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The weapons of tomorrow . The ‘drone revolution’ rewrote the battlefield in Ukraine. Will they upend the West’s way of war?
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Russia’s recent drone incursions into Poland and Romania set off alarm bells in Europe. For Brussels, it looked like a political signal of Moscow’s willingness to escalate. But the episode also exposed the West’s technological disadvantage. Of some 20 Russian Gerbera decoy drones that crossed the border into Poland, 15 to 17 weren’t intercepted and simply dropped from the sky when their fuel ran out. The few that were downed cost NATO dearly, traded for AMRAAM air-to-air missiles that cost nearly two orders of magnitude more than the drones themselves — and that’s not counting the cost of scrambling fighter jets.
After years of watching the bloodbath on the Russian–Ukrainian front, many military analysts have come to see drones as having unleashed an irreversible revolution in warfare, one that has rendered Western doctrines nearly obsolete. Their warnings often drown out the voices of other experts, who argue that the current dominance of drones is less a revolution than a patchwork of improvisations masking the weaknesses of both armies. In other circumstances, on other battlefields, different methods and tools may prove decisive. Which is why, skeptics contend, the West doesn’t need to match Russia and China by producing millions of drones; it only needs to learn how to fight them. Meduza unpacks the so-called “drone revolution” — and what it might mean for the future of warfare.
What’s the ‘drone revolution’?
Ukrainian estimates suggest that in 2025, more than 70 percent of battlefield losses on both sides are caused by drones. That statistic is only a blunt illustration of the broader “UAV revolution.” In this particular war at least, drones have not only replaced other types of weapons but have also reshaped tactics, operational art, and even strategy.
Ruslan Pukhov, a member of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Public Council and director of the Mosocow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, gives perhaps the fullest account of this shift, using the war in Ukraine as a real-world example. His assessment is shared by many Western experts and military officers from various countries.
Pukhov argues that drones and their sensors are fundamentally the tip of a communications system that can stream huge volumes of information, including video, in real time to many different “consumers.” That link, from drone sensor to commander, has all but erased the traditional “fog of war.” For millennia, the best commanders have been celebrated for their ability to anticipate an opponent’s moves. Today, however, thousands of drones over the battlefield and behind the lines reveal enemy activity and feed it directly to commanders in real time.
The logical next step is to arm those drones so that a target can be struck as soon as it’s discovered, collapsing the time between reconnaissance and strike to nearly zero. Even less advanced armies have suddenly gained both reconnaissance capabilities and millions of precision munitions. Soon, Pukhov says, commanders at every level will have a transparent battlefield in front of them and be able to simply select the appropriate means to strike any target that’s spotted. Whatever is seen will be destroyed immediately — and on some stretches of the front, that’s already the reality.
According to Pukhov, that change has overturned a longstanding principle of operational art. In Ukraine, both at the front and 10–15 kilometers (six to nine miles) into the rear, it’s now impossible to mass forces and equipment the way commanders have done for centuries. Concealment and dispersion have replaced concentration: troops, weapons, headquarters, and ammunition depots must be hidden and spread out. Armored breakthroughs deep into enemy lines — the sort of operations on which past wars were built — are now impossible until one side achieves absolute drone superiority over both the battlefield and the rear.
Drones have already effectively seized the sky (if only close to the ground), can threaten conventional navies at sea, and are on course to become the backbone of ground forces on the front lines, Pukhov argues. Once integrated with artificial intelligence, satellite reconnaissance, and satellite communications, they will be able to strike at almost any depth. In short, Pukhov believes, whoever hopes to win the wars of postindustrial societies will first have to suppress an opponent’s drones and establish dominance with their own unmanned systems in the air and on the ground.
drones on the battlefield
Three years ago, the ideas laid out by Pukhov would have sounded almost fantastical. Now, they’re grounded in reality: in many ways, the drone revolution has already partially unfolded on the battlefield in Ukraine. The proliferation of reconnaissance drones and kamikaze UAVs has indeed made it virtually impossible to concentrate forces.
The front line itself has thinned to a startling degree. Where even a year and a half ago, companies and even battalions held defensive positions or launched assaults, today the fighting is often carried out by groups of just two to five infantrymen or soldiers on motorcycles. These small units try to slip behind enemy lines and consolidate positions there. Both their supply lines and those of defending troops are increasingly maintained by drones. Just behind the front, dozens or even hundreds of drone operators are working to cover the battlefield, destroying anything that moves within a depth of 10 to 15 kilometers (six to nine miles). And with the recent spread of signal-relay drones, that reach now stretches to as much as 30 kilometers (over 18 miles).
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And yet this picture still falls short of the “irreversible revolution” some describe. That’s because, aside from drones, communications systems, and infantry numbers, both armies remain strikingly weak. Russia’s Aerospace Forces, for example, field only a few hundred modern aircraft, and their rate of use — the number of sorties per plane per day — is far below what Western coalition aviation achieved in Iraq and Yugoslavia two to three decades ago. Because Ukrainian air defenses were never suppressed, Russian jets operate only from dozens of kilometers behind the front line, dropping glide bombs or firing limited numbers of cruise and air-launched ballistic missiles.
Ukraine’s aviation situation is even worse: its arsenal of relatively modern Western-made aircraft numbers fewer than 30, and its total inventory of jet fighters and bombers, including Soviet-era planes refitted for Western munitions, is only about a hundred. Nearly four years of combat losses and wear and tear have taken their toll. Facing Russian air and air-defense superiority, Ukrainian pilots must perform complex maneuvers just to release glide bombs, limiting their effective range.
Artillery, too, has been depleted. In the first two years of the war, it was the dominant weapon, but the pace of fire consumed a large share of the world’s ammunition stockpiles. With production unable to keep up, many fire missions have been handed off to drones. These UAVs can be extraordinarily precise — fiber-optic–guided drones can fly through a window or hatch and allow an operator to choose the target inside — but that doesn’t make them superweapons.
Both sides claim to manufacture several million drones each year, but these don’t translate into millions or even hundreds of thousands of destroyed targets. On both sides of the front, tens of thousands of soldiers are killed each year — and that’s with drones being only one of the weapons in play. Once the wounded are counted as well, it’s likely that fewer than 10 percent of drones actually hit a target, even if one assumes every casualty corresponds to a single drone strike.
Russia’s casualties
Both armies have grown heavily dependent on drone operators. In one article, a Western volunteer who fought for Ukraine described the helplessness of Ukrainian troops when deprived of UAV support. Meanwhile, the much-hyped AI revolution — the promise of fully autonomous drone swarms capable of flying from launch to target without human guidance — hasn’t yet materialized. Each drone still requires its own operator. In a war where manpower is scarce, tens of thousands of trained operators can be an unaffordable luxury.
The “drone revolution” on the Ukrainian battlefield has been driven largely by cheap, accessible civilian technology and by military officials willing to adopt it immediately. Almost all drones are built from Chinese parts, many produced under Western licenses. Satellite communications come from private companies, with Russia tapping illegally into SpaceX terminals. As long as global trade continues, the spread of these technologies can’t be stopped. In a broader global conflict, a China-led coalition could gain the upper hand in drone warfare.
At the same time, even with millions of drones now in use, the “fog of war” hasn’t lifted. Both armies can still move reserves into key sectors, and their opponents have little way of stopping them — a factor just as decisive as drones in producing today’s stalemate. Kamikaze drones have made rapid armored breakthroughs nearly impossible, but reserves rushed to threatened areas are still able to blunt slow advances. In fact, maneuver warfare had already ended by late 2022, when there were still relatively few drones in use.
And perhaps most tellingly, Ukraine isn’t winning the war — despite having had an advantage in the number, quality, and organization of its drones at different stages of the conflict. In the end, the more decisive factors remain Russia’s larger army, its superiority in the air, and its overwhelming artillery firepower.
life on the front lines
What about NATO armies?
For now, NATO members lag behind Ukraine and Russia — and possibly China — in the production and use of kamikaze drones. If they chose to, of course, Western countries could throw their resources into producing millions of small UAVs. Spurred by the flood of battlefield footage coming out of Ukraine each day, some prominent voices in the West — from Elon Musk to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt — have urged the U.S. and NATO to shut down expensive weapons programs and pivot toward drones, which, they argue, are clearly the future of warfare.
But more conservative military experts see it differently. They contend that drones have not fundamentally altered the balance of power between NATO and its adversaries, nor have they changed the West’s established approach to winning wars.
Justin Bronk, a combat aviation expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, frames the issue this way: in three years of fighting, neither Ukraine nor Russia has demonstrated that deploying drones on a massive scale — hundreds of thousands or even millions — can deliver a military victory. Instead, the war has created a kind of “drone dependency” among infantry units, which hesitate to act unless they have UAV cover. Also, Bronk notes, Western militaries lag behind Russia and Ukraine both in using drones and defending against them — closing that gap would require huge investments.
At the same time, the United States enjoys an overwhelming advantage in the air, Bronk says. Specialized Air Force units train specifically to suppress enemy air defenses. True, U.S. pilots have never faced an air defense system on the scale of Russia’s — or even Ukraine’s — in actual combat. But the entire doctrine of Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) was originally built to take on Warsaw Pact countries, which fielded even more formidable air defense networks. Of course, drones can also be useful in this domain. Israel has used FPV drones against Iranian air-defense systems, and Ukraine has done the same against Russian surface-to-air missile batteries.
If Russian air defenses were neutralized — a likely outcome in a NATO–Russia conflict — allied aircraft could strike targets across the front and deep into the rear with relative impunity, according to Bronk. And they could do so mostly with cheap munitions, like free-fall bombs fitted with American Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits, which are similar to the UMPK kits Russia uses today. Each JDAM costs around $20,000 to $30,000 — less than a single Russian Geran drone.
It’s worth noting that the heavy drones already in service with the U.S. military — both reconnaissance and strike models — were widely seen as obsolete after the first year of the full-scale war in Ukraine. Even the Houthis in Yemen have managed to shoot them down numerous times. But in a scenario where enemy air defenses are suppressed, these UAVs could once again be highly effective.
Bronk concludes that NATO doesn’t need to compete with Russia by churning out millions of small drones. Moscow is already far ahead in both their use and in countering them. Where Russia has little chance, however, is in a fight against Western manned aviation.
Still, the West faces two significant problems. First, without U.S. participation, European allies alone would likely struggle to suppress Russia’s air defenses. Despite their numerical advantage in modern aircraft, they lack the specialized tools for dismantling a large, layered system. Second, neither Europe nor the United States has yet developed a robust system to counter Russian drones — a vulnerability underscored once again by the recent drone incursion into Poland.
Russian drones over Poland
How do you fight drones?
As Meduza reported previously, Ukraine and Russia have been largely unsuccessful in their attempts to counter drones. Now, NATO faces the same challenges. On the one hand, Western militaries lag behind both the Russian and Ukrainian armies in practical experience. On the other hand, that very gap gives them an advantage: they can learn from the mistakes both sides have already made. NATO also has the unique opportunity to test its systems directly on the battlefield in Ukraine. The same solutions are under discussion and in trial here as in Ukraine and Russia: electronic-warfare systems of all scales, automatic anti-aircraft guns, low-cost interceptor missiles, drone interceptors, laser weapons, and microwave-emission systems.
The U.S. Department of Defense has directed the military and defense industry to achieve “electromagnetic and air-littoral dominance” by 2027. In plainer terms: solve the small-drone problem. That won’t be easy, especially with resources already stretched. By that same deadline, the Pentagon also wants to field a vast new drone fleet and distribute it across all branches of the armed forces. In other words, despite skepticism from some experts, the U.S. military is preparing to enter the drone race in full — and it has even canceled its Apache attack helicopter program, once expected to dominate that low-altitude airspace.
What’s clear is that drone defense has to be layered and multi-tiered. There will likely never be a silver-bullet technology. Another complication is that the countermeasures available today are either experimental prototypes or systems whose munitions cost far more — sometimes orders of magnitude more — than the drones they’re meant to shoot down.
Bureaucracy is another obstacle. Both Ukraine and Russia started out with rigid, slow-moving command systems. But both armies adapted. Drone designs and software are constantly updated, as are the countermeasures and troop tactics used against them. This openness to innovation has allowed them to keep pace in the drone war — including by copying each other’s solutions.
In the West, the challenge of bureaucratic rigidity is recognized, but debate over reform remains confined largely to expert circles. The risk is that by the time expensive Western counter-drone systems actually reach the battlefield, they may already be obsolete — especially given the rapid advances in machine vision and artificial intelligence.
So has the ‘drone revolution’ actually happened?
It’s more accurate to call what we’re seeing a democratization of technology: capabilities that once belonged to the wealthiest, most advanced militaries — especially in reconnaissance, communications, and precision strike — are now widely available.
At the start of the decade, it seemed the standard for a “democratic” drone would be a medium-size UAV that could loiter for hours at medium altitude (up to about 5,000 meters, or 16,400 feet), hunt with onboard sensors, and attack targets with small precision bombs or missiles — the archetypes being Turkey’s Bayraktar and China’s Wing Loong. In the very first year of the full-scale war in Ukraine, however, Russian air defenses seemed to refute that concept (early warning signs had already shown up in Syria and Libya, where Bayraktars came up against short-range Russian-made air-defense systems).
What has instead surged to the fore — and even influenced thinking inside the Pentagon — are small and very small loitering munitions: FPV quadcopters and fixed-wing kamikaze drones with medium- to long-range capabilities. In the Russian–Ukrainian war, their obvious weaknesses — namely, limited range and payload, and vulnerability to electronic warfare — have been mitigated by clever organization, tactically astute employment, and simply fielding enormous drone fleets.
But these approaches are likely far from final, and these drones are probably not the only types that will shape military conflicts in the near future. Bayraktars and Wing Loongs remain highly relevant where an opponent lacks adequate short- and medium-range air defenses.
Drone types, countermeasures, and tactics will keep evolving. And their use doesn’t stop the parallel development of other military technologies and concepts such as armored vehicles, maneuver warfare, and the practice of concentrating forces and firepower to overwhelm an opponent — long the primary method of defeating an adversary.
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