Hi everyone, hope you find this look at the discussion unfolding in Ukraine about drone warfare and drone production interesting—if you do and aren’t subscribed, please consider doing so! I very much rely on your support to keep doing this, whether it is a free or paid subscription, or simply sharing this newsletter with your colleagues or anyone you think might be interested. And you can always make a one-time donation on Ko-fi. Thanks!
Drones have an outsized place in Ukrainian civil society discussion about the war effort—and, in the past few weeks, in the more specific and increasingly vocal debate about the necessity to ramp up industrial production for that war effort. One reason is of course that drones have proven a crucial asset on the battlefield, both in a recon and strike capacity. But I think another reason is that, more than any other aspects of the war effort, drones have been from the very beginning (meaning, since 2014) been a civil society project.
Volunteers and activists have been the ones first clamoring about the importance of drones, and many military units still heavily rely on small groups of volunteers to receive their drones. Drone production, popular Ukrainian blogger Oleksandr Karpyuk wrote on December 11, still has the characteristics “of a garage-volunteer effort”. Drones matter also because they represent civil society’s main claim to the war effort, with the perception that it is the main area where civil society is stepping up to compensate for the State’s failures.
There’s been a lot of discussion about drones lately on Ukrainian media and social networks, and I’ve noticed two main things emerging from these discussions.
First is the growing consensus that Ukraine has lost the advantage it once had in the realm of drone warfare as Russia not only increases production, but also introduces innovation. “If a year and a half ago we were more or less on a parallel track with Russia, right now I estimate we’re about six months behind” Ukrainian military expert Serhiy Flesh said in a December 9 interview published by Focus. Most recently, Russia’s introduction of drones equipped with nighttime vision has transformed the battlefield and taken Ukrainian soldiers by surprise: “a lot of activity takes place at night, from the rotation of troops to the evacuation of the wounded, the transportation of ammunition, the movement of equipment, etc. So when the Russians began to attack us at night, they struck critical objects and events, and we weren’t ready for this”.
The technological race will, meanwhile, only intensify, according to Oleksandr Karpyuk: “I wonder if anyone here is preparing for the time when standard FPV data transmission channels will stop working ? […] Or when the front is saturated with electronic warfare equipment, to the point where Mavic and Autel drones will no longer work, meaning it will no longer be good enough to buy Chinese drones 3-5k dollars apiece in order to gain operational awareness?”
“We’re conceding to the enemy on every front, when it comes to human resources, ammunitions, drones” wrote MP and service member Yegor Firsov in a gloomy assessment of the situation published on December 7 on his Facebook page. “Russians learn from their mistakes and steal our technological solutions. We are more creative, but they are able to take our ideas and produce on a massive scale.” Maria Berlinska, dubbed by Ukrainian media the “mother of drones” for her influential role in advocating for drones in the military since 2014, has never been one for exaggerated triumphalism (a stance that has earned her criticism in the past), and doesn’t shy away from tough words in a December 7 interview with Ukrainska Pravda: “time is playing against us” she says, adding “I’ll say it honestly, now isn’t a stalemate on a chessboard, it is a moment when we’re losing—I believe our people are mature enough to be told the truth, and the truth must come from the supreme commander.”
Such a situation is no reason to despair, Firsov says: “on the contrary, you need to soberly analyze the situation and draw conclusions.” “Of course”, Ukraine won’t be able to produce fighter planes or HIMARS. What it can do, according to Firsov, is to produce more drones than Russia, and to use those drones better.
This brings us to the second main element of the discussion as I see it unfolding in the public space—calls for creating some kind of special state institution dedicated to coordinating innovation efforts in drone production at the highest level. For Maria Berlinska, Volodymyr Zelensky should lead such an institution: “there is the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, where he gathers the military-political leadership. And there should be an Engineering Headquarters, where engineers from the best companies in the country report to him once every few weeks about the directions they’re working in and the results.” Firsov advocates for the creation of a “engineering and analytical room” in the General Staff, tasked with monitoring the use of drones on the frontline in order to identify successful cases that can then be scaled up. Ukrainian military expert Serhiy Flesh also pushes for a more coordinated and centralized effort to replace the current “garage-volunteer effort”: “I believe that Ukraine needs to create a “pool of scientists”, you can call them the genius-engineers who will fight the Russian Federation […] We need to gather the country’s best specialists in a single group and motivate these people to be creative and come up with smart ideas, and this should be done at the level of Zelenskiy because then these people will have access to all the data from Ukrainian intelligence”.
In all those takes I’ve come across in recent days, there is a common thread that Ukraine is now playing catch up, that while Kyiv has been dragging its feet for years in terms of industrial drone production, Russia is reaping the fruits of long-term investments. Yet there is still a strong desire for drones to remain a civil society project: when discussing the importance of Ukraine scaling up drone production, Yegor Firsov writes that “one of the main tasks of our society should be how to provide 100,000 drones per month. And I'm talking about society, not about the state—the state must ensure that this process is properly organized, but society itself must implement it”.