• Ukraine has approved a new ground-based drone, which fires thermobaric rounds, for combat use.
• It's now one of 80 uncrewed ground vehicles codified by the military to fight in the war.
• The Krampus is a tracked UGV meant to carry multiple RPV-16 launchers on rough terrain.

Ukraine's defense ministry has officially approved what it described as a flamethrower robot for its military units.

The Krampus, a locally invented uncrewed ground vehicle, now joins more than 80 other supported ground drone designs that Kyiv's forces can use, the ministry said in a statement Monday.

The ministry said the remotely piloted vehicle is equipped with RPV-16 rounds, which are rocket-propelled thermobaric rounds originally designed by Ukraine for infantry to fire from a portable launcher. Thermobaric rounds disperse a cloud of fuel into the air that is then ignited, creating a powerful blast.

Built to "perform assault and defensive missions" against infantry and light armor, the Krampus is a tracked UGV that runs on two silent motors and can fit in the back of a pickup truck, the ministry added.

The statement said its controls were jam-resistant and designed to withstand cold, heat, snow, and rain. It's also supposed to effectively cross off-road terrain such as thick forest, sand, swamps, and steep inclines.

"The platform's battery capacity allows for several hours of continuous movement," the statement said. "Thanks to this, it can remain in position for extended periods in standby mode."

The ministry didn't specify the drone's operational range or ammo capacity. Photos of the Krampus appear to show a tracked platform with a video camera that could fit four RPV-16 launchers. These launchers are typically single-use, so it's likely the Krampus can fire four times before having to be resupplied.

Authorization by the defense ministry can be important for how widely a drone is used, since Ukrainian weapons manufacturing and innovation are dispersed across the country. As the war rages, various firms and military units work simultaneously on their own battlefield tech and often share them with one another.

Official approval means Ukrainian forces can use their budgets to purchase the Krampus UGV.

Their heavier frames offer more deployment options than a typical flying drone, such as carrying larger explosive payloads for attack missions, evacuating the wounded as a last resort, or clearing mines.

"These drones allow us to replace infantry soldiers on the battlefield," Oleksandr Chernyavskiy, an enlisted soldier who helps with fundraising in the 241st Territorial Defense Brigade's drone prototyping team, told Business Insider of UGVs like the Krampus.

His own brigade has created a similar tracked UGV with mounted belt-fed machine guns that he says runs on an operational range of 20 kilometers, or about 12 ½ miles. Typically, such assault UGVs fly in tandem with aerial drones that can help them scout for mines, traps, and targets, Chernyavskiy said.

"It appeared to be quite effective in some kind of operations, like against well-equipped positions and traps," Chernyavskiy said of his brigade's weapons-mounted UGVs. "Usually, it's been used remotely without our infantry nearby."

Ukraine has set a goal of fielding 15,000 UGVs on the battlefield by the end of the year.

• Anduril Industries has revealed a few more details about its new drone fighter for the Air Force.
• A new TV segment shows the drone's wing being fixed by two engineers with screwdrivers.
• Anduril's CEO said the AI fighters are meant to fly ahead of piloted jets and screen for enemies.

Palmer Luckey's Anduril just gave the world an inside glimpse of its new project for the US Air Force — an uncrewed fighter jet that teams up with piloted aircraft.

The military startup was featured on Sunday in a CBS 60 Minutes segment, during which a few clips showed Anduril's Fury drone being assembled in a hangar or warehouse.

It's not the first time the drone was shown to the public — the Air Force unveiled a test representative model on May 1. But the TV segment reveals a few more details about the drone's make.

In one clip, two engineers are seen fixing a wing on the Fury, the defense startup's offering for the Air Force's collaborative combat aircraft program.

That speaks to the aircraft's modular design. Anduril says the Fury, like many of its other products, is built so that its parts can be easily swapped out and customized.

Both engineers are also filmed using screwdrivers to secure the wing onto the aircraft. The company has said that it wants the Fury to be manufactured at scale and possibly in many different workshops in the US instead of relying on a few highly specialized facilities.

CBS also showed a conceptual clip of a scenario in which three Fury drones flew as a team in front of a crewed fighter jet and helped it strike an enemy aircraft.

"These fly out ahead of manned fighters, and they're able to find the enemy first, able to engage the enemy well before a manned fighter has to be seen or is in range," Brian Schimpf, Anduril's CEO, told CBS.

Such a mission is part of the Air Force's vision for its advanced fighter jets to fight alongside drones that act as "loyal wingmen," or for the drones to be used in missions on their own.

It's expected to be a key feature of the F-47, the sixth-generation stealth fighter developed by Boeing. But the Air Force has also said it hopes to integrate the program with F-35 Lightning IIs and F-22 Raptors.

Air Force leadership has said its priority is making the drones affordable and easy to manufacture, as it hopes to bring mass to the skies since its fleet has shrunk in favor of more advanced aircraft.

Anduril was chosen to compete for the program, but the Fury hasn't clinched the contract yet. Dubbed YFQ-44A by the Air Force, the aircraft is competing for the bid with General Atomics, which is also offering a drone with a modular design.

The Pentagon is expected to make early decisions during the fiscal year of 2026, which starts in October.

Anduril didn't respond to a comment request sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

• Ukrainians have fitted a Bulgarian Bulspike-AP grenade launcher on a large quadcopter FPV drone.
• It's been tested for months, but Wild Hornets released new combat footage of the platform on Tuesday.
• A weapon like this would allow drones to attack without having to directly fly over or into a target.

A Ukrainian drone maker released footage on Tuesday showing what's believed to be the first time a grenade launcher was fired in combat from a first-person-view uncrewed aerial system.

The Wild Hornets firm published the clips on its Telegram channel, crediting the "Bulava" drone unit of the 3rd Mechanized Battalion in the Bohdan Khmelnytsky Separate Presidential Brigade.

The footage shows two instances of the mounted grenade launcher firing over open terrain.

In the first clip, a soldier can be seen caught in the resulting explosion and being knocked to the ground. Their fate was unclear based on the footage, but the Wild Hornets said the target was a Russian soldier who died. The target in the second clip was not clearly visible.

The drone maker said both clips featured one of its designs, the "Queen of Hornets" drone, as the platform for the grenade launcher. With a 15- to 17-inch frame, the quadcopter is among the largest FPV drones commercially produced for combat in Ukraine, and it's typically used as a bomber.

Wild Hornets did not say when the footage was shot, nor did it specify which grenade launcher was used. But during September testing with the "Bulava" unit, the company said the "Queen of Hornets" drone was fitted with the Bulspike AP, a Bulgarian anti-personnel grenade launcher. The platform is meant to be reusable.

The Bulspike AP fires a 2-kilogram fragmentation grenade at an effective range of about 100 meters, or 328 feet.

A drone mounted with such a weapon could thus give Ukrainian operators far more options to strike, since FPV combat drones are typically either used to fly directly into a target as a munition or to drop explosives from above.

The clips released on Tuesday demonstrated the launcher's range capability, showing the mounted weapon firing at enemy targets positioned well ahead of the drone itself.

"From now on, an ordinary rocket launcher can work at a distance of 5+ km. This opens up new opportunities for the military," Wild Hornets wrote at the time of testing in September.

Still, it's unclear whether Ukraine can or will produce and deploy these drone-mounted launchers at scale. Dozens of Ukrainian companies have developed and tested a massive variety of drone weapons, such as mounted shotguns and Kalashnikov rifles, but troops are still widely relying on loitering munitions and bombers as their bread and butter.

Wild Hornets, in particular, has been recognized for producing some of the war's most exotic drone weapons, including FPV drones that spew thermite from above or interceptors designed to fly faster than 100 mph.

• On changing battlefields, armies have to adapt quickly using the close relationship between industry and troops.
• The model for that is having companies on the front line getting feedback, DIU's program manager said.
• He called Silicon Valley a "secret weapon."

Modern battlefields change quickly, and the trick to making sure weapons and capabilities keep pace with new threats and challenges is to put companies on the front lines with troops, a Defense Department official said Tuesday.

It's a "Silicon Valley" type of model, the DoD official said.

US military officials, acquisition team members, and leaders in Washington have long been discussing the need for rapid iteration for future fights, pointing to examples from the war in Ukraine, where an underdog nation on defense built an arsenal on a shoestring warfighting budget and held its own in the tech arms race against the larger invading Russian force.

Lessons from this conflict have shown just how quickly some weapons, like different types of drones, are entering the battle and then being thwarted by electronic warfare like signal jamming and other countermeasures.

When they run into a problem, the soldiers can relay their concerns and experiences to industry partners, which must react quickly to introduce new solutions. Sometimes, the cycle takes only a matter of weeks.

At a Hudson Institute event on building weapons that can be adapted at scale, Defense Innovation Unit Program Manager Trent Emeneker said uncrewed systems had changed warfare like nothing since the introduction of the machine gun during World War I and that the war in Ukraine is showing constant iterative adaptation in both technology and tactics.

What's the trick? Emeneker suggested a rather untraditional government contracting approach with more trust in the defense industry and constant, close work on adapting systems.

"What we see is the model that works is companies and their engineering teams are embedded directly with the warfighter, on the front lines, at operations, in combat," he explained. "They take that learned feedback, and they send it back, overnight, to the larger engineering team."

Then, the solution is brought back to the warfighter. It's not going to be perfect, Emeneker said, but it's going to be better. And if not, they try again until they get it right.

"It's the Silicon Valley model of software development: go fast, release, update, and improve," he said.

That is a shift in traditional thinking and how defense contractors have worked with the US military on weapons programs in the past. It would be a move away from years of testing complex, exquisite weapons systems before getting them into the hands of troops. There are efforts like that in the US military, but it's not militarywide.

A lot of smaller, newer defense companies are embracing these concepts, especially in the uncrewed systems and artificial intelligence spaces. US military and defense industry leaders recognize that for potential future wars against peer adversaries like China, cheap, easily made weapons will be needed. Some companies have told Business Insider the work with soldiers has provided a constant stream of feedback for adapting systems.

This type of acquisition and development process is one that is becoming increasingly popular within special operations forces.

At the Hudson Institute event, some panelists discussed how this approach could give the US an advantage in a future war with China, which has undergone a massive transformation of its military resources, technologies, and capabilities in recent years.

Adapting systems and capabilities to the needs of the US military quickly in a conflict situation depends on the private sector. "Silicon Valley is our secret weapon," Emeneker said.

• The US wants to equip all Army divisions with drones by the end of 2026.
• The move appears to be heavily influenced by the war in Ukraine.
• Meanwhile, crewed aircraft and ground vehicles like Humvees are set to be scaled back.

Every division of the US Army should be equipped with drones by the end of 2026, according to an official memo released by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday.

The move is part of a raft of measures that aim to "restore the warrior ethos" and "reestablish deterrence," Hegseth wrote.

Crewed attack helicopter formations are also to be restructured and augmented with "inexpensive drone swarms capable of overwhelming adversaries," he said.

The memo signals a shift from yearslong procurement cycles for large-scale, multimillion-dollar equipment, to what appears to be a more nimble and responsive approach, wrapping in much cheaper and more adaptable systems.

While the announcement referred only to the goal of deterring China in the Indo-Pacific, it appears to be heavily influenced by the war in Ukraine.

As BI's Jake Epstein reported, Ukraine's use of drones against Russia has become a blueprint for modern warfare on a budget.

Ukraine says it's the world's leading producer of drones, which it fields in their thousands. These range from large attack drones to commercial off-the-shelf drones used by soldiers for surveillance and target acquisition.

Russia is also heavily deploying drones. One Ukrainian drone pilot told BI that there are so many drones in the skies that soldiers can easily find themselves confused about who they belong to.

Drones for all divisions

Each combat division of the US Army is set to receive about 1,000 drones, the Pentagon confirmed to Business Insider.

These are for use in attacks, moving supplies, and surveillance, The Wall Street Journal reported.

"Land warfare has transitioned to drone warfare," Jack Keane, a retired general, told the Journal. "If you can be seen, you can be killed."

Hegseth's announcement also directed the Army to ramp up the use of counter-drone capabilities, as well as AI and 3D printing across units.

In March, Breaking Defense reported that the US was already 3D printing small drones for training purposes.

Along with the high-tech push, Hegseth's memo also laid out plans to "cancel or scale back ineffective or redundant programs," including in areas like crewed aircraft, outdated drones, and ground vehicles such as Humvees.

Other "wasteful" projects earmarked for scaling back include sustainment of legacy items and what the memo described as "unnecessary climate-related initiatives."

• Russia looks set to incorporate motorcycles into its coming offensives, a US think tank said.
• It said Russia was likely trying to find a way around Ukraine's major drone capabilities.
• A Ukrainian officer said Russians were training on motorcycles and they're hard to stop with drones.

Russia is likely readying to further incorporate motorcycles into its tactics for its coming offensives against Ukraine to offset drones, a US think tank said.

"Russia is likely preparing to systematically integrate motorcycle usage into offensive operations in Ukraine for Summer and Fall 2025, likely to offset adept Ukrainian drone capabilities," the Washington, DC-based Institute for the Study of War said in a briefing over the weekend.

It pointed to evidence of Russia training, as well as warnings from a Ukrainian military official and recent footage of Russian soldiers using motorcycles in Ukraine.

The ISW highlighted comments from Ukraine's Lt. Col. Pavlo Shamshyn, the spokesperson for the Kharkiv Group of Forces, who said that Russia was training its soldiers on combat tactics with motorcycles.

Shamshyn said this suggested that Russia would carry out assault operations later this year using motorcycles, the Ukrainian broadcaster Suspilne reported.

He added that motorcycles could benefit Russia because many drones would be needed to stop a group of motorcycles and motorcycles can move fast and travel a long distance while drones are being prepared and launched.

He said that one advantage for Ukraine is that the loud noise of motorcycles means Russian soldiers would likely not be able to hear the sound of Ukrainian drones approaching.

Already in use in Ukraine

Russia has already been seen using some motorcycles in Ukraine.

An American veteran fighting for Ukraine told Business Insider in October that some Russian soldiers "have motorcycles and stupid golf carts."

The ISW said it had seen an "increased trend of Russian units conducting mechanized and combined motorized assaults and transporting infantry with motorcycles and civilian vehicles throughout the frontline."

It also pointed to footage shared by Ukraine's Vuhledar tactical group, a unit in Ukraine's ground forces, that it said showed Russian forces having "recently advanced during a motorized assault near Bahatyr comprised entirely of motorcycles and civilian vehicles."

Russian training

The ISW described this latest development as part of the Russian command's efforts to adapt tactics to offset Ukrainian drone strikes, as well as a likely mitigation to "the Russian military's equipment constraints resulting from high armored vehicle losses in Summer and early Fall 2024."

Russia lost swaths of tanks and armored vehicles last year as drones played an increasingly important role in the conflict. They've taken over roles traditionally performed by soldiers and other weaponry.

On Saturday, Russia's defense ministry shared footage of a soldier riding a motorcycle through a course with explosions going off around him. It said that some troops were being trained for both offensive and defensive combat.

The ISW said the video likely showed "elements of the 299th (Airborne) VDV Regiment (98th VDV Division) practicing offensive and defensive tactics on motorcycles."

It added that the video "indicates that the Russian military is likely developing a tactical doctrine for systematic offensive motorcycle usage and may be preparing to issue an increased number of motorcycles to Russian personnel in Ukraine."

Russia was seen last year using fast but poorly protected vehicles like ATVs and motorbikes in Ukraine, the UK's Ministry of Defence said.

It described Russia as making a sacrifice for increased mobility, leaving its soldiers more vulnerable than they would be in more heavily armored vehicles. "Ukrainian FPV drones have already demonstrated their ability to effectively target such light vehicles," it said.

Reports from last year also pointed to Russian troops using quad bikes in Ukraine.

Russia leaning further into this tactic could make its soldiers more vulnerable, but it could also create major problems for Ukraine's military.

The buried roots and stumps of an ancient forest in southern China are the charred remains of an ancient war and the burning of a capital city, according to a recent study from researchers who carbon-dated the stumps and measured charcoal and pollen in the layers of peat surrounding them.

It may not be obvious today, but there’s an ancient forest hidden beneath the farmland of southern China’s Pearl River Delta. Spread across 2,000 square kilometers are thick layers of waterlogged peat, now covered by agriculture. It’s all that is left of what used to be a thriving wetland ecosystem, home to forests of Chinese swamp cypress along with elephants, tigers, crocodiles, and tropical birds. But the peat hides the buried, preserved stumps and roots of cypress trees; some of the largest stumps are almost 2 meters wide, and many have burn marks on their tops.

“These peat layers are locally known as ‘buried ancient forest,’ because many buried trees appear fresh and most stumps are found still standing,” writes Ning Wang of the Chinese Academy of Scientists, who along with colleagues, authored the recent paper. It turns out that the eerie buried forest is the last echo of the Han army’s invasion during a war about 2,100 years ago.

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• Jamming in Ukraine means that drone operators often can't rely on GPS.
• Operators told BI that means they don't always know where their drones are.
• They have to look for standout landmarks instead, something that's hard in the uniform landscape.

Ukrainian drone operators flying their uncrewed aircraft against the threat of Russian jamming are often unsure where their drones actually are, meaning they have to use other guideposts to find their way, an operator told Business Insider.

Directional landmarks can include "weird-looking buildings" or intersections. Operators use these when they can't use GPS to locate themselves and can't be sure exactly where their drones are over fields and treelines that look similar, Dimko Zhluktenko, a drone operator with Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, told BI.

Drones warfare is a major part of Russia's war against Ukraine, and both sides are rapidly creating and developing new types of drones and counter-drone technology. The countermeasures include electronic warfare like jamming, which can target connections between the drone and its operator or the aircraft's GPS navigation system.

GPS, a satellite-based navigation system, is used in munitions, drones, and civilian technology like digital maps. It plays an essential function in military systems and civilian society, but military leaders are increasingly coming to terms with the reality that modern battlefields may be GPS-denied environments.

Weapons that rely on GPS, including sophisticated US weapons, have run into problems on Ukrainian battlefields.

"At the front line, there is literally no GPS," Zhluktenko said. "So a key issue is that when you're flying with no GPS, the drone thinks that he's in one position while, in fact, he's in completely another position."

Electronic warfare can make location data unreliable, and wind and other factors can knock a drone off course, out of sync with the operator's expectations.

Without GPS, operators have to look at what their drone's camera is showing them and compare it to satellite imagery and maps to figure out where it is.

"And that's why you have to look at the visual markers that you have from the camera: a lake, some weird-looking building, weird intersection, and you just discuss all those markers and use them to navigate through the front line basically."

"The operator, he's looking at the camera, looking at the map, and figuring out where the drone is and where to go next," he said. That's not an easy task, and in some sectors of the front, this can be extremely difficult.

Eastern Ukraine, where most of the fighting is taking place, is very flat and has a largely uniform landscape, making it hard for operators to find those standout features and learn where they are.

Zhluktenko said that in the east of the country, "one of the key issues is that all of those places, they look exactly the same. It's the same kind of field, the same kind of forest, and there are literally no visual markers to figure out where you're at."

The flat landscape has also made other parts of warfare more difficult, like tank and armored assaults. Drones can see them coming from far off.

Another Ukrainian drone operator, who spoke to BI on the condition of anonymity, shared similar experiences, explaining that without GPS, drone operators "have to get oriented using benchmarks." They said that those can include "a building or a lake or a river or some house."

Drones have been used in this war more than in any other war throughout history. From quadcopters to octocopters to large fixed-wing aircraft, drones are running reconnaissance operations, collecting targeting data, dropping bombs, and exploding on targets, and that's just the aerial ones.

These relatively cheap weapons have eliminated assets worth millions of dollars and destroyed targets far from the front. They're radically changing warfare.

And they have been key for Ukraine, which has suffered from shortages of other weaponry. Maj. Gen. Peter Boysen, the commander in chief in Denmark, a significant Ukrainian partner, said this month that attack drones account for more than 70% of Ukrainian kills.

The proliferation of drones means that Russian and Ukrainian industries are in a race to find ways to jam and stop the other country's drones. They are also developing new drones that are resistant to or able to overcome those efforts.

New drone systems include fiber-optic drones, which have a cable between the operator and the drone that prevents them from being jammed, and AI-enabled drones.

• Ukraine says its air force struck a drone hub in Kursk, killing up to 20 drone operators.
• Russia used the site "to launch reconnaissance, strike, and FPV drones," Ukraine's army said.
• The reported attack occurred before a 30-hour Easter truce between Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine says its air force struck a drone complex in the Russian region of Kursk, killing up to 20 drone operators.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine shared an image on Telegram on Monday of a large plume of smoke and debris rising from an industrial site, saying it was "used by the enemy to launch reconnaissance, strike, and FPV drones."

It said the drone hub was near Tetkino, a village close to the border with Ukraine and roughly 40 miles west of Sudhza.

Business Insider could not independently verify the claim, but was able to geolocate the image to the outskirts of Tetkino.

The general staff said the attack took place on Saturday, before President Vladimir Putin proposed a 30-hour truce with Ukraine. It did not give details of how the attack was carried out.

"The Armed Forces of Ukraine will continue to destroy elements of enemies military infrastructure until a just peace will be achieved," it said.

Drones have been a major part of the fighting in Ukraine, with both sides deploying them to surveil and attack. There are so many drones in the skies over Ukraine that one drone operator told BI this month that soldiers jam everything when they can't tell friendly and enemy drones apart.

Russia retook the Kursk town of Sudzha in March, reducing to a sliver Ukraine's grip on the region that Kyiv's forces initially attacked last August, in a cross-border offensive that caught Russian forces off guard.

Ukrainian soldiers, talking to the BBC, reported their retreat as being like a "horror movie" and described a near-constant barrage of drone attacks on departing columns.

As of Monday, Ukraine still claimed to hold territory up to five miles into Russia, according to analysis by the Washington DC-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War.

Much of Russia's success in retaking Kursk has been attributed to advanced drone techniques, including the use of fiber-optic drones that are immune to jamming, and the aerial targeting of Ukrainian supply lines.

• Himera is a Ukrainian tech startup that makes electronic warfare-resistant walkie-talkies.
• It was founded after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
• Its products are being tested by the US Air Force.

The Ukrainian defense tech industry has boomed in recent years.

From drone and robotics makers to electronic warfare system providers, Ukrainian innovation has been on full display since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.

One company to have sprung up since the conflict began is Himera, which makes electronic warfare-resistant walkie-talkies.

Its products include the G1 Pro — a tactical handheld radio — and the B1 repeater, which extends communication ranges.

Despite only having launched in 2022, the company has quickly caught the attention of the defense tech industry, as well as the US military.

The product's major selling point is that it offers a potential solution to one of the defining challenges of the war in Ukraine — electronic warfare.

The G1 is EW-resistant, using frequency-hopping technology to help evade electronic warfare interference, which seeks to disrupt and jam certain signals like GPS, radio, and video.

Reticulate Micro, which supplies Himera's radios in the US, announced the first US delivery of G1 Pro radios to the US Air Force in October 2024.

The company said the Air Force would test the G1 Pro alongside Reticulate's Video Assured Secure Transmission (VAST) technology, which delivers real-time video streaming.

In a press release at the time, Joshua Cryer, then the president and CEO of Reticulate Micro, said: "By combining the Himera G1 Pro with VAST, we're aiming to democratize secure video transmission on the battlefield—empowering every warfighter with video-capable radio technology for enhanced situational awareness."

Misha Rudominski, one of Himera's cofounders, told Business Insider that Himera's tech "bridges the gap" between tactical and commercial communications solutions.

"We take the best from both worlds," he said. "We provide all the tactical relevant functionality like low probability of detection, low probability of interception, and low probability of jamming, which you don't find in commercial spec solutions."

"But we do it in a very user-friendly way," he continued. "We want the lightest radio, we have one of the longest battery lives on the market."

The G1 Pro has a battery life of around 48 hours and weighs just 300 grams. It can support the transmission of multiple information types, such as GPS, voice data, and texts, and is programmable by an encrypted app on a mobile or tablet device.

"We make a very scalable and affordable solution," Rudominski added. "The scalability is a big point because we only use commercial off-the-shelf components."

Representatives for Himera told Ukrainian news outlet Militarnyi in March that the company was "producing up to 1,000 radios per month" and that it had the capacity to "scale quickly to 2,500 units."

"For large-scale orders, we are prepared to supply 10,000 to 15,000 radios per month," they said.

Innovation has been crucial to Kyiv's fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces, and Ukrainian firms have continually adapted to meet the battlefield's ever-evolving demands.

Rudominski told BI that this had also been key to Himera's success.

"Over the last three years, we've done more than 80 versions of firmware updates," he said. "We've done more than probably 20 versions of separate kinds of hardware products. Most of them didn't go into production, but most of them have at some capacity been tested on the battlefield."

Along with Reticulate, Himera has also partnered with Quantropi, a Canadian quantum security company, to integrate its security solutions into Himera's products.

"We have our own software, but they can enhance our capacity," Rudominski said.

• Drones have seen widespread use by both sides in Russia's war against Ukraine.
• Different types of drones include aerial, ground, and naval, all with specific models and uses.
• Drone operators have been working adapt to the new technology.

Drones are an emerging technology in modern combat. Evolutions in these remotely piloted uncrewed systems have been radically affecting the way war is fought.

Although drones have been used in past conflicts, Russia's war against Ukraine has been marked by a rise in drone warfare, both the employment of uncrewed systems and the development of countermeasures such as electronic warfare.

What are drones?

Drones are vehicles or systems that operate remotely or autonomously without a human being physically on board to drive them. They come in aerial, ground, maritime surface, and undersea varieties, and they are used for civilian, commercial, and military purposes.

They can be used for photography, videography, delivery, inspection and monitoring, intelligence gathering, surveillance, and reconnaissance, as well as precision strikes.

While drones have received attention for the role they play in Ukraine, they have also gotten a lot of interest in the civilian world. There was, for instance, a drone scare in New Jersey in December 2024 that turned out to be mostly hysteria, but it fueled a very long-overdue conversation about drones, including about the ones routinely flying around US military bases.

Earlier that month, the Pentagon unveiled a new strategy for dealing with the challenge of drones, particularly small aerial drones that can be easily acquired for both benign and malign purposes.

"These cheap systems are increasingly changing the battlefield, threatening US installations, and wounding or killing our troops," the secretary of defense wrote. And they have been becoming increasingly prolific.

These systems have been doing the jobs of snipers, combat aircraft, naval vessels, and even precision-guided munitions. In the Red Sea, the US Navy and its European allies have battled drone attacks accompanying anti-ship missiles. These attacks have come from air and sea, targeting both military and commercial vessels.

These relatively low-cost systems are widely available, lowering the barrier to entry for capabilities that were once reserved for conventional militaries. Now they are being used by non-state actors and nation-states alike.

The future of war is expected to be robotic, with machines outnumbering human warfighters. A wide range of drones are already being employed in battle.

Many militaries are looking into purchasing a lot of drones that are cheap, attritable, and readily available or able to be mass-produced on a budget so that drones are available even for squad-level operations.

There continues to be interest in larger, more sophisticated systems as well, such as uncrewed naval vessels capable of supporting traditional warships and uncrewed combat aircraft to fight alongside piloted planes.

Militaries are also exploring new technologies to drive these assets, such as artificial intelligence.

Aerial drones

Uncrewed aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are drones capable of flight. They are typically launched by a UAV operator, and the ranges and altitudes at which they can fly depend on the model.

Some of the most well-known military UAVs are the large, fixed-wing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones and uncrewed combat aerial vehicles, or UCAVs.

Fixed-wing ISR drones include assets like the US military's Globe Hawk or Russia's Orlan drones.

Combat drones include drone platforms like the US military's Predator and Reaper drones. The latter can not only conduct surveillance but is also armed with Hellfire missiles. There are heavy fixed-wing UCAVs like Russia's Okhotnik, and there are several stealth drones like the RQ-170 or emerging Chinese CH-7.

Among these drones are maritime assets. Several countries, such as Iran, China, and Turkey, have actually built drone carriers. Some argue the US military needs drone carriers, too, though the US is looking into launching drones from traditional flattops.

Other fixed-wing drone assets include collaborative combat aircraft, or "loyal wingmen," that fly alongside piloted aircraft. The Air Force has been working on this technology, as well as exploring the potential of AI-piloted fighter aircraft.

While fixed-wing drones take off like airplanes, there are also vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) drones. These include classic designs like helicopters, tail-sitters, tilt rotors, etc., as well as innovative engineering such as articulating-wing designs.

Quadcopter drones and related hexacopters and octacopters are common VTOL UAV models that have been everything from Christmas presents to combat platforms.

The small combat quadcopters, sometimes called first-person-view, or FPV, drones are usually flown by an operator wearing a headset or using a screen and can be used for scouting enemies, dropping explosives, or flying into targets and detonating.

Some commercially available models, like DJI Mavic drones, have seen extensive use in Ukraine, where operators strap plastic explosives or RPG warheads to the drones.

These drones can be piloted through various means, including radio frequencies, a fiber-optic cable that prevents jamming, and artificial intelligence, although autonomy in drones is still limited to terminal guidance targeting and hasn't seen widespread adoption yet.

Other types of aerial drones include loitering munitions, which fly high above targets before crashing into them. Some common types of loitering munitions include the Switchblade, Lancets, and the Iranian-made Shaheds. All have been used in Ukraine.

Ground drones

Uncrewed, or unmanned, ground vehicles, or UGVs, are drones that operate on land. They're often used for transporting supplies or weapons, clearing dangerous areas of threats, and executing casualty evacuations.

Most military ground drones are wheeled or tracked, resembling more complicated versions of remote-controlled cars. Via a controller, an operator can drive the drone over various terrains. The US military has prioritized using UGVs for urban combat environments and subterranean places like caves and tunnels, as drones can keep personnel and military dogs out of harm's way.

Some UGVs are referred to as robot dogs. These quadrupedal robots have four legs and resemble a canine. These drones have been developed by the US, China, and Russia. Some robot dogs wield rifles or machine guns, while others feature cameras and sensors for intelligence-gathering. These drones have been employed in combat and security roles.

Other UGVs include things like the Air Force's unusual Throwbot, which is a football-size device that can record video and audio for reconnaissance and intelligence purposes.

Naval drones

Naval drones have a few variations, but they are typically defined as drones that operate in water. They can be used for missions in hard-to-reach areas or waterways that would be difficult to reach via ship, submarine, or divers.

Ones that sail on the surface can vary in size and payload but often look like boats. Ukraine, lacking a proper naval force, has used drone boats to devastate Russia's Black Sea Fleet during the war, sailing them into vessels in one-way explosive attacks.

The US Navy has experimented with drone boats that can conduct surveillance, as well as ones like the Ghost Overlord Fleet that can fire weapons and augment the conventional battle force.

US military leaders have seen these uncrewed naval assets, and others, as critical to building the kind of mass American forces would need against an adversary like China, which has the world's largest navy.

Uncrewed underwater vehicles, or UUVs, are submersible drones that operate underwater. There are a number of different UUVs varying depth, distance, and capability types depending on the model.

One of the larger UUVs being tested is the Manta Ray, built by Northrop Grumman. The drone is effectively submarine-sized and looks like a flat metal manta ray. It has recently completed in-water testing and can act as a torpedo, small submarine, or even work as a naval mine.

UUVs are especially useful for navigating waters with relative stealth to gather information in areas that could be inaccessible or dangerous for people or other maritime assets.

Naval drones are a growing area of interest. The US Navy's Task Force 59, located in Bahrain, is working on naval drones for surveillance around the waters of the Middle East. NATO also has launched a new Task Force X for naval drones aimed at combatting Russian aggression and preventing underwater sabotage.

How the US military uses drones

The US military has long used drones like the Reaper for surveillance operations; it lost one to Russian aggression in the Black Sea and has lost several to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. These platforms have also been key in counterterrorism strike missions.

Some other US military drones serve as unit-level airborne sensor platforms while other products like the pocket-sized Black Hornet drones provide individual and squad-level options.

Developing these uncrewed capabilities has been a priority for the US armed forces, but it's taken on increased urgency. The US military is working quickly to adapt drone technology across its service branches, especially as it takes note of the drones that have been used in the Ukraine war.

Special Operations Forces has been a leader due to its agile acquisition process and close relationships with defense industry partners that allow for faster iterations.

Other elements of the military are pursuing this technology as well. The Marine Corps, for instance, just recently created its new Attack Drone Team focused on drawing lessons from Ukraine.

A Marine general recently said that with the rise of drones, the longstanding adage "every Marine a rifleman" may need to change. It may be that future war demands they be something more, maybe a drone operator.

The US military has been looking at how drones can make operations safer for personnel, how to extend the military's reach, and what future warfare would look like with drones. And it isn't just the US military exploring these capabilities. Drone technology and artificial intelligence are considered critical for future war.

Counter-drone technology

The Pentagon has been pursuing new drone policies and initiatives to quickly adapt drones and counter-drone systems.

Last year, the Department of Defense launched a new strategy for countering drone threats in an effort to create common guidelines for the department amid the growing threat posed by the rise of uncrewed systems.

Earlier in 2024, three US soldiers were killed in a drone attack at a military outpost in Jordan. The Tower 22 attack highlighted the need for a comprehensive and standardized plan for counter-drone capabilities.

The Pentagon also has Replicator initiatives focused on developing and delivering thousands of all-domain attritable autonomous systems. Replicator's goal is to innovate with defense partners on uncrewed systems and integrate those technologies into the services. There is also a counter-drone element as well.

And the US military has its new Joint C-sUAS (Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft System) University, or JCU, which opened in late 2023 at Fort Sill in Oklahoma to teach troops how to combat hostile drones.

With the rise of drones, there has been greater interest in the development of countermeasures and anti-drone weapons. Counter-drone technology has been seen across the Ukraine war. Some is as low-tech as shotguns, while others are electronic warfare systems that can jam radio frequencies and disable drones.

Signal jamming and electronic warfare require constant innovation and adaptation for drone operators.

Drone careers

Militaries around the world are actively recruiting people to serve as combat drone operators. Ukraine's drone units have said technological, engineering, and even video gaming skills are useful for pilots, as they can quickly pick up the controls needed to operate a drone. Others have said musicians make good operators because of their fine motor skills.

Drone operators in the Army's special forces are working on how to make learning different types of drones easier, such as using similar controllers for multiple systems.

There are many drone operator positions in the US military. The Army is hiring tactical UAS operators for reconnaissance, surveillance, and targeting missions, and the Air Force is looking for trained remotely piloted aircraft pilots for systems like the MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-4 Global Hawk. The Marine Corps, too, is looking for small UAS operators. And the Navy has a relatively new Robotic Warfare Specialist position.

To take on one of these roles, an understanding of what capabilities a drone can bring to a fight and what countermeasures an operator will face is crucial.

• The UK's MOD said it used a radiowave-based weapon to shoot down a drone swarm.
• This would be a first for the cutting-edge weaponry in the UK.
• The RF-DEW disrupts drones with high-frequency radio waves and costs 13 cents a shot.

The British Army says it shot down a drone swarm using a radiowave-based directed energy weapon, in a first for the technology in the UK.

At an undisclosed weapons range in Wales, the Radiofrequency Directed Energy Weapon, or RF-DEW, tracked and took down the swarm during the trial, and worked with "near-instant effect," the Ministry of Defence said on Thursday.

RF-DEW has been shown in previous trials to be effective from over 1,000 yards.

But — as the largest such trial in the UK to date — this was the first time it took down a whole swarm of drones.

RF-DEW is being developed by a consortium led by French manufacturer Thales, which dubbed the tech "RapidDestroyer" during trials.

Thales also collaborated with both the French and British defense ministries on the MMCM naval mine countermeasures system that is being rolled out this year.

RF-DEW uses high-frequency radio waves to disrupt or damage electronic components inside drones, in what Thales described as a "hard-kill" mechanism. This is in contrast to existing systems that jam, or confuse drones, Thales said.

The technology is considered to be a low-cost partner to larger-scale, missile-based air defense systems, and costs just 13 cents a shot, according to the MOD.

The British Army conducted the trials against 100 small quadcopter drones, of two types: The Boresight Raider, a drone with swarming capabilities designed specifically for use in counter-drone tech trials, and the Parrot Anafi, a commercial off-the-shelf drone camera.

Sgt Mayers, the British officer who brought down the drones, said that the system was "quick to learn and easy to use."

"With improvements on range and power, which could come with further development, this would be a great asset to Layered Air Defence," Mayers added.

This comes against a backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has seen major advancements in the use of drones in combat.

Drone swarms — where groups of drones act autonomously or semi-autonomously and in concert with each other — are still in their infancy, with Ukrainian companies trialing swarms designed to resist Russian electronic warfare.

The RF-DEW trial is part of a push to increase new technologies in British defense capabilities. There are currently no plans to deploy the system in Ukraine, the MOD said.

In early April, the UK government announced a £400 million, or $530 million, fund for defense innovation, with 10% of the MOD's equipment budget to be ringfenced for new tech.

• There are so many drones in Ukraine that soldiers can easily find themselves confused about which side they belong to.
• An operator told BI that sometimes soldiers panic and jam everything.
• He said, "they're scared" and unsure if a drone flying at them is Russian or Ukrainian.

Some soldiers in Ukraine get so confused by all the drones in the sky that they panic and jam everything, a drone operator shared with Business Insider.

Dimko Zhluktenko, a drone operator with Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, told BI that telling drones apart is "a big problem" as there are so many drones, and many are "technologically very, very similar."

"Imagine yourself being an infantry guy," he said, explaining that "you are seeing an FPV drone flying at you, and you literally have no idea whether that is a Russian one that just came from behind or a Ukrainian."

"So there are a lot of cases happening when Ukrainian guys, the infantry, in their position, they have an EW system and they literally click all of the frequencies to be jammed because they're scared."

A confusing high-tech war

The Ukraine war is a high-tech fight involving a range of robotic technologies, but how that fight plays out "depends on human beings."

"There will always be an issue just because not everyone is an expert in technology, and it's hard," Zhluktenko said. "Let's say you have a guy who never had a smartphone sitting in the infantry in the trench, right? And he's supposed to understand that there is a friend or foe FPV drone flying at him and he has to put this specific frequency on the jammer. It's a mess."

So, instead of jamming a specific frequency, he just jams everything, hindering not just enemy drones but friendly ones as well. There have been reports of Ukrainian forces accidentally jamming their own drones.

Drones, especially small uncrewed aerial systems like the FPV quadcopter platforms, have been used more in Russia's invasion of Ukraine than in any other conflict in history, and an electronic warfare battle has emerged to defeat them.

Russia and Ukraine both try to jam each other's drones to break the connection between the operator and the drone.

Although some drones like fiber-optic systems or AI-driven platforms are largely immune to enemy jamming, most drones are connected to the operaters by radio frequencies that can be flooded with noise. As electronic warfare countermeasures have become more prolific, so have efforts to stop jamming efforts.

A cluttered battlespace

BI has seen combat footage from the war, and the confusion about drones is real, especially when there are dozens flying overhead. "Whose drone is that?" and "Is that one of ours?" are questions that have been shouted many times over the sounds of gunfire.

A US veteran fighting for Ukraine told BI last year that he could not tell which side a drone above him belonged to until it dropped a grenade. Then he had to start running.

Another Ukrainian drone operator, who spoke to BI on the condition of anonymity, said amid the confusion, infantry sometimes attempts to shoot down every drone they see.

Zhluktenko said some Russian drones can be easy to identify. Russia makes far fewer drone types than Ukraine, and he said that makes it easier for Ukraine to learn to identify those drones and how to defeat them.

But sometimes, when they're rapidly buzzing by overhead amid distractions like other enemy activity, it can be harder to sort out which one belongs to which side.

Zhluktenko said that with most drones, "they all sound the same, and they all look the same, really. And they have the same radio frequency signature and anything."

Both Ukraine and Russia use some of the same types of drones, like the Mavic drones from Chinese company DJI. And the radio frequencies get so crowded that operators sometimes unintentionally see other operators' drone feeds.

Operators try to avoid situations like mass jamming because that doesn't help, especially given the importance of still being able to fly their side's drones. Zhluktenko said that drone operators try to coordinate with other soldiers to tell them when they are going to fly along the front line or through areas where the Ukrainian soldiers are.

He said that they send activity notifcations using messaging apps like Signal, explaining "we have a group chat of coordinating small aviation in that specific sector."

A technological arms race

Russia and Ukraine are engaged in an arms race, striving for supremacy in drone technology and electronic warfare countermeasures.

Drones have been used to monitor and locate enemy troops and equipment, launch attacks on soldiers and weaponry, and destroy equipment worth millions of dollars at a fraction of the cost.

Ukraine's defense minister said in February that his country was winning the race and had become the world's largest producer of tactical and strategic drones.

Russia is working to increase its domestic production as well.

Ukraine is now making most of its own drones, and its defense industry is booming. That self-sustainability is key as the US under President Donald Trump has become less reliable.

Zhluktenko said he will keep fighting Russia, regardless of US support levels.

"I do not think that some people in the United States are able to affect whether I want to fight for my home or my family," he said. "At the same time, it's kind of sad that because I know a lot of great Americans, I'm proud to call them friends."

He said that he saw the brutal ways Ukrainians living in parts of the country occupied by Russia have been treated. "So I know that I just don't want this to happen to my home next."

• A24's new movie "Warfare" is based on the memories of a Navy SEAL team's skirmish in Iraq.
• The film, directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, recreates the operation to harrowing effect.
• Mendoza said he made the film to show it to an injured comrade, who doesn't remember the incident.

Ray Mendoza, a former US Navy SEAL, joined Hollywood on a specific mission — to recreate a failed military operation during the Iraq War for his comrade, Elliott Miller, who doesn't remember the incident.

In November 2006, Mendoza, a communications officer, and Miller, a sniper and medic, were part of an operation to infiltrate and surveil a neighborhood in Al Qaeda-controlled Ramadi, Iraq, but their team was unaware they'd set up a hideout next to a house full of insurgents.

Once Mendoza's team was discovered, there was a shootout, and their first attempt at evacuation was thwarted by an explosive that severely injured Miller and another SEAL. It took hours for the team to return safely. Due to his injuries, Miller lost a leg and suffered a brain injury that took his ability to speak and memory of the incident.

Mendoza told Business Insider that although he and the other SEALs had recounted the operation to Miller since that day, he wanted to show Miller what happened visually.

"If you don't have a memory of something, it could be often frustrating when everybody else remembers except you. It's only been in the literary form for him," Mendoza said.

Mendoza's mission is now complete with A24's new movie "Warfare," which is in theaters now. The film marks Mendoza's directorial debut alongside Oscar-nominated director Alex Garland, whom he worked with as the military advisor on his 2024 film "Civil War." Garland was so impressed by Mendoza at the end of working on "Civil War" that he asked Mendoza if they could make a war film based on a true story together.

Mendoza knew immediately that he had to tell Miller's story.

"I was ready not only from an experience standpoint, but I think emotionally being able to start to unpack a lot of these things, speaking with my friends, seeing how they felt about it if they were ready to unpack [it]," Mendoza said.

'Warfare' puts a new spin on the war film genre by basing the movie on peoples' memories

Though "Warfare" is based on real events, many of the details were murky as Mendoza and Garland spoke to people involved and third-party sources to create a timeline to base their movie around.

Because the event occurred almost two decades ago, many peoples' memories weren't exact.

"You have two guys involved in a machine gun fight and both of them say, 'I know someone else was up there with me, but I can't say who it was,'" Garland said. "More complex was when two people both remembered doing something in a first person way. So both said, 'I did this' and neither of them are lying."

By talking to everyone, Garland said he and Mendoza could piece together what happened like a "strange jigsaw puzzle."

Once the timeline was set, Garland and Mendoza said they laid down a "dogma-like" rule not to divert from it while filming except for minor actions not related to the overall plot.

"If an actor said, I'm motivated to do this, and that character didn't do it, then the actor wouldn't be allowed to do it," Garland said. "What you are seeing at all points is a representation of memories of people."

The film's opening scene, in which the SEALS gather to mosh to the music video for Eric Prydz's 2004 song "Call on Me" before heading out into the streets of Ramadi, was real, too.

"We didn't come up with that until maybe halfway through the movie," Mendoza said, adding that it was a good way to emphasize the characters' youthfulness and make it clear when the film is set.

"It was a ritual of ours."

Hollywood's rising stars were cast for their authenticity — not their internet boyfriend status

The "Warfare" cast is stuffed with up-and-coming actors from buzzy movies and TV shows, including "Stranger Things" star Joseph Quinn, "Heartstopper" heartthrob Kit Connor, and Marvel It Boy Will Poulter, among others.

While this may seem intentional, Garland told BI his buzzy cast was an incidental consequence of needing young yet established actors for the film.

"We didn't really have an audition process, so we were typically going to actors that we knew," Garland said. "We had a very tight schedule with very extreme demands on that tight schedule. And so a degree of experience on set, not just in the cast, but really, really heavily demonstrated as well in the crew, was super helpful for getting it done."

"Reservation Dogs" star D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, who plays Mendoza in the movie, said casting young actors contributed to the film's overall authenticity.

"These are very young guys who are on the front lines of wars," Woon-A-Tai said. "A very important thing that audiences take away is how young we all look, how young they really were that day, because we didn't Hollywoodize nothing."

"They were so young to have even been where they are, which is not something that before this I would've ever thought of a Navy SEAL," Cosmo Jarvis, who plays Miller, added.

While the film was specially made for Miller, Jarvis said one of his favorite moments was watching Mendoza come to terms with his own memories when they first walked through the set, which was a perfect recreation of the entire street where the skirmish in Iraq occurred.

"We were watching Ray watch where he was when he was a younger man," Jarvis said. "It was just quite a profound event to be walking down somebody else's memory lane."

Additional reporting by Caralynn Matassa.

"Warfare" is in theaters now.

• Ukrainian soldiers trick the Russians into attacking the wrong positions by building fake bunkers.
• They put effort into making it look real, even putting trash nearby, a drone operator told BI.
• Drone operators are targets for the Russians, so they operate underground on scarred battlefields.

Soldiers in Ukraine make fake bunkers with tree branches and more to trick Russian drone operators hunting for them. This is especially important for Ukraine's drone operators, which are often high-priority targets.

It has become standard operating procedure for soldiers to "make a few fake positions," Dimko Zhluktenko, a drone operator with Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, told Business Insider.

He said that soldiers build the fake positions in the tree line, designing them so that it all "looks real."

"You would leave some marks of human life in there, some trash or anything," Zhluktenko explained, adding that it makes Russian reconnaissance drone ops more likely to focus on the fake position.

When the fake bunker draws enemy fire, it's a telling warning for the Ukrainian soldiers. That "would be a signal for you to get the hell out of there as soon as you can," Zhluktenko said.

Another Ukrainian drone operator, who spoke to BI on the condition of anonymity, said that the fake bunkers are something that Ukrainian operators will try to do when they have enough personnel to pull it off.

Hiding from the eyes of the enemy

Ukrainian drone operators are high-priority targets for Russia's military. For that reason, they regularly to try to stay concealed from Russia's attack drones and its reconnaissance drones that provide targeting data for its soldiers and other weaponry, but they can't shy away from the front lines. They have to be close enough to fight, especially with impediments like electronic warfare covering parts of the battlefield and complicating operations.

The drone operator who requested anonymity said that the distance that an operator can hang back from the fighting depends on the terrain, but operators typically have to get as close as 0.9 miles from the front line.

With largely static lines in many places and intense fighting, operators often hide underground. A US veteran who is now fighting for Ukraine told BI last year that when operating from a town, most, if not all, of the buildings there are destroyed.

"Our somewhat urban environment is all rubble," they said.

The front lines can be so unmoving that positions get "hit enough by artillery, drones, mortars, and other types of ordinance. It just falls apart little by little by little over time. And then eventually, it gets to a point where it's not a defendable position," the veteran said.

For the Ukrainians, many of their positions get "whittled down to next to nothing" and become "impossible to defend."

Zhluktenko, who has operated both strike and reconnaissance drones, said that operators like him often use underground dugouts covered with trees and branches. They put their computers and equipment that is needed to operate the drones in here.

They then try to find places where they can put the drone antenna and launching mechanism without being spotted, making them "look like a tree or something."

Throughout the war in Ukraine, both the Russian and Ukrainian armies have engaged in deception, using decoys and setting up traps to fool the enemy. These have included cardboard weapons, inflatable tanks, fake trench traps filled with bombs, and more. These tactics have played critical roles in protecting troops and military equipment.

The other Ukrainian drone operator said that operators try to operate "constantly inside a bunker," but they said that operators will sometimes have to risk going outside, including to put their drone on the ground so it can take off.

He said it can be highly dangerous because if an operator is spotted, they immediately see Russian drones flying toward them. When Russia spots Ukraine's drone operators or their drone stations, those become "target number one," he explained.

He said that when Russia attacks the positions, it does not hold anything back. "It does not sacrifice anything," he said, and its response can include Russia's devastating glide bombs.

Drones of all types are being used more in Russia's invasion of Ukraine than in any other conflict in history, and the skies above the battlefield can be filled with drones to the point that soldiers have found themselves confused about which ones are theirs.

Both sides are racing to make more drones than the other and to out-develop each other's drones and counter-drone measures.

• There are so many drones over Ukraine that soldiers can be unsure which ones belong to each side.
• But a Ukrainian operator said Russia is innovating less, making some of its drones easier to beat.
• Ukraine has hundreds of companies working on drones, while Russia has a more centralized approach.

Russia is flying fewer types of drones than Ukraine, which is making them easier to recognize and defeat, a Ukrainian drone operator told Business Insider.

Dimko Zhluktenko, a drone operator with Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, told BI that when it comes to some Russian drone types, "it's very easy to identify them. They rarely make any changes to the design."

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has become a war of drone-filled skies.

Yet Ukraine is presenting a bigger variety of drone types to counter, aided by a huge domestic drone industry with hundreds of companies producing a vast range of different models and technologies.

Russia, in contrast, has focused on making bigger numbers of just a few models. While this has helped it produce them at scale, it also aids Ukrainian drone operators in identifying them and developing a sense of how to defeat them.

Hard to surprise

Zhluktenko said that Ukraine's more dispersed way of making drones means that "it is very hard for them to surprise us and it's very easy for us to surprise them."

He said Russia doesn't upgrade its drone designs very often, so it can be "very easy to identify friend/foe."

Russia's defense procurement is highly centralized, with soldiers getting material through state weapons manufacturers and Russian allies like Iran and North Korea.

Ukraine, in contrast, has hundreds of homegrown defense companies that work directly with soldiers to develop, test, and roll out gear, as well as volunteer networks that buy, alter, and develop new equipment for soldiers.

James Patton Rogers, a drone expert at the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute, told BI that Russia's more centralized process means that "if there's an error with a component part, then it will be an error that spreads across systems. If there's a loophole that allows you to hack, then it spreads across all systems and makes them vulnerable."

The different varieties of drones give Ukraine some advantages, but it still has a huge challenge.

An advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told NPR last month that Russia is a few months behind Ukraine when it comes to drone innovation, but has a far larger production capacity.

The production gap means Ukraine's soldiers are still using some drones bought from Western and Chinese companies. Those can be bought by the soldiers themselves, or by crowdfunding groups.

Zhluktenko said they are needed, but typically don't perform as well as Ukrainian-made drones designed specifically for this fight.

A booming drone industry

Ukraine is making most of its drones itself. Its military said more than 96% of the 1.5 million drones it bought last year were of Ukrainian origin, and that number is set to increase in 2025.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country would make 1.4 million drones in 2024, but it's not clear if that goal was met.

Most of the drones that Russia has fired at Ukraine have been Shaheds, a type of drone given to Russia by Iran and that Russia has started making itself.

Mauro Gilli, a senior researcher in military technology at ETH Zurich, told BI that Russia "does not have the type of production, both scale and diversity, that Ukraine has."

He also said that Ukraine has been the first in the world to develop some drone tech. Ukraine's pioneering drone types have included different naval drones, and drones that can fly over 1,800 miles.

A drone war

Drones remain key to Ukraine's fightback against Russia, especially given its smaller military and population.

Zhluktenko said that in his unit's area of the front, up to 80% of hits on Russian infantry and mechanized targets are being made by drones. Ukraine also uses them to identify and launch attacks, hit Russian ships and oil refineries, and in place of weaponry like artillery.

But while Russia's approach to different drone models makes it easier, defeating them is still a struggle.

Zhluktenko said it can still be "a big problem" to recognize whose drones are whose, because there are so many flying at any given time.

Another drone operator, who spoke to BI on the condition of anonymity, said there can be so many drones in the sky that infantry can be ordered to shoot down every one they see.

Even so, they said that Ukraine's overall tactics and equipment were constantly changing toward unmanned systems, and that drones were proving "decisive."

Ukraine will be hoping it can keep this advantage.

• Vladyslav Plak's school uses a simulator and practice ranges to teach Ukrainians to fight with drones.
• Only a third of people who try the course actually succeed in becoming a drone pilot, he says.
• Playing music and sewing are two skills that often tell Plak that a candidate is the right fit.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Vladyslav Plak, the CEO of Drone Fight Club, a Kyiv-based company that trains combat drone pilots for the Ukrainian military. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Not everyone can learn how to fly a drone to fight the Russians. But over the years of training pilots, I've figured out ways to tell if someone fits the role.

Since Russia invaded my country in 2022, we've worked with thousands of Ukrainians at Drone Fight Club. Only a third of the candidates who come to us make it all the way to certification. We don't just train men; about 15% of our students are women.

Our country's battle drone industry is still young. But we've already found that most people wanting to be combat drone pilots are not ready for the studying required. Our war environment changes quickly and is difficult to navigate, and we don't have enough time to work with people who are not completely suited for the job.

It's like "Top Gun." Be the best, or get out. At the zero line, you don't get a second chance. You are either alive, or you get killed.

Musicians make for great pilots

Being a good combat drone pilot is more complicated than just quick reflexes. It is about being able to make the right decision at the snap of a finger.

When we screen candidates, we tell them to watch two balls: one green and one red. Then, we tell them which ball to catch. If their reaction speed is slower than half a second, it is not fast enough. This is the top requirement for all pilots.

Fine motor skills are also very important because the drone controls are sensitive. If one of our candidates works with a hammer in their day job, they may be good at big movements, but it may be hard for them to be a drone pilot.

However, if they play the piano or a similar instrument, they will usually learn fast. Knowing how to play music is a strong sign you will be a successful drone pilot.

To be good with music, your brain has to be wired to think ahead. You have to multitask and plan your next steps while you are already using your fingers for finer movements.

When you know how to think ahead, your choices will be made with foresight. Those choices matter when you fly in battle.

Women who excel at sewing are also often great combat drone pilots. Here, it's the same. They need to think ahead to envision the bigger picture of what they want their clothing material to look like while simultaneously making decisions and using fine finger movements.

Generally, our good combat drone pilots are also people who can focus on the task at hand. If your mind is jumping between everything you see, you will lose your concentration.

From the simulator to the range

At Drone Fight Club, basic courses last a minimum of three weeks and have an exam each week. If you fail one exam, you are dropped from the class and advised to repeat the course.

Lessons at our school are split between our simulator, theory lessons, and indoor and outdoor practice ranges.

Our simulator, Drone Fight Simulator, is made to work with two pilots who can team up, and the scenarios are all based on the real missions that our guys fought.

The same rules that we fight with on the front lines are put in our simulator. When the soldiers come back, they tell us exactly what happened, and we update the simulator with their battles.

Just like with learning to fly a plane, you go through a pre-mission checklist, with things like checking the propellers and the data link. On the battlefield, if you forget one of these things, your mission can be a total failure.

After using the simulator, students also go onto our target ranges. Each is in Ukraine and is up to four kilometers (2.5 miles) long.

Our space is limited because of the war, but it's important that the range is large. In the war, our enemy can be 20 kilometers away. To effectively send a drone into combat, you have to understand what it means to fly long distances over different terrain, in different weather, and with jammers affecting your drone.

When this war ends, we might start to help outside nations and militaries with their drones. We will be glad to help friendly nations defend themselves.

It's not a matter of whether the war will end, but when it will end. I believe that this war must stop soon. It is costing too many lives.

• Maxar Intelligence announced its new Raptor software designed to help drones navigate without GPS.
• Raptor works by combining a drone's visuals from its camera with Maxar's 3D topographical data.
• GPS jamming continues to be a challenge for drones and other systems.

Drone operators on modern battlefields are facing intense electronic warfare, with enemy jamming making it outrageously difficult to fly with GPS.

Maxar, a leading satellite imagery company, has unveiled a new solution to this problem that bypasses GPS by having drones rely on what they see and three-dimensional global terrain data.

The company announced Raptor, a "first-of-its-kind" program, on Tuesday. It's designed for integration on any uncrewed aerial system; no additional hardware is required.

Rather than using GPS for navigation or location information, a drone using the Raptor system can use Maxar's data — over 90 million square kilometers of 3D terrain data mapped around the world — and details from its surroundings.

Peter Wilczynski, Maxar's chief product officer, said that this software ensures uncrewed systems "get the job done no matter how much GPS interference they face."

It's a novel approach specifically designed to counter the challenges of GPS jamming and electronic warfare, which can throw drones off-course. That has been especially prevalent in the Ukraine war and is becoming a top concern for future wars.

"The entire modern battle space is defined by GPS," Wilczynski explained. A wide range of military systems depend on it, but it may not be available in future fights.

US and other Western military officials have long expressed the need for alternative navigational systems in environments where GPS may be contested or completely denied.

Raptor about visual recognition and data matching. With the software, a drone operator can compare the drone's camera feed with Maxar's data in real time and figure out where the system is and where it needs to go.

Maxar has been focused on the shift toward mapping out a 3D representation of the world from two-dimensional photos and data. Raptor is a culmination of that project, Wilczynski said, as well as an answer to the countermeasures that have been taking out drone navigation in battle.

The Raptor system consists of three elements. The first part is the vision-based position software, which has an accuracy of less than 10 meters RMSE, or root mean square error, which measures the difference between the model's predictions and actual values. Next is the technology that syncs with the drone's video feed to Maxar's data. The final element is loaded on laptops, which the operators use to extract real-time coordinates from the video feed.

Geography is not static, especially in a wartime scenario, where battlefields can change quickly. Wilczynski said Maxar can update its data in about a day's time; then Raptor gets new maps representing any changes. It's similar to giving a drone operator a map right before an operation. The drone's visual feed can also track changes by comparing what it's seeing to the data.

And even with a bit of change or difference, or different qualities of video feeds depending on drone cameras, Raptor can help the operator match the 3D representation and video feed, sort of like "a puzzle or a lock and key," Wilcynzski said.

A drone's visual feed, too, can be severed or jammed. Raptor allows the drone to keep the map data locally, so it can still use that should the feed between the operator and drone be cut.

The 3D element, Wilcynzski said, is crucial. It gives the drone far more detailed topographical data than a 2D image. It's more resilient to nighttime operations, seasonal and weather changes, and altitudes. Raptor can operate as low as 120 meters.

Another element is the ability to operate multiple drones at once. Because Raptor uses a central geospatial source and doesn't require specific cameras on the drones, it is possible for different uncrewed vehicles to work together regardless of hardware or software differences.

Maxar's Raptor comes as countermeasures to rising drone warfare are rampant, especially in the Ukraine war. Both sides have developed ways to jam each other's drones. Alternative solutions, like fiber-optic drones and AI-driven drones that can't be jammed, have proven useful, though nothing is without complications.

• Ukraine says that Russian Shaheds are increasingly being found with Chinese antennae.
• The devices help the attack drones bypass electronic jamming and spoofing.
• Ukraine's air force says it means Kyiv must dramatically increase the number of jammers it uses.

Chinese-made antennae are helping Russia's exploding Shahed drones counter Ukraine's electronic warfare more effectively, per Ukrainian reports.

The devices are Controlled Reception Pattern Antennae, or CRPA, which are advanced systems that protect against signal jamming or spoofing — when a fake GPS signal is sent to a drone to make it go off-course.

Ukraine has reported since January that the Chinese antennae were being found in Shaheds. Vladyslav Vlasiuk, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said at the time that the devices were likely originally made for agriculture.

But a popular radio tech specialist in Ukraine, Sergey "Flash" Beskrestnov, said on Friday that a Shahed was found last week with the most advanced Chinese anti-jamming device yet.

He posted a photo of a circular dish with 16 elements, which are the parts of an antenna that handle signals. The devices found in January, in comparison, had eight elements.

An antenna with more elements typically helps drones deal with higher-powered jammers and more spoofing signals simultaneously.

"This is the first recorded instance of its use," Beskrestnov wrote.

Col. Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesperson for Ukraine's air force, addressed the tech changes during a broadcast by local channel ICTV on Monday.

"If there were previously eight channels, now there are 16, which means our electronic warfare systems must suppress them," he said in Ukrainian.

Ihnat said Ukraine would have to respond by surging the number of electronic warfare systems it's deploying.

"The more antennas the drone has, the more suppression systems we need. That is what the serious efforts of our military-industrial complex are focused on, along with assistance from partners and organizations," he said.

Iran-designed Shahed drones are not typically known to incorporate Chinese anti-jamming antennae. Russia has a 12-element military antenna, the Kometa, which Ukraine also said it found on a Shahed drone in February.

The appearance of Chinese devices on Russia's exploding drones could provide clues as to how Moscow's military-industrial base is dealing with Western sanctions that have sought to cut off the supply of vital electronic parts for its weapons development.

Ukraine says the sanctions haven't fully walled Russia off. In November, it said Moscow was deploying decoy drones fitted with Western-made components such as transceivers.

Meanwhile, Russia has been trying to scale up its own production of long-range attack drones modeled after the Shahed, which it's relied on heavily for strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure and air defenses. One version of these devices is the Geran-2, which is similar to the winged Shahed-136.

In July, Bloomberg reported that European officials said Russian and Chinese companies were partnering together to develop another such drone.

Russia's defense ministry did not respond to a comment request sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

• Ukrainian troops need heavy-duty nets to block enemy attack drones.
• They're getting over 1,000 tons from Denmark for free, thanks to Brexit and a lone gardener.
• He and other volunteers are trucking heavy-duty trawl nets stuck in harbors to the front lines.

Carl Futtrup is no military man. The 53-year-old gardener spends most days on mowers and tractors, tending to fields in a town on the western edge of Copenhagen, Denmark.

But Futtrup, like many Europeans, has kept a close eye on Ukraine since Russia's invasion in 2022 and donated gear to the front lines.

Before Christmas last year, he caught wind of an unusual request from Ukrainians in the trenches. They needed nets — thick ones strong enough to stop the munition-laden drones that have become the battlefield's leading killer. Soldiers were draping them across fortified positions and combat vehicles as a final defense, and Futtrup heard they were saving lives.

"They write to me that they want more because, without this, all other donations are worthless," Futtrup told Business Insider.

Thyborøn, a fishing village of some 2,000 people in Jutland, just happened to have 450 tons of those nets sitting unused at the harbor. These were trawling nets, made of nylon fibers up to four millimeters thick for hauling hundreds of fish at a time from the deep sea.

Futtrup found Thyborøn's fishermen on Facebook and asked if they were open to making a donation. They agreed.

Now, the nets are in Ukraine, being used to snag Russian drones similar to insects on flypaper. They're just the first tranche of what Futtrup and other volunteers hope will be a total of 2.1 million pounds of Danish commercial nets — left over from Brexit fishing disputes — lining Ukrainian fortifications.

As drones dominate the battlefield, defensive netting has become a hot commodity on the ground.

"They're really effective because the drones are still using propellers, and the nets catch the propellers," said Mykhaylo Ardashyn, a senior soldier in the Separate Artillery Brigade of Ukraine's National Guard. "Even after an explosion, the net will not be destroyed or burned completely, and some fibers can still catch other drones."

There are times when a snagged drone might even fail to explode, he told BI.

Ardashyn, who primarily helps his brigade procure supplies, said Futtrup's donated nets are being deployed on his units' section of the front line. The brigade is fighting near Pokrovsk.

Fishing nets aren't new to the war. Ukrainians have been using them in fortified positions since the full-scale invasion began, but primarily to provide camouflage.

Recently, Ardashyn said, there's been an increased demand for heavy-duty nets as troops realized they can be a reliable option to counter uncrewed aerial systems. The need is exacerbated by the growing use of fiber-optic drones, which can bypass electronic jamming and have to be blocked or disabled.

"We are talking about big nets," Ardashyn said. "Not those that people use by hand, but the really big ones, like from ships. The material is strong enough that it can handle a drone falling from the sky."

Some units have started draping thick nets on the tree lines along supply routes to hinder ambushes from skilled Russian drone pilots. Others have shrouded their fortified positions completely in netting.

Moscow's troops are using them too, said Federico Borsari, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis who studies drone warfare in Ukraine.

"The Russians are using nets to cover entire roads and protect their logistics from Ukrainian first-person view UAVs, with mixed results depending on the area," he told BI. But it's unlikely that either side will have enough time or resources to cover their entire rear with nets, he added.

Troops also use them to protect armored vehicles, relying on a combination of nets and metal frames — once mocked as "cope cages" — to lower the chances of direct impact from a drone. Even a foot or two distance from a vehicle's armored body can reduce a drone's explosive power.

"The amount of nets needed is increasing exponentially," Ardashyn said.

Brexit's loss, Ukraine's gain

Back in Denmark, Futtrup has been contacting other local harbors and secured another 600 tons of trawl nets to send to Ukraine via truck. He's been speaking with Ukrainian media, such as the Kyiv Post, trying to raise funds from volunteers and the Danish government for transportation.

It's a heavy expense for the gardener, with costs for the second shipment totaling about 90,000 euros. Futtrup estimates that each truck can carry up to 20 tons of nets, and each trip will cost about 3,000 euros, or $3,200. A typical trawl net is about 1,300 feet long.

The nets themselves are free. Carsten Bach, a parliament member of the Danish right-wing Liberal Alliance opposition party, told BI that most of the donated nets sat in storage for years after Brexit cut off British fishing waters from Danish fishermen.

"Some of the fishermen put a lot of value in these nets. It's quite a large investment for a small company or a single-person fisherman," said Bach, who is his party's spokesman on both defense and food. The fishing industry contributes about 0.75% of Denmark's GDP, but the country is the world's fifth largest exporter of fish products.

Bach said many fishermen chose to keep their nets, hoping that a new agreement with the UK could restore access to their old fishing spots.

However, Danish environmental laws require such equipment to be disposed of or recycled eventually. And Bach said fishermen typically must pay a large fee for this service.

The politician, who is helping Futtrup submit a financing proposal to the Danish government, said it's therefore likely these trawl nets won't be a renewable resource for Ukraine.

"There will not, in the future, be as large a volume of fishing equipment like this for disposal in Denmark," Bach said.

Danish nets won't last forever

Still, Futtrup's nets are supplying at least 13 units on the front lines, said Bernard Christensen, who runs the Swedish non-governmental organization Operation Change.

"This is our main vein for the foreseeable future," he told BI.

Christensen, a Swede living in Ukraine, has been helping brigades find sources for heavy-duty nets. One brigade typically requests about 50 to 80 tons of netting, and they can be difficult to procure locally, he said. Russian-controlled territory blocks much of Ukraine's access to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

A unit commander overseeing fortifications and mine-laying in the Donetsk direction told BI that his battalion needs about three truckloads, or roughly 60 tons of nets, a month.

"We have no local sources for these nets, they can only be obtained from abroad," said the commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of his work. His identity is known to BI.

He said it takes his men about three to four days to set up one truckload, often in miles-long "tunnels" of netting along roads to protect vehicles against drone strikes.

But even with volunteer donations, there's barely enough to go around.

"Many units desperately need these marine nets," he added.

That means Futtrup's nets will eventually run out, and Christensen must search elsewhere soon. Operation Change is looking to acquire nets from organizations cleaning up the western Swedish coast, he said.

Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at the Washington-based think tank Defense Priorities, told Business Insider that Ukraine's demand for fishing nets is an example of how the fighting there has democratized modern warfare.

"In the United States, military and political leaders are always searching for the next best weapon or military system, the one platform that will give the United States insurmountable advantages," she said. "But what the Ukraine war has shown is that while these types of high-tech solutions to military challenges have their place, low-tech and inexpensive alternatives can sometimes work just as well."

Investing billions of dollars into advanced platforms may not be enough to win a future war, since they might be defeated by a less capable adversary with a simple or cheap defense, she added.

"Fishing nets might not be the right response for the US military, but in this case and others, the Pentagon should spend more time exploring less advanced options rather than defaulting immediately to complex and bespoke designs," Kavanagh said.

Meanwhile, Futtrup said he's pouring his energy into securing the money to truck over the donated nets. He hopes to acquire 50,000 euros from Swedish and Danish government agencies.

"Ukraine is part of Europe, and the country is only 1,250 kilometers from Copenhagen," he said.

"As long as there is demand for fishing nets in Ukraine, I will send them, until there is no more to be found in Denmark either," he added.

Translation by Sofiia Meleshenko.