The Terrifying Efficiency of Drone Warfare

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0:00This is a grainy, sped up, cut up, loud and proud, combat highlight tape released to

0:06social media by a Ukrainian military brigade. In the picture are Russian T-72B3M tanks,

0:13a refurbished and revamped Cold War staple that Russia has come to rely on during their invasion

0:18of Ukraine. All three are doomed, about to be put out of commission by the author of this video,

0:24the 79th Air Assault Brigade—a highly trained but highly out-gunned subset of the Ukrainian defense

0:30effort. The unit deals with all three tanks through conventional means—weapons and approaches

0:36that have more or less been around since World War II. The first is stopped in its tracks by a mine,

0:41an anti-tank mine, while this one, unclear as to why it’s stopped, is hit by an antitank missile or

0:47some similar sort of air ordnance. Finally, what struck the second is what strikes and stops the

0:53third. Up to this point, if the video were just a bit grainier or black and white, the battle scene

0:59could be from 2024, or 1974, or 1944. But the clip isn’t over.

1:06These three tanks—at least by their own power—are not going to move again which,

1:11for the 79th, means they’ve landed three mobility kills as they’re called in military parlance. But

1:16the work’s not done—should they be hauled back behind Russian lines, perhaps they could be fixed,

1:22or at least used for parts. So the 79th needs to finish the tanks off. But now they turn to

1:28something novel, something that’s shaped Russia’s invasion and Ukraine’s defense,

1:33something that’s quickly becoming a staple in 21st century warfare: drones.

1:39Rather than sending troops in to finish off tanks and chase down their operators—which risk the

1:43safety of a soldier—or fire artillery or missiles at the sitting targets—which the Ukrainian

1:48military has desperately few of—the 79th now mobilizes a fleet of small, inexpensive unmanned

1:54aerial vehicles. Here, a fixed-wing drone strapped with an explosive plows into the tank’s weak point

2:00to render it useless. Here, another does the same. Here, a drone pilot, rather than tracking on foot,

2:08follows the path of hiding Russian soldiers with what’s in all likelihood a quad-copter equipped

2:13with a grenade. Here, the same. And, when zooming out to consider what made this possible—spotting

2:20the quickly moving enemies approaching first, then filming it all to cut the prideful 1-minute,

2:2427-second piece later—it’s again a drone, this of the more expensive military-grade

2:30variety. And these 90 seconds serve as a microcosm—drones are no small part of what’s kept

2:36Ukraine in the fight for this long and they’re a big part of why the 79th still exists at all.

2:43Consider the context of this clip—it’s shot somewhere around here on the front lines in

2:48the hotly contested Donbas region near Donetsk. For years now, the 79th Air Assault Brigade has

2:53been battling over this region—in particular over this village, Marinka. Once home to 9,000, Marinka

3:00is now a ghost town with few structures still standing. It’s a spot that Ukraine

3:05and Russia grappled over for 20 months before it finally fell to the invaders in

3:09late 2023. And to some educated onlookers and strategists, its fall was cause for concern.

3:16Now, it seemed Russia would have easier access to Ukraine’s interior by way of the city of Kurakhove

3:21just 10 miles or 16 kilometers west down O0510 Road. But in more than 6 months of trying and 14

3:28coordinated efforts to break through, Russia’s been rebuked—because of brave, well-trained

3:32soldiers, and because: drones. In fact, most of these thwarted efforts play out in a strikingly

3:39similar manner to the earlier clip. Just 11 days prior to the 79th releasing the video of the three

3:44ill-fated T-72s, they posted this video. And 9 days prior to that, they posted this one. In each,

3:53drones, like Ukraine itself, are punching far above their commercial-grade weight. And

3:58they’ve been doing so since the very first days of the invasion—it just looked a bit different.

4:04First it seemed the Turkish-produced Bayraktar TB2 might carry the day. Capable of staying aloft for

4:09up to 27 hours, carrying a payload of up to 330 pounds or 150 kilograms, these weren’t cheap,

4:16as Ukraine purchased six of the drones, along with three control stations in 2019

4:20for about $69 million dollars. It was worth the investment initially. As early as 2021,

4:28they patrolled the Donbas region and even fired on a separatist position. Then, in February,

4:33with the invasion beginning, they quickly reached legendary status—successfully firing on tanks,

4:38fuel trains, fighting vehicles, and missile systems, the TB2 quickly gained a reputation in

4:43the invasion’s early stages. By April, they were now sinking ships while Ukrainian troops sang—and

4:49Ukrainian radio played—the Bayraktar song as the Turkish drone had become a central figure of

4:54Ukrainian resistance. The world took notice, too, as The New Yorker even went so far as to publish a

4:59story titled “The Turkish Drone That Changed the Nature of Warfare.” Then something changed.

5:07Specifically, the global attention on the TB2 extended to Russia,

5:10which after anchoring more defense positions near and within Ukraine’s borders, directed

5:15more attention to and surface-to-air missiles at the relatively slow, relatively low-altitude,

5:20and relatively expensive drones, effectively blasting them off the front-lines and into more

5:24minor observational roles. High-dollar drones worked,

5:28but they didn’t play to Ukraine’s advantage—its resourcefulness and conviction in the role of

5:33the defensive combattant—nor recognized the gap in available resources between them and

5:38Russia. Fighting with, and inevitably losing such expensive equipment played into Russia’s hands.

5:44 But rather than pivot entirely away from UAVs, they iterated,

5:48moving away from the military-grade, million dollar drones for the unassuming sort;

5:52the commercial, cheap, easy-to-operate, and easy to produce quadcopters. While DJI, the world’s

5:58most renowned commercial quadcopter producer, has never made a military-grade drone, and has

6:03no interest in its products being used, sold, or thought of as weapons, they’ve become exactly that

6:08in the 21st century’s most significant ground war to date. In October of 2023,

6:13the country’s prime minister Deny Shmyhal claimed that Ukraine had gotten their hands on some 60% of

6:18the company’s global output of Mavic quadcopters. These drones, DJI or otherwise, play squarely to

6:25Ukraine’s strengths. For one, they just don’t cost much—they retail at under a thousand dollars. Used

6:32as small-area scouts, they also play to the advantage of the defender rather than the

6:36aggressor, as any advance, build up, or really any disturbance on the frontlines becomes easy

6:41to monitor via drone while the operator maintains their cover. They also help

6:45mitigate Ukraine’s ammunition deficiency, as a drone can scout targets—while a TB2 can spot

6:51a potential target miles away, a quadcopter can fly near enough to make sure it is indeed

6:56worth the in-demand artillery shells to attack. And this technology has helped Ukraine undercut

7:01mighty Russia’s greatest fighting strength: its sheer scale. With the advent of such accurate,

7:07unrelenting monitoring of every movement, Russian forces have had to adjust, moving in smaller

7:12numbers more quickly, which, for a fighting force known for prevailing by force but consistently

7:17plagued by organizational issues, is a big ask. And for a fighting force constantly in need of

7:22supplies, drones are uniquely easy to crowdsource —Ukrainian citizens have been happy to donate

7:27their hobby drones to the cause, and so too have citizens across the heavily sympathetic West.

7:32But if the idea of repurposed quadcopters was resourceful on the part of Ukraine,

7:36then the advent of mass-produced kamikaze drones is nothing short of scrappy.

7:42Mechanically, there’s a good few differences between reconnaissance quadcopters and kamikaze

7:46drones—some of the latter are fixed wing, a vast majority are piloted by

7:50fixed camera first-person-viewing-systems, and increasingly these are manufactured strictly

7:54for military purposes within the borders of Ukraine. But the biggest difference is

7:58that these aren’t capable of carrying, then dropping, a payload, they are the payload.

8:04On an economic scale, these make obvious sense. Consider the earlier example of kamikaze drones

8:09ramming into the weak points in downed tanks. Now, it’s difficult to boil down the exact unit

8:14cost of a T-72; they cost a couple million per when built during the Soviet era, and they cost

8:19over $200,000 each to ramp up for the standards of modern warfare. But whatever the cost, the

8:24math remains simple, as the oft-cited going rate for a first-person-view kamikaze drone is about

8:29$400. Suddenly, the playing fields of an asymmetrical conflict becomes a bit closer

8:36to level. And this goes for human capital, too. Ukrainian troops on the eastern end are

8:41outnumbered by orders of magnitude by Russian soldiers, so anytime a DJI Mavic can search

8:46the fields surrounding Marinka for retreating Russians, or a quadcopter can drop a payload

8:50big enough to finish off a soviet-era tank, Ukraine keeps another soldier out of harm’s way.

8:55Across what’s nearing three years of innovating and iterating, drones have become central and

9:00fundamental in Ukraine’s defense. And its military knows it. Just take the 79th air assault brigade’s

9:06website: there’s soldiers, there’s a helicopter, and there’s a drone. And, should one view the

9:11brigade’s listed vacancies, they’re looking to hire more drone pilots at a wage competitive

9:16to the rest of their open positions. The brigade has even gone so far as to create an attack drone

9:21company to flank its more traditional tank company and attack battalions. And along with more pilots,

9:26they need more drones, something that battalion members have posted on YouTube,

9:29and something that American 501c3’s have latched on to as an easy way to help the cause, with

9:34groups like Ukrainian Defense Support publishing explainers on how to get all important drones from

9:39American consumer’s hands to Ukrainian soldiers. But the cycle of military innovation is

9:45predictable, and the next stage after a novel technology opens up an asymmetrical advantage

9:50is the development of countermeasures. In this case, some of the countermeasures are stupidly

9:55simple. For example: nets. The exposed rotors of commercial quadcopters will quickly seize

10:01up when in contact with just about anything, so simple netting is enough to stop them in

10:06their tracks. So facing the new threat, Russia has adorned all their key infrastructure near

10:11the front line with so-called anti-drone netting, and it’s working. In addition,

10:16they’ve experimented with building metal cages around high-value vehicles and weapons to at

10:21least minimize damage from kamikaze drones—keeping the blast further away from fragile components.

10:27But then there’s the offensive option. The sorts of sub-$1000, commercial drones used in this war

10:33have rather limited flight time—between 20 and 30 minutes—and even more limited

10:37signal range—often as little as a mile. While there are ways to reduce these limitations,

10:42operating kamikaze drones always requires the operator to be effectively on the front line.

10:47Therefore: drone on drone warfare. Observing their effectiveness, Russia has built up an

10:53equally-strong drone capability, backed by a burgeoning domestic manufacturing

10:57industry. Along the front line, operators from both sides now hide in makeshift bunkers,

11:03peaking out momentarily to launch their aircraft on a mission to hunt out their counterparts just

11:07miles away. Finding and destroying an enemy drone base is now a prime objective of each

11:13side as it has the ability to immobilize a whole fleet of potentially destructive drones,

11:18rather than just one tank or truck or soldier. But perhaps the most effective countermeasure

11:24is signal jamming. Cheap commercial drones rely on GPS to navigate, but fundamentally what a GPS

11:30signal is is a rather weak radio wave broadcast from a satellite in space. Therefore, all it takes

11:36to disrupt GPS navigation is broadcasting a different, incorrect signal on the same

11:41frequency. This is what GPS jamming is, and it’s now rampant in hotly-contested areas. And the same

11:48principles apply for essentially any other form of wireless communication. It's all just radio waves

11:53of different frequencies, so if Russia knows what frequency Ukrainian drones use to communicate with

11:58their operator, which is fairly predictable if they’re using popular commercial drones,

12:02they can simply overwhelm that frequency with irrelevant radio waves, forcing the drone to lose

12:07signal and crash. This sort of electromagnetic warfare has turned the drone war into a game of

12:13cat and mouse. One side develops a signal jammer capable of interfering with the frequency used

12:18by the other side’s drones, so the other side develops drones that communicate using a different

12:22frequency, then the first side adapts their electronic warfare capabilities, and so on and

12:27so on. The net effect is that drones have gotten less effective for both sides. The likelihood of

12:33a given drone successfully destroying an enemy asset has steadily declined, and therefore that

12:38incredible efficiency that made headlines in the early days of the war is quickly diminishing.

12:44But there’s an obvious solution, and it's seen in this short clip. These red boxes

12:50represent the first days of a new epoch of warfare. That’s because this drone,

12:56developed by startup Ukrainian company Saker, is autonomously identifying targets. Within each box

13:03is what a computer vision algorithm believes is a target that could be strategically beneficial

13:07to destroy, while the text above indicates what, in particular, it thinks it is, and the number to

13:12its right is an indication of the software’s confidence in what it believes it sees.

13:17The short-term benefit of autonomy is straightforward: Russia’s most effective

13:21countermeasure is to interrupt the signal between a drone operator and a drone, so what if the

13:26drone doesn’t need a signal? What if the drone, once deployed, could independently navigate to,

13:33identify, and strike a target. Or even: what if it could determine its target and decide to strike it

13:39itself without any authorization by an operator? While all indications suggest that there’s not yet

13:45wide-scale use of AI drones in Ukraine, Saker’s scrappy autonomous drones have reportedly already

13:51destroyed Russian targets in autonomous mode, meaning the era of AI warfare has quietly begun.

13:58In practice, autonomous drones have yet to make a major impact in the war as they still require

14:02human involvement, they’re rather finicky, and they’re more costly than equally destructive

14:06conventional equivalents—but 6,000 miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic,

14:11in an industrial area next to an Ikea in Costa Mesa, California, one company

14:16is trying to change that. Its name is Anduril. Anduril’s heritage explains a lot. Its founder,

14:23Palmer Lucky, was the pioneer behind the Oculus brand of VR headsets. While still a teenager

14:29he grew this into a burgeoning company and eventually sold it to Facebook for $2 billion

14:33at just 21-years old. During these years, others that would eventually join Anduril were working

14:38at SpaceX and Palantir. The significance of this pair of companies is in the fact that

14:43they effectively built the Anduril business-model. That’s because the rocket-launch and predictive

14:48analytics companies each took the US government on in court when they believed they were being

14:53shut-out of competitive bidding for US military contracts in favor of the old-guard of the

14:57military-industrial complex like ULA or Raytheon. Each of these companies believed the US military

15:03procurement system was broken, and this belief was well-grounded. After all, the United Launch

15:08Alliance was paid to keep operating a wildly inefficient and aged Atlas V launch system

15:13for decades, with absolutely no incentive for innovation in a way that might bring down cost for

15:17the government. That’s because, like many military contracts, ULA was paid on a cost-plus basis,

15:24meaning they were paid whatever it cost for them to do the work they were asked to do, plus a fixed

15:28percent for profit. In many ways, this actually disincentivized innovation since creating a more

15:34efficient system that cost less per-launch would actually reduce their fixed profit percentage. But

15:39SpaceX wasn’t getting these contracts anyways, so their solution was to foot the cost of

15:43innovation themselves, develop a more efficient launch system, then enter a competitive bidding

15:48process to offer space access at a lower cost, yet still turn a profit. After some legal tussles,

15:54this worked, the government had effectively no choice but to accept their proposal to do

15:58the same work for less, and they’ve now grown into the largest launch provider for the US.

16:04Anduril was formed under the same model—that of a traditional company, rather than a military

16:09contractor. But rather than work on the fringes of the industry, competing in the space-launch or

16:15predictive analytics spaces, which have plenty of private customers, Anduril is taking the old-guard

16:20head-on—developing innovative products that are generations ahead of what the legacy contractors

16:25are offering, exclusively for the US and allied militaries, under the belief that their offerings

16:29will be just too good to pass up. At the core of that value-proposition

16:34is artificial intelligence. They seem to recognize the shortcomings of early autonomy

16:39in Ukraine—fundamentally, that the full potential of autonomous drones is stymied by the persistent

16:45one operator to one device equation. Just as vehicle autonomy is still merely a convenience

16:50rather than the promised generation-defining breakthrough due to the need for human oversight,

16:55drone autonomy won’t either until it’s able to unlock unimaginable degrees of volume. That’s

17:00why Anduril’s marquee product is Lattice—this is essentially an operating system… for war.

17:07This promotion video demonstrates how Lattice is supposed to work. In this mock scenario,

17:12a combatant drone is detected by the company’s Sentry product—one of its first, originally

17:16deployed along the US-Mexico border as part of a contract with US Customs and Border Protection.

17:21Sentry then alerts an operator, who elects to activate Pulsar—Anduril’s electromagnetic warfare

17:26solution, capable of jamming communication signals to and from the drone. But next we see the launch

17:32of Anvil—their kinetic interceptor drone or, put another way, the drone built to smash into other

17:38drones. Each of these devices work autonomously, yet are strung together into an integrated system

17:44by Lattice. And Anduril’s has plenty more products to add to that system—a jet-powered interceptor,

17:50an infrared surveillance platform, and a wide variety of other airborne platforms.

17:55This is what unlocks the full potential of drones. Highly capable drones are now cheap, but

18:00human operators are not. So by stringing together autonomous drones with an operating system, both

18:06the drones and the operation of drones is cheap. This is where capabilities really compound.

18:13Destruction in warfare typically follows certain rules. A grenade might be cheap and destructive,

18:19but it’s not very capable—it requires close proximity. A guided missile might

18:24be destructive and capable, but it’s not very cheap—its manufacturing is extraordinarily

18:29expensive. A single kamikaze drone might be cheap and capable, but it’s not very destructive—it can

18:34possibly destroy a tank, but with lowering success rates it’s really that a single drone can destroy,

18:39on average, say, a tenth of a tank. Interconnected, autonomous drones, however,

18:44are cheap, capable, and massively destructive. And that’s largely thanks to drone swarms. Without

18:53the need for operators in close proximity for each aircraft, a military could deploy dozens,

18:57hundreds, even thousands of drones without a risk to human life on their side before

19:02getting to the cost of a single advanced precision-guided missile. That’s to say:

19:07the cost of killing is getting scarily low. And then there’s one other key difference—to date,

19:15essentially every life taken in war has been the direct result of a decision made by another

19:20human. Human judgment determines death. But soon, artificial intelligence algorithms might. Humans

19:28will decide to deploy a drone, but a drone will be capable of independently determining

19:32whether a life is worth taking. So that’s to say, in addition to removing the monetary and

19:38human cost of killing, autonomous drones also remove the moral cost—nobody has to bear the

19:43weight of pulling the trigger that ends a life. Killing should have friction, it should be costly,

19:51it should feel terrible. This new era of warfare unlocks apocalyptic levels of efficiency

19:58in death. It is often the case that early observers overestimate the potential calamity

20:04that new military innovation will bring—the long-term average is that reality is not as bad as

20:08we fear—but there is a fear that this time might be different. Drone warfare has precedent—we’ve

20:16seen how militaries act when they have access to risk-free killing anywhere in the world with

20:20multi-million dollar drones manufactured by major contractors. Some of the most horrific

20:25actions by the US military have happened outside the context of a formal war through the use of

20:30remotely-operated aircraft. Civilian casualties have been enormous, and the state of war is now

20:35a blurry, near-perpetual concept—strikes happen indiscriminately in countries with which the US

20:41has no active state of war. Now, we’re entering an era where this same technology can be acquired

20:47on a miniaturized scale not from military contractors, but from online retailers. So

20:53the concern is twofold. First, what will non-state actors—terrorists, cartels, and others with a will

20:59to kill—do with a technology that allows them to transport an explosive device effectively

21:05anywhere, at limited risk or cost to themselves. And second, with the expanded capabilities of

21:10massive swarms of drones, what will state actors do when the accountability and friction of war

21:17is minimized to perhaps its lowest level ever. As this video makes clear, artificial intelligence

21:25is becoming quite influential—it is the key technology around which the next generation

21:30of weapons is being built. When any technology becomes this influential, I believe it’s important

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The Terrifying Efficiency of Drone Warfare

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