The Drone War Is Our Current Military Revolution
Military policy makers need to get over their discomfort with the implications
During the first week of April, Ukrainian drones struck the only known fiber optics plant in Russia. Located at Saransk in Mordovia Oblast, PJSC Optical Fiber Systems is more than 430 miles (700 km) from Ukraine. A simultaneous strike on the Promsintez chemical plant in Chapaevsk Samara Oblast, located almost 550 miles (877 km) from Ukraine, reportedly “damaged the production line, storage facilities, and administrative buildings. A nitric acid leak was also reported in the area.”
Small drones dominate the tactical airspace over the battlefields of Ukraine. Attack drones dominate the strategic bombing war between Russia and Ukraine. Drone-centric operations are the dominant mode of conflict between the combatants. Drones stretch defenses to their limits. Drones are increasingly engaging enemy drones in combat and counter-UAS technologies are the hot new defense industry catalog. The current military revolution is all about drones.
While the Promsintez plant makes explosives, which have obvious military uses, the strategic Saransk strike was aimed at diminishing Russian production of tactical fiber optic guided (FOG) drones. Drone war is here, and here to stay, so every standing military force must adapt or face defeat. Policy makers must get past their skepticism, get over their doubts. We are witnessing the immediate future of warfare. (I’ll leave the ‘FOG of war’ puns to someone else.)
As I explained two months ago, a decisive Ukrainian numbers advantage in small drones was the key reason behind the slowing pace of Russian advances. Since I wrote this analysis, Russian battlefield progress has entirely halted, with Ukraine making successful small counterattacks in Toretsk and Kherson Oblast. Also in February, Russians began posting videos and images of donkeys being used for frontline logistics.
As I noted at the time, donkeys are not just replacing the vehicles that Ukrainian drones have destroyed, but they also make up for the missing manpower needed to deliver supplies on foot. Videos of Russians trying to resupply units near Pokrovsk on foot, trudging along with backpacks, only to stop in their tracks at the approach of an FPV (first person view) drone, have appeared on X since then. (Disturbing example here.) Three drones may be necessary to take out one wily Russian, but the AUF have enough to do the job, denying food, water, and ammunition to a whole platoon.
Because of the Ukrainian drones, Russian forces cannot concentrate anywhere within six miles (10 km) of the line of contact. Anything important inside of that ‘gray zone’ will be found and destroyed by drones, or by other fires — tube artillery, rockets, aerial bombs — directed by drone spotters.
Just as the appearance of HIMARS on the battlefield altered the dynamics of a war that was dominated by artillery, forcing Russians to disperse troop and ammunition concentrations and slowing their operations, drones have made the gray zone untenable for any coherent massing of men or material. The result is a static front.
Of course, Russian forces have the same ability to strike back. Ukraine is therefore subject to the same limitations as Russia: the last ten kilometers to the line of contact are the most dangerous, for the Ukrainians are under drone observation at all times. Fiber optic drones have become a key technology in Russia’s adapted wartime arsenal because they are immune to electronic warfare, aka jamming.
We should note that fiber optic weapons have their own limitations. Drone tactics often involve flying very low, so that trees and other obstacles can snag or even break a fiber optic line. Their range is more limited than drones which are operated remotely or automatically. They are slower, as they have to carry a large spool of fiber optic wire, and consequently they carry smaller payloads. A long, unspooled line creates its own wind and drag effects.
Too many fiber optic wires coming together in one place will give away a drone control station. “Unlike strike drones with traditional communication systems, pilots of fiber-optic drones take great risks by exposing themselves with wires and must frequently change positions to protect themselves,” Militarnyi explains. However, in the contested spectrum environment of Ukraine, they still have clear, if limited, tactical advantages over radio-controlled drones.
On a historical note, fiber optic weapons are not really new. In fact, they were a Cold War technology. Here is tinny, musically-earnest VHS transfer video of the US Army MGM-157 EFOGM (Enhanced Fiber Optic Guided Missile) being tested during the 1980s. I remember a news interview with the inventor.
In the closing paragraph of his 1993 book On Artillery, historian Bruce I. Gudmunsson predicted that this weapon “will turn the clock back to 1870.” Technology will replace the knowledge and experience needed for effective indirect fire. “The technique of artillery will have disappeared,” he wrote. “All that will be left is tactics.”
Developed by Raytheon and tested at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, the FOG missile bears a striking resemblance to the x-winged drones developed by both Russia and Ukraine, but with fiber optic FPV guidance instead of radio control. Ultimately, the Cold War ended and the Army never bought this system, but it would serve quite well on the battlefields of Ukraine right now.
Both sides are adapting, studying and imitating the other side. However, the Russian plan for fiber optic battlefield domination had a serious flaw. The Baza (“Base”) Telegram channel has confirmed that “JSC Optifolokone Systems is the first and only fiber optic plant in Russia.” While Russia can still source fiber optics from China, importation will be the most expensive and humiliating proposition for replacing their supply of spools.
“Residents say they counted 6 to 8 drones in the sky,” Baza says. Other sources say a dozen drones were involved in the overnight raid on 4 April. Then, as if taking a cue from the resolve of allied bombing commands to strike Germany “around the clock” in World War II, Ukraine conducted a second attack on a different building in Saransk, belonging to the same company, in the morning light of day. An Aeroprakt A-22 sport plane that had been converted into a drone bomb, i.e. a ‘kamikaze’ drone, nose-dived into the building.
The A-22 is also reusable. Optionally, they can fly as drone bombers, i.e. drones that drop or launch bombs and then return to base for another mission rather than destroy themselves against the target. While in the air, they create more targets for Russian air defense. (Distributed jamming of Russian radar by onboard electronics packages would also imitate the allied strategic bombing tactics of World War II, though of course I have no way of knowing that is the case.)
“In partially shifting to reusable attack drones, Ukraine increases the number of targets each drone can strike,” David Axe writes at his Substack. The “double-tap raid … promises to throttle the supply of parts for Russia’s best front-line attack drones, which under the control of skilled operators can peer inside the dugouts that shelter Ukrainian vehicles.”
Russian Z-channels were suitably livid over the strikes on JSC Optifolokone. Ukraine has been developing their own FOG drones, but Russia had enjoyed an advantage in numbers due to faster development and industry scaling. Russian MoD got there first, and went big, but at the risk of putting all their proverbial eggs in one targetable basket.
Ukraine has been catching up fast. “Dozens of teams of Ukrainian engineers are already offering their models of these drones and components for them, in order to fill the vacuum in the market in a matter of months,” Ukrainian Pravda reports.
Ironically, because Chinese manufacturers scaled up production to meet Russian demand, Ukraine now benefits from a 60 percent drop in the cost of a fiber optic spool. The cost of a median FOG drone spool has dropped to around $725, about $100 more than a radio controlled FPV drone. Ukraine has also begun spooling their own wire.
Alongside fiber optics, AI advances are finally coming after delays and disappointments with early results. “We are preparing for release a drone with an improved camera and updated systems, which will be able to be guided at a distance of more than a kilometer,” Oleksiy Babenko, director of Vyriy drone, explained in January.
“To solve the problem with electronic warfare on the way to the target, we developed a cruise control function so that the drone can autonomously fly to the target” — that is, a human operator will choose the mission, which AI will execute. We should be expecting results soon, Babenko says. “I think that by the end of winter, a large second wave of machine vision implementation on FPV drones will begin.”
It can be hard to keep up with the drone war, since it changes every six months. “From the appearance of an effective solution on the front to a state order in Ukraine, it usually takes six months to a year,” Babenko tells Pravda. “We are now seeing this with the example of fiber-optic drones.” Once introduced, a new drone technology has a six-month shelf life before it is countered by another drone or a new counter-drone technology. A FOG drone can be detected and destroyed just like any other drone.
Ukrainian defense technology company Kara Dag is reportedly working on detection systems that combined acoustic and visual signatures to spot a drone. Noise levels attenuate with distance, however, limiting audio detection range to 328 ft (100m), so it is unclear that such initiatives will succeed.
Russians have already tried out at least one countermeasure themselves. In a test recorded and released on social media, they conducted a nighttime demonstration of a flaw detector used to find breaks in optical wire. When used “at night, the cable connected to the flaw detector does indeed emit a faint light,” Russians discovered. “However, this was not enough for a drone with a daytime camera to track the direction,” Milityarni reports. “The DJI Mavic 3T, a popular military drone, does not see such a cable through either the television or thermal imaging channels.”
DeepStrikeTech, another Ukrainian defense firm, has found that “at night, this cable glows quite brightly in the infrared spectrum. It is perfectly visible with a passive night vision device or a drone like the Autel Max 4N with an IR camera” and leads right back to the operator’s position — as long as the wire is unbroken.
“To do this, you need to properly strip the cable using a special fiber optic cleaver, and then connect the fast connector” of a laser flaw detector. “The process takes about 10-15 minutes, but in field conditions it may take a little longer.”
By then, the operator may have already moved. And this technique is already becoming obsolete, as both sides are now ordering fiber optic wire with green or black paint to reduce all visual signatures.
Radar therefore remains the most promising domain for C-UAS (counter-unmanned aerial sytems) defense. See for example the Falcon Shield system made by electronic warfare contractor Leonardo for the UK and Italy. The RAF used these to stop a series of drone intrusions at Heathrow airport in 2018 and 2019. It can be integrated with weapons “ranging from missile systems to a 30-mm cannon,” according to program manager Ben Hewitt.1
As I keep saying, the drone war is forcing every unit on any given battlefield to fight electromagnetic battles with ever-smaller, more compact radio electronics. Radars will become as common in Ukraine as electronic protection equipment, which is carried even by individual soldiers.
In May of 2024, a Ukrainain source told electronic warfare historian and journalist Dr. Thomas Withington “that 90% of the EW waged at the tactical level in support of land maneuver is focused on UAVs.”2 Rather than large, expensive systems for targeting jet fighters at altitude, the trend will be small, light, and relatively cheap radars integrated with smaller weapons to take out drones.
Like the airplane, or radio communications, drones are now ubiquitous in warfare, so the solutions must become equally common. Military procurement policies and training doctrines must reflect this plain reality. Otherwise, nothing that politicans and generals and admirals desire will matter, anymore. In the future, there will only be tactics.
Ukraine Becomes The Latest Country To Field A Combat Laser Weapon
Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense named their new combat laser system ‘Trident’ (Tryzub) for the national symbol, but it is almost certainly developed from ‘DragonFire,’ the Royal Navy’s new shipboard laser directed energy weapon (LDEW). At least eight other nations — the United States, Russia, Israel, France, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and China — have developed combat laser weapons across the domains of land, sea, air, and space, so it should not be surprising news that Ukraine can build an LDEW. However, Ukraine has the “representative frontline setting” that British developers also say they want for testing and refining DragonFire.
White, Andrew. “C-UAS - Protecting Military Bases and Critical Infrastructure from Drones.” Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance, January 2024, pp 16 - 24.
Withington, Thomas, Dr. “The Electromagnetic Battle for Ukraine.” Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance, May 2024, pp 22-30.