For infantry it is now as indispensable as an automatic rifle, grenades, radios, and so on. Fighters in Ukraine without drone support are at significant disadvantage.
Maybe ironically, I wonder if we won't see things like the Bofors 40mm guns continue to be prolific if they get successfully retasked to fighting drones (and they would end up like the M2, fighting long after it was initially conceived).
For the smaller drones it's an even more rapidly evolving, high-tech arms race. AFAIU, over the past year most of the battlefield drones have switched to kilometers-long fiber optic tethers to avoid electronic jamming. I dunno what all the defensive measures are, but one is using other drones to cut the cable. I think they may also be using directed energy weapons, now, though not sure how widespread that is.
Current method from public posts seems to be run on GPS and remote data link until jamming bubble is hit, then transition to visual/thermal/radar recognition of target for terminal approach.
Jamming only covers a small area (yes, some areas will have overlap), or a narrow movable cone. Both systems can be overran by the above method, or by swarms overriding directional electronic attack
They use a Bushmaster 30mm cannon with proximity fuse HE rounds so they don't need to hit the drone dead on.
For example with tanks, they...
- strap artillery shell to the drone and fly it into the tank
- drop a standard grenade into the hatch after the crew has fled
They don't need to drop munitions like cluster, they strap several on and drop them one at a time. They have become quite skilled and accurate, even from 100+ meters up in wind
There are places in Ukraine where it looks like giant spiders live there, due to all the fiber optic cables from drones left on the battle fields
They have strapped so many things to drones, you'd think they've tried about everything, then some new video comes out
Drones have evolved rapidly and come in all shapes and sizes now. The DJI Maverick image in people's head is only one modality, though by far the most common form factor
I do like seeing the production facilities of these drones, how they simplified the designs but also made design decisions to deal with the scale, they're built so they can be stacked easily. Mind you, this is probably the case with these drone show drones too.
Are they tethered? I thought these were all radio controlled
Here's an post with a few pictures of the tangled mess left behind
This was perhaps a decade ago mind you, people rocking DIY setups had fairly limited computing compared to what you can buy today. The PID needed for quads/hex/octos to stay aloft has trivial compute requirements.
they're pretty thin, and it's not hard for the operators to displace. even using other drones and AI to track refraction index of the fiber it's still a tall order. you'd probably have better luck shooting artillery at any large building or hedgerow nearby...
Russians are able to retrieve 80% of disabled armored vehicles to repair them.
A tank does not even notice cluster bombs - this type of bomb is effective against infantry and civilians.
that might be a solution for massed infantry, but then again you can just drop a single mortar round, e.g. the Ukrainian "foot crusher"
Tactics when you have large numbers of expendable drones are totally different from the old days of snooping around with a few drones.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/12/45-million-...
If you can get any large group together, then a drone will come for it. So, there is a balance between the size of a group and the cost of the drone that the enemy is will to spend (+ estimated failure rate).
As drones get cheaper and more efficient at killing that number of soldiers worth killing approaches 1. Meaning that group and unit cohesion at the 'front' goes to 0. The 'long term' dynamics are stunning.
I cannot imagine the psychological horror of being sent with little training (because why bother for either side) into the theater all alone without any officer supervision or buddies. You'd have a radio that gets jammed, maybe, some bivouac supplies, bad food and water, a gun of some sort hopefully, and time, terrible time. The veterans, what little there are, would tell you that if you hear a drone, you're dead already. You'd have nothing but superstition to go on. You'd just sit there in the heat or cold, waiting on a radio signal, knowing that your side will shoot you too if you 'missed' the call to attack. And you'd wait and wait. If your buddy came over, or a lieutenant, to check in on you then you're at higher risk of being droned. You'd have only your frightened thoughts to keep company and solace with.
Morale? what morale? That is carnal house. There is no 'army' in the field, you command nothing but the slaughter of young boys to an indifferent AI god.
To some degree, having AI drones fighting off against AI drones can't come fast enough.
Everybody in that war is getting good at building trenches with top cover for drone protection.[1] Camo netting up top can help. But the dug-in troops can't accomplish much beyond survival. This war is static but deadly.
[1] https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-marines-trenches-drones...
Massive stress factor when you are in the field leading to hyper vigilance when on leave (or at home) with lots of trigger events.
Also, swarms.
This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.
Train a soldier is hundreds of thousands.
Manufacturing , both Ukraine and Russia , generally speaking technological midgets, producing as of today millions a year. Ukraines projected output is around 4 millions in 2025
China can easily produce tens of millions. Even if 1 out 4 hit your target , that’s any army of any size in the world obliterated without new recruits.
At this point it's not even so much about scale, but about intelligence - finding viable or valuable targets. A million FPV drones won't do much good if your enemy is >100 kilometers away. The Ukranian front line is over 1000 kilometers long, but viable targets are easily a hundred kilometers from that either side. And that's just around the front lines, picking off individual soldiers or hardware won't stop this war, not when thousands are recruited and trained every month. Which is why Ukraine has done some deep strikes, taking out trains, infrastructure, refineries, air bases, etc. If they can take out the Shahed drone production facility too, that'd be a huge blow. But again, it wouldn't stop this war, just slow down attacks on civilians.
you need at least ~16 years of food, water, and teaching to get something useful. ideally 18, sometimes as low as 12. and you can't refurbish ones that are missing parts or otherwise defective.
the 20k to run them through Basic Training is a pittance.
The amount of money spent on training high level US infantry goes into the hundreds of thousands, and millions upon millions for Special Forces, Ranger/Ranger Recon/Tier 1 units/CIA SAC/SOG, etc.
A drone that can carry a payload can be built for under $200 USD. A swarm could be as few as say 10. Let's say 50, just for you example. 50x$200=$10,000.
If you take out an SF Team for example, that's 12 people. Let's say they were very new and they were only $800,000 into training so far in their career. 12x$800,000= $9.6mil USD.
Let's revise that calculation, with a 6 man infantry fire team young troops, $100,000 into training, each. $600,000/$10,000 = 60x more economically efficient even if all drones were lost in the operation, as long as the target was killed. You could still have 59 more tries with 50 drones per swarm to hit cost parity.
Oh yeah and some of those drones have thermals and high quality glass optics now, so they can see you and your squad as white dots moving across the landscape from miles and miles away.
People really don't understand the impact drones are having on the battlefield. It's nuts.
Edit:
I think this level of drone warfare will end up having a larger impact on warfare than both gunpowder and later the machine gun, but probably not as big as WWII large scale air campaigns.
So your 50 drone swarm is going to need 50 operators, fairly close to the front. Who are also vulnerable to enemy counter drones and glide bombs - the latter is a real problem for Ukraine
I haven’t seen any evidence of a “swarm” on combat footage from Ukraine war, I have seen a few drones hitting a single target, especially armored vehicles in fairly quick succession, like a few seconds, It looked like independent operators all picking the obvious high value target, not some intentional “swarm”
Tech may change this in the future but we’re not there quite yet
AI as we know it today is overkill for this application. Image detection and signal processing is enough for most.
They are absolutely on the way.
First, you don't need AI operators, you just need a swarm. The operators are reusable!
>Ukraine reported the largest single-day drone attack by Russia on July 9, 2025, where Russia targeted Ukraine with a record 728 drones. This surpasses earlier attacks, including one on May 26, 2025, when Russia launched 355 drones.
With that many pilots, that is a swarm.
Next, analysis of last months AI driven attack was performed by many drones with no human terminal guidance - they were jammed and expected to be!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/25/ukraine-russia...
>“Our models are being trained to recognise targets to understand target prioritisation,” he says. “We do not have full autonomy yet. We use the human factor where we need to, but we are developing different scenarios for taking autonomy further.
> “We are also testing some autonomous drones, which we have not announced and are probably not planning to announce, but they have a high degree of autonomy, and they can potentially combine themselves into swarms. We are still facing technical problems and hurdles, but we already see a path forward on this.”
One Final Note - Most of the info you ever hear about military tech is only the things people are allowed to discuss publicly. The battlefield is also a hell of a lab, and 3d printers and open source flight software (and open source AI models) are amazing.
But yeah, drone swarms with fewer operators will be, probably already is a thing. But what I've seen so far, they're just not very useful; drones look to be generally used on individual targets, if there's a bigger or more targets, they'll use something bigger like a HIMARS, glide bomb, or if it's closer by, an artillery strike.
Many argue drone swarms require some level of orchestration and control, others say a certain level of automation is required.
I'm aware of the differences in many drone classifications.
HIMARS was made largely impotent by GPS jamming. Glide bombs have limited range (barring exceptions for stuff like JASSM-ER but that is massive increase in cost) and detection and fire by counter battery. Artillery strike requires fairly close proximity but a bit more of rocket assisted.
Spent time doing military things with a lot of ordinance and a lot of drones.
“Swarm” to me means more than just number. It’s number, concentration, and tactics, like a swarm of bees… the problem is they are concentrated and hitting from many directions, While individually they are not that bad, when they use this tactic it is very effective, Which is how they can drive 500 pound bears away from their hive.
Otherwise “swarms” have been a thing for along time. Would you call an 19th century infantry regiment (let’s say about 600-1000 soldiers) a “swarm”. Or how about those formations of B17/B24s/Lancasteres in WW2 which would attack in similar numbers (hundreds). I would say no, partly because they didn’t use a swarming tactic
Argue about the definition of swarm (the distance between units and level of coordination) all you want, but ultimately it's irrelevant given the addition information.
Massive coordination is going into attacks across hundreds or thousands of Km. Multiple layers of drones, electronic warfare, recon, airspace deconfliction, etc. Highly orchestrated. Large numbers that are overwhelming systems designed to defeat them, like a swarm of locust.
Note: These aren't the Warthunder forums.
Long range, heavy payload, ISR drones with excellent optics and thermals are helping to spot targets from very far away that small groups of fpv operators can search and target.
Smaller drones must be somewhat closer, so this can't happen too far away from where are currently.
Depending on the terrain and what the enemy is using to adapt (like fiber optic tether for drones like a TOE missile, or like AI targeting and terminal guidance to counter controls + GPS jamming), fpv drones can be a liability (tree cover, rubble) or have a big impact.
What a lot of units are doing for tree cover is what is called a VT fuse for mortars or artillery. These can be configured to burst at tree height. Artillery/indirect often have coverage over top of drone units to cover their advance with smoke if need be, and much further range than FPV drone operations do without some sort of comms relay (could be another airborne drone relaying).
Yeah. Don't group up though. The first round of indirect fire is normally the most deadly.
I'm saying they're not acting alone, and alluding to battlefield conditions changing and combatants adapting as they have done since warfare started.
They are using Combined Arms doctrine to support their drones now. Instead of drones supporting everything else, everything else is in support of drones and drone dominance.
The supply chain and cost is a big part of it.
As both sides continue to develop new and better AI targeting systems, RF jamming will cease to be effective and they'll have to move to laser jamming of the optical systems. As that is no longer effective, swarm tactics counter the laser tactics. Currently counter-swarm attack methods for drone-swarms are being investigated, because nobody knows of a cost effective way to stop this. Even the drone supply chain is very easy to do much of very near the front lines. Carbon fiber and some heavy duty airframes are harder. It's SO CHEAP compared to any comparable weapon.
https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/the-meaning-of-drone-enabl...
Oops!
And I think you would actually agree with this by taking a simple thought experiment. Imagine we have 1 soldier with a million dollars of training. And we give an opposing force the choice of eliminating that soldier, or eliminating 1,000 $1000 drones. Everybody is going to pick the drones, and it won't be even remotely close. In fact drop it down by an order of magnitude, 100 drones, and it's still not even close - even though the on paper value of that soldier is an order of magnitude higher. 10 drones is probably where it starts to get close, though I think it'd still lean heavily towards the drones.
---
I would add that when a war becomes a late stage war of attrition, the value of infantry goes up. I am speaking in more general terms in a war where manpower is nowhere near a critical issue. In any case by the time manpower does become a critical issue, a war is usually already lost, even if it might be able to drag on for many months yet.
(Number of infantry x .3) = $DesiredCasualties
Let's say it takes 10 drones to kill a soldier, and each drone is $250/ea. That's $2,500, or the $KillCost
$DesiredCasualties x $KillCost = Dollar value needed to move an infantry unit into combat ineffectiveness
Looks like around 620,000 troops deployed by Russia so far.
620k x .3 = 186,000
186000 x $2500 = $465 million, bottom line price, in a crazy world where the starts align in many ways that aren't realistic, gives you a huge destruction in combat capability for less than $500mil.
For those following along, this is extremely overly simplified, but I hope it conveys both the huge military advantages drones provide as well as the political (less dead bodies to deal with, less broken soldiers sent home for treatment and decades of care) and economic advantages lethal drones in combat can provide.
Then factor on top of this logistics. You need to transport men, keep them fed, equipped, and more. You need to move a massive amount of stuff constantly in war, yet drones are going to be buzzing everywhere. So I think we're seeing the future of war now - slow, grueling, bloody wars of attrition.
And war where high prices tags are replaced by high costs in stuff, making it more apparent than ever that economies maximized through financial games and services are paper tigers when facing economies based on the production of tangible things.
Ukrainian drone doctrine is very different than Russian, and not just on paper, but how it is playing out.
This is for two main reasons: proximity to logistics for the defenders vs attackers, and existing military structures including vehicles and troop organizational structures (MTOE) that drone systems support or are supported by.
So I don't agree with your assessment there. It doesn't seem to match what's happening in the field with the type of drones used and the percentage of the classification of each type of drone system and purpose. These are quite different.
I also don't think it will be more bloody, but less over time. Much of the fight is in the electronic warfare arena and in air dominance across the vertical airspace. A colleague agrees:
https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/the-meaning-of-drone-enabl...
Infantry are expensive to train correctly, to outfit, and supply. I think the total number of frontline combat troops will continue to go down as a fraction of overall troops, while increasing supporting positions for drones, communications, electronic warfare, and general battlefield logistics.
Agree with your last paragraph 100% !
I half wonder if what I linked to wasn't an indirect response to what you posted, as it was published only 3 days later, and is essentially that article's equal but opposite.
[1] - https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/i-fought-in-ukraine-and-he...
Dude, Russians literally post this stuff on their own social media accounts. The "munitions" in question are no more expensive than a basic frag grenade.
And what part of the Russian war effort has led you to the conclusion that they value productivity over terrorism and photo ops? The incentive structures of the Russian military are just oceans apart from anything a westerner would consider a proper functional military.
I have some clips for you. Does this look like the operations of a productive military to you? You have no clue, absolutely none at all. They do this shit kind of to their own soldiers, and you think they're above trying to terrorize Ukrainians into compliance?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/28/europe/russia-deserters-ukrai...
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1937075719428780250
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1935714762664693993
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1932061484030267809
Note: that last clip is very, very NSFL. For reference, naked and bound deserters were thrown into a dirt pit and fired upon with rifles (not killed, at least not in the video, but threatened essentially)
I can understand how a westerner who has never seen, even by proxy, the dregs of the Russian internet could conceive of just how fucked up Russian military culture is. But, like, none of this stuff is hidden. The brutality of what happens to people who disobey them is genuinely part of the image they want to portray to the world (and to themselves). And in this way they feel the need to make an example of the Ukrainians - who by the way Russian state media isn't shy about portraying as basically subhumans.
And there is far, far worse shit than this that never makes it out of Russian-language telegram channels.
This puts pressure on Ukrainian leadership and citizens while minimizing outcry from global powers.
The Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine are volunteers, well paid (five times average salaries). https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0002tho
The people on the ground know how the war is going - there are no more Ukrainians volunteering to fight. Winning attracts, and Russia doesn't need conscription. Amazingly, Ukraine is now recruiting 60+ year old men to fight. https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-signs-law-allowing-over...
What is amazing is that we've been at this point for years and Russia has only made teeny tiny amounts of progress.
Winter Bear? Paper tiger.
They never would have stood a chance directly against the US in a peer conflict.
Russia, and many other countries - like everywhere in Scandinavia, has compulsory military enlistment or conscription. But these people generally are not eligible to be sent abroad to participate in conflicts. Instead it's used for training. After that training they are then required to sign up for the equivalent of the US Selective Service where, after after some years (2 in Russia), they may be called up, or mobilized, for participation in any conflict. Russia carried out one very small scale mobilization very early on in the war. It led to hundreds of thousands of Russians leaving the country and was generally exceptionally unpopular. Since then their entire army has been 100% volunteer forces.
By contrast Ukraine immediately, after the war began, made it illegal for men of "fighting age" (18-60) to leave the country and declared a general mobilization such that any man of "fighting age" can be immediately mobilized and sent to the front. This had led to them at times literally dragging people off the streets, beating them into submission when necessary (with more than a few 'deaths in training'), giving then some performative training, and then sending them to the front. And the like the GP mentioned, they recently passed a law to allow even 60+ year olds to enlist, limiting potential medical exemptions, and more. In other words - they are simply running out of people.
So Russia has been essentially fighting a war of attrition against an endless hoard of people armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in the Western gear, directed by Western instructors, using Western intelligence, and winning. It's going to be difficult for any developed nation, including the US, to ever fight a real war like this - because people aren't going to tolerate general mobilization, let alone people coming back in body bags by the hundreds of thousands, for the sake of geopolitics half way around the world. Even Russia has managed to do so only by offering extremely high wages for their soldiers, but it's unclear what this will entail once the war winds down. Hopefully they have not found themselves in the US trap where they suddenly essentially have to always be at war to keep their economy chugging along.
https://us.dk/media/vsxfb4vt/factfindingmission_russia-recru...
>The Chechens most at risk of being coercively recruited are critcs of the authorites, family members of vocal critcs, drug and alcohol users as well as members of the LGBT community. The Chechen authorites have used coercive recruitment to get rid of what they call the undesirables. In general, any deviaton from the norms and rules of Kadyrov’s leadership could be used to coercively recruit Chechens. In this regard, the Chechen authorites use forced recruitment as a form of punishment in Chechnya. Although certain groups can be identfied as being more at risk than others, there is also a high degree of unpredictability and arbitrariness in the actons of Chechen authorites in regards to coercive recruitment.
And the ones who tried to hide: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/05/26/austria-deports-ch...
There's also nothing that practically stops those same tactics from being aimed at other soft infrastructure targets: electrical substations, telco facilities, water treatment facilities... the nightmare scenario is taking down transmission lines and switching stations outside, say, a large nuclear power plant during a heat wave. The nuke itself is hardened, obviously, but who cares if it can't transmit the power it's generating to the people that need it?
The issue in your logic is assuming Ruzzia/Kremlin uses same natural logic as the rest of the world, I talked with many Zed patriots, that country uses a non natural logic, Zed Logic. Add on top of the unatural logic, the brainwashing and the fact that most of thye soldiers are murderers and rapists from prisons and you get a lot of civilians killed or abused by this asshols for fun or other reasons that make no sense in a natural logic.
An example of Zed logic
When Ruzzia attacks some civilian infrastructure in Ukraine (like grain storage) then Zeds claim it is legal, but when Ukraine strikes a military ship Zeds claim this is illegal, it is terrorism because... ... the ship was outside the SMO (special military operation) that Putin decided to be.
I am not joking, the Zeds are full of this bullshit logic, something ie legal/correct is always dependent of who makes the crime, where the crime is happening, who is the victim.
Second best Zed logic shit I heard is "USSR was the best democracy ever, in the entire human history"
It's not, it forces your enemy to waste valuable resources on defending those civilian targets.
Now imagine a swarm coming at you, each with explosives.
Covered in Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez
camp out at the top of a 5 story building and don't move or shoot and no one will even gaze at you. 300m straight up? might as well be in orbit.
M79/M203/M320/etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M576_40_mm_grenade
AK would be a different story, but Ukraine has a lot of 3d printers and those shells are one time use and not hard to make.
also doesn't help for the ones that are 300m straight up dropping bombs -- no buckshot will work that high up. maybe 50m at best, if you're very, very lucky with dispersion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/1b0u0k0/how_eff...
Furthermore, drones are generally difficult to detect at 400 meters unless you're using a synthetic detection system. By the time you spot them, it's too late.