeed, we do not even have a Ministry of Arms), the responsible officials in a situation of “controlled chaos” profess a free market theory with the Chinese slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom!”, as though it were enough just to give money to buy drones, and the necessary drones will appear in the right quantities by themselves, under the invisible hand of the market. Some well-known high-ranking officials directly state that they give money to everyone a little bit at a time, so that they are not accused of bias (and it is easy to accuse them, as these officials themselves do not know much about drones) or, worse still, so that they are not accused of corruption.

Undoubtedly, the Ukrainian industry of UAVs and drones is developing at a tremendous pace, compared to the tiny steps before the Great War. However, even these tremendous rates are not enough, and the vector of development is not always accurately verified, and even more so, not always understood by officials, and, consequently, not supported by the state. A vivid example is those FPV attack drones with fiber optic control, which the enemy had earlier than us. And before that, the enemy was the first to have drones with automatic target acquisition. And there are many such examples. Unfortunately, the government, having switched from rejecting “wedding drones” to purchasing a million of them, has not yet realized that in a technological war it is important not only to react to the situation (“give money”), but also — most importantly — to accumulate experience, knowledge, forecast the development of unmanned systems, and make administrative and financial efforts to ensure that new technologies and even more deadly drones based on them appear in time.

Now, just like at the beginning of the war, we are witnessing organizational chaos in the Ukrainian drone industry. There are many “providers” both at the stages of development/production and in the field of operation/application. Literally everyone is involved in drone operations (“gives money”): the Ministry of Strategic Industries, Ministry of Digitization, State Special Communications Service, Ukroboronprom, the Ministry of Defense, the General Staff, branches of the military, the Security Service, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, the National Guard, the State Border Service, and even the Foreign Intelligence Service. And literally everyone uses drones, even more than those listed above. On the one hand, this is beneficial because it becomes impossible for one person to make a wrong decision and impose it on all the others. On the other hand, it is obviously inefficient because “on the market,” i.e. in the troops, there is a “zoo” of drones, dozens of which are similar to each other in terms of tactical and technical characteristics, but sometimes vastly differ in price because it is easier and cheaper to make one or two unified models at a hundred enterprises than to make a hundred similar drone models at once. Obviously, training drone crews for different models, operation, maintenance, and repair of a “zoo” of drones is not an easy task either. Oftentimes, in this “zoo” there are models that simply do not fly because they were bought either from scammers or for too small a price, and are made of low-quality but cheap components. And this is a direct consequence of the situation when everybody’s business is nobody’s; there are not so many professionals in this industry to provide solid expertise to all the agencies that “deal with drones” (“give money”).

At the same time, the government allocates practically no money for drone development, almost no support for technology development (there are small, purely symbolic programs, which are not easy to get into either), and does not help developers organizationally, does not even give reservations from conscription to the teams engaged in development (with rare exceptions). That is, they “give money” within the framework of contracts for the purchase of ready-made devices built on ready-made technologies, as if these technologies and these devices did not need to be developed, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and hiding designers from the military enlistment offices. As a matter of fact, that is why we did not have our own analogues of Shaheds as quickly as we would have liked, until the Main Intelligence Directorate and the Security Service got involved in this process, simply taking the developers under their guardianship, protecting their employees from mobilization and providing extra-budgetary funds for development. Now large long-range drones are increasingly flying deep into Russian territory and burning oil depots and airfields. This case clearly demonstrates how competent state management and effective support of manufacturers help the “blind hand of the market” in the implementation of defense programs in war conditions.

We are now facing even greater challenges than we did two years ago. In the next six months, a qualitative leap in the development of microelectronics and artificial intelligence technologies, which are applicable to drones, is expected. And despite the rapid development of drone production in Ukraine, a situation may arise when the enemy will have qualitatively new drones armed with artificial intelligence, fully autonomous on the battlefield, invulnerable to electronic warfare and merciless to the enemy before we do.

Are we preparing for this near future? What we are doing is not enough. And it will not be possible to resolve the problem when it appears by simply “giving money” because these new technologies should have been developed yesterday, and money should have been given yesterday. Today you can simply buy a spool with fiber optics to convert an FPV drone into a drone “on fiber optics” and thus eliminate the lag in this direction. But tomorrow it will not work that way. Just “giving money” will not work because no one will sell us ready-made artificial intelligence for combat drones.

Today we are repeating the same managerial mistakes that we made a year and two years ago. Officials still brush “wedding drones” off — both on fiber optics and with artificial intelligence — and when the need arises, reluctantly open the country’s treasury to buy another million drones. This is by no means an example of wise state management, nor is it a talented state policy. This is so because drone specialists are not involved in the formulation of drone policy (or attempts to formulate it), and state management (or attempts to manage it) is handled by people with quite different management experience. Not a single drone professional was or is in the high corridors of power. By the way, during World War II, the Soviet aviation industry (for new airplanes) was managed by aircraft designer Alexander Yakovlev. The German aviation industry was managed by Erhard Milch, who had been involved in aviation all his life. Wernher von Braun, a talented rocket scientist, was also a great organizer who created the German and then American rocket industries and sent the first man to the moon.... The factor of professionalism in management is decisive, especially in times of war; however, we believe that loyal executors are needed more than talented professional leaders.

Today, more than ever, it is necessary to finally create a single management center, a single hub of knowledge and technology, to seriously engage in the accumulation of experience, analyze the development of technology, develop public policy, unite talented people and all the resources so that we do not suddenly fall behind in the near future in the field of drones and lose the war for this reason.

It is naive to think that Ukraine is ahead of the world today in drone making. Yes, we use drones in warfare extensively, and we are unrivaled here in terms of experience, except for our adversary. Yes, we produce hundreds of thousands and maybe even one million attack drones this year, or maybe two, because one million is clearly not enough. But we were not and are not the frontrunners in drone technology and component manufacturing. We use off-the-shelf components — batteries, engines, electronics, carbon, fiberglass, special resins and even plywood — to build (assemble) our attack drones. Yes, we have already started making our own electronic modules and are strong in drone software development. But it is foolish to even assume that after the war is over, Ukraine will have a high-tech drone development and production industry with a large export potential. For this to happen, we need to invest billions of hryvnias not only in the purchase of drones assembled from Chinese components, but also in the development and production of components, in the creation of our own electronics industry, our own production of batteries, motors and composite materials. We need to invest even more in artificial intelligence for drones. Not only in order to sell something after the war, but first and foremost to make sure that this “after-the-war” time finally arrives.

I cannot agree with optimistic assessments of the state of affairs in the drone industry, for example, from Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who, having done a lot for the establishment of the drone industry in Ukraine, today claims that the state buys up to 90% of all drones, including drones with artificial intelligence. This is not quite true. I think that the state’s share does not exceed 70% because there are a lot of “unaccounted drones” from volunteers, relatives and friends coming to the frontline. Secondly, drones with artificial intelligence have not been created yet, and drones with video capture and homing sensors are a bit different. We must not become complacent. All the most serious and existentially critical drone battles in this war are yet to come.

 

What do we do?

Immediately establish a national committee (at the ministerial level) on drones, robots and artificial intelligence.

Gather all known market professionals, all the most successful commanders of combat units using drones, and with their participation select/appoint the head of the committee and the composition of the committee from among the professionals.

Develop as soon as practicable the main principles of the state policy in the field of drones, aimed primarily at protecting the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and winning the war.

Based on the developed policy, define priorities/ work streams: technology and drone development, mass drone production, drone training, drone operation/application, information gathering, analysis, development of drone tactics and strategies.

The Committee should publicly announce its goals and objectives, publicly articulate government policy and be held publicly responsible for the fulfillment of its tasks and the achievement of its stated goals. Naturally, such a Committee should have at its disposal the necessary administrative and financial resources: up to 90% of all resources allocated for drones.

On the basis of professional analysis of the situation on the battlefield and on the market, the Committee shall, in pursuance of the state policy in the field of drones, place orders for the development of technologies, components and finished drones; for the production of drones; deal with the unification and modernization of drones, training of drone operators, and tactics of drone.

Chaos and anarchy should be a thing of the past. Market mechanisms and private initiative must be effectively supported by the state because now we are facing a task no less difficult than the implementation of a missile program or even a program to create an atomic bomb. Drones are the nuclear weapon of the 21st century, with the help of which we can win. By the way, it was not me who said this, but a famous American scientist, futurologist, professor at the University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley) Stuart Russell back in 2017. No one believed him then, until the big European war in Ukraine broke out.

So start thinking.

Read this article in Ukrainian and russian.