Ukraine’s milestone shows drones prevent defeat, but don’t secure victory

PATRICK TUCKER

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Ukraine has reached a milestone, the country’s Ministry of Defense announced Monday: more than one million drones delivered to military units since January, with two million expected by the end of the year.

Yet this achievement illustrates a counterintuitive phenomenon: increasing the speed of innovation and deployment of new technologies may not produce battlefield gains.

“Those one-way attack drones are not going to gain air superiority, and they don’t have air superiority—and that’s really one of the key attributes of the conflict in Russia-Ukraine, is no one does,” Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, commander of U.S. European Command, and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said last week at an NDIA event in Washington, D.C. A "core mission" of U.S. and NATO forces, Grynkewich said, is maintaining air superiority when even small militaries can rapidly erode U.S. advantage.

Ukraine had help reaching its goal. Among the million-plus drones are U.S.-made Switchblade and Ghost drones, as well as $2.5 billion donated by nongovernmental groups and citizens since 2024.

But Ukraine has also radically reformed contracting procedures and opened direct web exchanges, allowing frontline commanders to obtain drones directly from manufacturers. The Ukrainian government says commanders can now order and receive weapons in as little as five days.

This has helped convert a 20th-century military into one that can fight much larger and better-financed adversaries. The Pentagon, which has struggled to produce large numbers of cheap, highly autonomous drones, is taking note.

Emil Michael, U.S. defense undersecretary for research and development, speaking at the NDIA event, said the new U.S. approach “mimics what the Ukrainians have done. They push down the innovation to a very small unit level. They’ve competed them on which drones work better. Then they give more financing to the ones that work better. So that’s their model. Our model is going to be: bring it down to the unit level, reduce the barriers, provide broad training grounds.”