The Drone Wars
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Security is built in with Face ID, so you don't have to worry about your cards getting lost or stolen. And the best part, you still earn the card rewards, points, and cash back you love. So say goodbye to the buy fold, add your card to Apple Wallet, and start paying the Apple way. Terms apply. Over the past few weeks, the drone war between Russia and Ukraine has been escalating.

Last Friday, Russia launched a three-day aerial assault on Ukraine, firing some 900 drones. The Ukrainian Air Force called it the biggest drone attack since the start of the war. Russia now appears to be massing troops near Ukraine's northern border, and Ukraine is stepping up its own drone attacks, including some on towns near Moscow. A few months ago, reporter Jake Epstein traveled to Kiev to an unremarkable apartment building to see Ukrainian drone production firsthand.

We went into an elevator, went up several flights, and it was just a hallway where you would never know that this is where they're making weapons of war that will be sent to the front line soon and used in combat against the Russians. Jake covers defense for Business Insider, and he went to see a company called 3D Tech. One room, there were young workers who were assembling the frames of the drones. Another room, they were testing them, they were 3D printing them.

They were building fiber optic spools, which gives the drone a connection with its operator. Another room, they were packaging the drones in what almost looked like just a slim pizza box. It was very casual, but of course, it's not. It's very well thought out. It's very calculated. And there's a lot that goes into these sort of drone production lines. Jake had just come off a trip to Lockheed Martin's production line for the F-35 stealth fighter.

a sprawling facility in Fort Worth, Texas. This apartment and pizza box operation felt almost like its inverse. The shared trend here is that they're making weapons, and I visited a few of these production line or drone-adjacent facilities

factories in Ukraine. One of them made electronic warfare devices, another made ammunition for the drones. So the common thread is that they were all in unassuming buildings. It was very casual. They offered me coffee. There were workers just doing their thing off in the corner and in the middle of the room.

That's certainly not the case with every single weapon that the Ukrainian defense industry is producing right now. But from what I could tell, there seems to be a lot of these almost sporadic or jury-rigged production lines. Drones have become the weapon of choice in the war in Ukraine. They're cheap, easy to assemble, and work well in this kind of conflict. They are also showing the world a blueprint for 21st century warfare.

What we're seeing in Ukraine right now is what a lot of military planners and officials and experts have said is where conflict and where warfare is headed. Depending on the circumstances of the next war, whether it's in Europe, whether it's in the Pacific, I mean, this will...

absolutely be different, but the prevailing sentiment is that drones are going to increasingly play a role on the battlefield. And military planners are absolutely looking at what's happening in Ukraine and thinking, how do we prepare for this? How do we prepare for our own engagements? Or if they've already had these sorts of engagements, how do we better our capabilities? How do we better our defenses?

Today on the show, how Ukraine's drone war is influencing the future of conflict. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

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So let's back up a little bit for people who have not been closely following the war or haven't been to Ukraine as you have. How did drones first start being used in this conflict? So earlier in the conflict, Ukraine really struggled with artillery shell shortages. And, you know, there is a high cost of missiles and guided munitions. These could typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece or more.

Ukraine needed to generate mass firepower and needed to be able to do it cheaply. So drones really became a major focus for Ukraine's defense industry, especially what is known as a small first-person view type drone or FPV drone. These are kind of like the quadcopters that you might see on the shelf at a Walmart or something. Soldiers can essentially strap these with explosives and fly them directly into enemy tanks,

armored vehicles, trenches, you know, really any kind of military asset. So we're not talking like predator UAVs that were used by, you know, the Obama administration in Afghanistan. We're talking like a drone you can get at Best Buy. Exactly. So really cheap, commercially available drones. So you really start to think about the cost benefit of using something like this versus a more expensive munition where the supply is a lot lower. Right.

How did we go from, hey, we don't have enough artillery shells, we can kind of bootstrap our way into this to, oh, we are making drones all the time. They are a full scale part of this war. So Ukraine really seized on the opportunity to sort of take its defense industry and say, hey, you know, we are able to mass produce these sort of cheap, uncrewed

whether it was small drones or medium drones or long-range drones. And a lot of this has to do with how Ukraine's defense industry has pretty much just increasingly scaled up in the years since Russia first invaded back in 2014. So, you know, spending on weapons and dual-use goods in Ukraine has surged since then. And a lot of that money went to buying arms from abroad,

but the domestic defense industry was also growing quite a ton. Ukraine's former minister of strategic industries told me last summer that Ukraine had always been sort of a peaceful agricultural country. Then, quote, they came and started killing us. We had to learn how to fight. And he said it was not our decision to switch from being a breadbasket, and Ukraine is often referred to as the breadbasket of Europe, to being the arsenal, he said.

So essentially, the full-scale invasion was sort of a wake-up call, some defense industry executives have told me. Ukraine recognized that to sort of cripple Russia's war machine, which has enjoyed manpower and machinery and material advantages, they had to find an asymmetrical solution. They had to also find a way to be self-sufficient.

Well, right. There's also this complicated relationship with the United States that sort of differed in various presidential administrations. But neither the Biden administration nor the Trump administration was giving Ukraine everything that they wanted. I mean, does some of the self-sufficiency stem from that? Yes, absolutely. So I mentioned earlier that Ukraine had Ukraine really supported.

boosted production of sort of these smaller FPV-type drones. What Ukraine was also doing is building drones that could travel medium and long distances. These became super critical because Ukraine was essentially restricted from using powerful cruise and ballistic missiles that it had received from Western countries like the US and the UK. And Ukraine couldn't use these weapons to strike Russian military targets across the border.

So Ukraine's defense industry focused on the production of these homemade drones that could almost mimic the effect of Western missiles, but they were cheaper and they didn't have the same restrictions. So Ukraine would use these homemade longer-range drones in very successful cross-border strikes on Russia's military and energy facilities, such as airfields or ammunition storage sites. So this is really an example of how the defense industry saw a problem

and had to find a workaround because they needed to continue to put pressure on Russia's military assets in the rear. How big is the Ukrainian drone industry now?

Ukrainian drone industry is pretty massive. Ukraine now has an edge over Russia when it comes to drone production. Ukraine said it produced just over 2 million drones last year compared to Russia's 1.5 million. And Ukraine is now aiming to double production to 4.5 million drones this year. It has scaled up significantly. And are they all the kind of like

in the apartment building down the hall setups that you went to see, or do some feel more traditional? It's hard to say. I mean, there are hundreds of drone producers now in Ukraine. So I obviously didn't go to all of them, but not all of them, I'm sure, have operations that seem maybe as casual as 3D techs. But what I saw kind of emphasizes just how

immediate. These operations had to spring up. They had to find solutions wherever they could. And it's not always possible to have sort of a sprawling industrial facility. Sometimes you just have to make it work in a high rise or in a basement. They had to really meet the demands and do it wherever they could. Who is paying for all of this? Is this all the Ukrainian government's money?

Yeah, so the Ukrainian drone industry is funded largely by the country's defense ministry. And since 2024, the defense ministry has spent more than $2.5 billion on drones. Beyond the defense industry, Ukraine's international partners and charity organizations and crowdfunding efforts and even individual military units are all procuring and buying up these drones.

So it's really a well-rounded effort to sort of secure these systems. But the biggest buyer is the defense ministry. My understanding is that Russia is using drones as well. How are theirs different both in the actual hardware and in how they use them?

Yeah, so Russia, like Ukraine, uses these FPV drones, these smaller drones that are strapped with explosives and can deliver hits on enemy positions or fortifications or armored vehicles. Russia also uses one-way attack drones as sort of loitering munitions, which they send pretty much every night on cross-border strikes to hit Ukrainian insurgents

infrastructure or civilian targets or whatnot. When we come back, how militaries around the world are watching this drone war and taking notes. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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You know, as this war is watched around the world, Ukraine is holding its own, despite being severely out-resourced and outmanned, to some degree because of these drones. And I wonder how military planners around the world watch this conflict and what lessons, especially around drones, that they're drawing from it. You know,

You know, the integration of drones into warfare is not necessarily new to the Ukraine conflict, but the scale and the proliferation of drones in the air, on the ground, and in the sea has been staggering in this conflict. So there's no doubt that militaries around the world are closely watching the drone war in Ukraine and using this to inform tactics and training. We know the U.S. and NATO forces are doing this.

The US military recognizes that drones are a growing problem for which it will need an answer. And late last year, the Pentagon released a new counter drone strategy that sort of explained how it plans to address the problem in the short and the long term. It was a little vague, but this includes, for instance, strengthening counter drone capabilities and defenses.

Last year, I went out to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where the Army runs an initiative that essentially trains U.S. service members from across the armed forces how to identify, engage, and defeat drones, especially, you know, the small FPV drones. And I watched soldiers use electronic warfare devices and assault rifles to train in shooting down the drones.

Wait, like just like shooting them out of the sky? Yeah, but instead of using bullets to sort of blast the drones, you know, out of the sky and that will cost a couple hundred dollars apiece, the soldiers actually shot at little balloons dangling from the drones. And it actually made for a difficult target because as you can imagine, you know, the Oklahoma wind made their movements a little sporadic and difficult to track.

So this is kind of one way that the U.S. is sort of watching the drone war in Ukraine and kind of innovating a little bit on its end to train soldiers how to actually engage these drones in combat.

One of the biggest things that we're learning about drone warfare is that drones are making it more difficult to maneuver on the battlefield. They give adversaries easier methods of attack, easier and cheaper, and they lower the barrier of entry for precision strike capabilities, as I mentioned earlier. You can't really hide anymore. That's something that army officers have stressed to me. As the technology advances, these uncrewed systems are only going to become deadlier over time.

Just last week, for instance, a U.S. Army officer told me that he thinks we're at the front end of this trend. In other words, the rapid evolution of what we're seeing right now is only the start. Drones are very quickly becoming more capable and more lethal. Well, that would seem to translate not just on the battlefield, but if you have non-state actors, terrorist groups, extremist groups, like it's pretty easy to get a drone and put explosives on it.

Exactly. And we've seen that some of the drone warfare that we've seen in the Middle East and three U.S. soldiers were killed in early 2024 and dozens more were injured at a U.S. military outpost in Jordan when a drone hit the base.

So it's a very serious problem for the U.S. military as well as other NATO forces. And they're actively looking for ways to sort of strengthen their defenses and learn more about the threat so that these deaths and accidents and injuries can be prevented in the future. I think one thing that I'm curious about is whether, you know, a large military force like the U.S. Pentagon is

thinks of drones as a potential replacement for some of its current technology? Or is it like, oh, they worked really well in Ukraine and they might augment our traditional arsenal? Like, is it an either or or is it an and? There are some...

instances where drones could replace traditional weaponry or systems that we've seen being used in the past. But there's also a lot of focus on how to integrate drones and have them sort of augment these, I don't want to call it analog, but like the historical, the traditional systems that have been used in combat. And this

We were seeing this play out on land, in the sky, and in the sea. So there's efforts to integrate naval drones, let's say, into U.S. military operations. And we've already seen that play out in the Middle East. And NATO is doing something similar in the Baltics.

Well, there's a psychological component, too, because, like, there is a very dark corner of the Internet where you can watch videos of soldiers being targeted by drones. And, like, it's hard to disentangle the technology from our...

experiential kind of internet-fueled understanding of it? Like, does it also become a weird psychological threat?

Yeah, well, you know, one of the sort of consequences of the drone war in Ukraine is the fact that the war has become very public facing. You can scroll on social media and see drone footage from the battlefield. Some of it, you know, could be quite graphic and you don't really know what to expect.

Units will post drone footage showing their confirmed kills on tanks or enemy positions. I mean, it's very you get these sort of high quality video footage that shows combat in a way that we really haven't seen it before. And it's it's quite terrifying. And it's propaganda.

Exactly. You'll have military units sort of using drone footage to boast their operations, to boast their kills of enemy forces. That's something that we've seen quite a lot of. This is a pretty big question, but when you think about how drones have been used in Ukraine, how do you think that use is going to inform or change conflict in the future?

Well, it's tough to say because when we look at what's happening in Ukraine, Ukraine has mainly been sort of a land war. As the U.S. focuses on a potential conflict in the Pacific, the battlefield would be pretty different from what we're seeing in Ukraine in that it could unfold over vast stretches of the ocean, which...

means that some of the drones that we're seeing in Ukraine might not be as relevant in the Pacific. And some of the drones that, you know, maybe we see a little bit less of, but that are still very prominent, like the naval drones that Ukraine has used to great effect in the Black Sea, these could be much more relevant in a Pacific conflict.

Thinking about how the defense industry changes, because that is really one of the things you cover, is like looking at how technology interacts with it. Like, obviously, militaries are moving toward autonomous warfare. Does this frighten you, the idea of weapons moving out of the hands of humans and into the hands of machines?

It's a pretty scary thought. Equally as scary is the fact that it is moving so quickly. And we're seeing these sort of war tech innovations all the time. And one senior Ukrainian official actually, you know, described this to me as sort of a cat and mouse affair between Ukraine and Russia. When one side comes up with its latest battlefield innovation,

the other side races to catch up and they go back and forth, whether this is production of drones or just the technology behind the drones. There's sort of this often this effort to one up the other side and be the latest to gain an edge. And I'll give an example. So many drones rely on radio frequency connections between them and their operators.

but these systems are pretty vulnerable to signal jamming. Last year, Russia started using drones controlled by the thin fiber optic cables that I had mentioned earlier.

The fiber optic cables preserve a stable link between the drone and the operator, essentially making them resistant to electronic warfare. So fiber optic drones marked a new chapter in the drone war. Soon enough, Ukraine was using its own fiber optic drones in combat, and production of these drones has skyrocketed in Ukraine's defense industry. At the same time, companies are also working on defenses against these drones because traditional electronic warfare doesn't really work.

So when we talk about sort of the cat and mouse game of war tech innovation, which is unfolding at a very, very rapid pace. So this kind of this is an underlying example of how fast we're moving and why drone warfare is scary. You know, we don't really know where it's headed and there's new innovations all the time.

Jake Epstein, thank you so much for your incredible reporting and for coming on to talk about it. I really appreciate it. Thank you guys for having me. Jake Epstein covers the defense industry for Business Insider. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort and Shana Roth. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell.

TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you're looking for even more great Slate shows to listen to, check out today's episode of The Discourse, which is our bonus series only for Slate Plus subscribers. I sit down with Slate's Nishpawa to discuss the bizarre story of crypto investors torturing a man for his Bitcoin. All right, we'll be back on Sunday with an episode about what Elon Musk got for that $300 million. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening.

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