The war between Russia and Ukraine began with an unprovoked combined air and ground assault, then settled into a mid-twentieth-century-style artillery standoff, and has now evolved into the world’s first conflict waged largely by drones.
Last year, Ukraine launched a series of successful long-range drone strikes against ammunition depots hundreds of miles inside Russian territory. Such strikes have been ongoing ever since. Every day, the Ukrainian military deploys thousands of shorter-range drones to defend against Russian ground assaults,
largely replacing the Howitzer shells that were previously the lifeblood of the conflict. Kyiv is locked in a technological and production arms race to ensure that its drones are both sophisticated enough and plentiful enough to overcome Russian jamming and other countermeasures. Ukraine’s innovators are still reaching new heights: in June, Ukrainian drones caused billions of dollars in damage to advanced military aircraft in remote parts of Russia.
The United States has played an important role in this Ukrainian success, seeding the expansion in this key area of the country’s defense industrial base and financing the most promising Ukrainian drone manufacturers, to help Ukraine reach a level of production once unimaginable—millions of autonomous systems per year. Today, the remarkable pace of this innovation, forged by necessity under battlefield conditions found nowhere else on the planet, presents an opportunity for the United States.
To seize it, the Department of Defense and U.S. industry must learn from Ukraine’s drones and other defense technology. The war between Russia and Ukraine is not perfectly analogous to contingencies that the United States may face in the future, and not every lesson in Ukraine is applicable to U.S. military planning, but this war is nonetheless full of instructive technological innovations and breakthroughs.
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