Subverted By Drones
Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine show the "unmanned revolution" in stark relief
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This is a riff on a Hoover Institution essay by Jacquelyn Schneider from June 2025
I’ve been banging this drum for a while now. For years, drones like the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper dominated the US vision of unmanned warfare. But that view of drone warfare—remote controlled from across the globe, exquisite, expensive—is out of date, and only recently has the DOD chosen to catch up. It is not expensive systems like the Predator or the Reaper that dominate the battlefield, but cheap quadcopters, mines, and missiles. The unmanned war playing out in Ukraine, Israel, or Iran is one of intense and rapid experimentation and innovation. These conflicts are changing our understanding of drones and warfare, and has forces the Pentagon to re-evaluate its beliefs about the future of the American way of war.
The drones that dominate the battlefield in Ukraine and Russia are primarily small short-range, commercially bought unmanned quadcopters with first-person view, using thermal or electro-optic cameras to give a controller on the ground a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield through a helmet or a digital display. These systems are useful for spotting targets, directing artillery or air support, and providing commanders with an understanding of the battlefield. Many pack small anti-tank or anti-personnel munitions capable of attacking targets miles away. Others carry remote mines that both sides have used to slow down ground troops trying to take territory. It was these small quadcopters that Ukraine used in Operation SPIDERWEB, where hundreds of them, secretly positioned in crates deep in Russia, took out many long-range Russian bombers.
Air power is, above all, a psychological weapon—and only short-sighted soldiers, too battle-minded, underrate the predominance of psychological factors in war.
B.H. Liddell Hart
Besides the small quadcopters, there are also heavier multi-rotor drones that feature greater payloads and ranges to carry larger munitions, ideal for bombing runs at night when drones are difficult to detect. Heavy drones also carry ammunition, food, and even medical supplies to entrenched troops under the cover of darkness. The Ukrainians call them Baba Yaga, a mythical witch who flies around in a mortar and pestle, leaving havoc in her wake.
Probably the closest systems to the American MQ-1 or MQ-9 are longer-range ISR drones with coverage beyond eighteen miles of the front line, like the Russian Orlan-10 or 30, Zala 416, and the SuperCam. Ukraine operates similar systems, including the Shark. While these are probably the closest analogues to the American MQ-1, MQ-9, or Global Hawk aircraft—the Russian and Ukrainian systems are much smaller, operate at lower altitudes, and have far less range than the American unmanned aerial vehicles. Also, the Ukrainian and Russian versions are much, much cheaper, and embedded with troops instead of being operated from the other side of the world.
Cheaper, Better, Deadlier
As these drones get bigger and extend their range, the definitions blur. Some are called drone-missiles, one-way drones, kamikaze drones, and remotely controlled missiles, with longer range than quadcopters. These have larger payloads, operate at higher altitudes, and late-stage seeker heads. These still have a shorter range and smaller payloads than cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and their hypersonic cousins.
When the war started, Ukraine had few more conventional missiles in its inventory and depended on resupply from NATO—often with strings on what targets these missiles could hit. But Ukraine is now producing her own cruise missiles and long-range drones with ranges of up to six hundred miles. The Ukrainians have also been very innovative in launching these systems, building their own trucks, adapting US and European launchers, and jury-rigging Western missiles to fire from Russian-made fighters.
While Ukraine has had to play catch-up, adapting their Soviet arsenal with European and homegrown technology, the Russians started the war with one of the world’s largest arsenals of long-range drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. Russia may run through her arsenal at a remarkable pace, but she is also revitalizing its weapons stores with adaptations to missile technology and new weapons from North Korea and Iran. These Russian missiles are becoming more precise and faster, all while Russia adapts its aging unmanned nuclear force to the conventional war with Ukraine.
Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
John Wooden
There is a tit-for-tat competition between remote-controlled drones, which depend on wireless channels to both control and receive information from the systems; electronic warfare systems target those channels. The success of electronic warfare has led militaries to revert to fiber-optic cable to negate jamming or interception of short-range drones, an echo of the wire guidance used for many decades.
In Ukraine, both sides use drones for tactical and long-range reconnaissance, air defense, mining and counter-mining, logistics, and close-range and long-range strikes. They have changed ground warfare by making it closer, less platform-focused, and slower—all the opposite of the wars of maneuver envisioned by nearly every military since 1918. They've also made war bloodier and more lethal by using guided munitions to target individuals on the battlefield, in stark contrast with visions of unmanned warfare negating human risk on the battlefield. The Ukraine battlefield looks more like the Western Front in living color all the time.
The Economic Arms Race
Drone technologies show how much manned and unmanned stuff any military needs to fight these modern wars, and how expensive even cheap drones can be. To keep up with this quantity of drones, missiles, and mines, countries must build domestic industries, carve out international and local supply lines, and build economies that can handle the long-term cost of sustaining these inventories. As a defense analyst explained in a recent interview, this is a problem of both bottom-up innovation and top-down investment in production:
They have to be cheap enough to be procured in large numbers because drones by both sides are produced. Now, at the range of maybe 1.5 million per year, but more than that, you’re essentially producing drones as you would produce artillery ammo…You have to come up with munitions for them, too. So, to some extent, you also have a real evolution in munitions. It’s still a challenge because when things kind of branch very quickly, it takes other supporting parts of the defense industrial chain a while to catch up…They have to be modified pretty quickly so you can evolve them fast. They have to be manufactured fairly quickly as well…There's always, for lack of a better term, a Hegelian dialectic between…the few, expensive, and complex versus the many simple systems. And this war had given much greater emphasis towards the many and the simple and the attritable and replaceable.
Michael Kofman
Other Battlefield Laboratories
North Korea, Israel, Iran, and even the Houthis in Yemen are leaning into missiles and drones. Iran built its missile and drone technologies on the assumption that the most important attribute of unmanned systems isn’t their range, precision, or lethality, but their cost. Versions of the Shahad drone cost between $20,000 and $50,000, a bargain compared to US cruise missiles like the ALCM or air- to-air missiles like the AMRAAM that cost over $1 million each. And Iran is happy to sell these weapons to anyone with money—Russia, Hamas, North Korea or the Houthis.
Drones played a pivotal role in Israel’s opening attack on Iranian leadership and nuclear sites. Like Ukraine, Israel smuggled small drones into Iran, and these systems launched a first wave of attack against Iranian air defenses, allowing larger Israeli manned fighter and drone strike packages to knock out Iran’s surface-to-air missiles. Iran launched drones and missiles at Israel, desperately trying to signal will and capability while playing a dangerous game of escalation.
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
Julius Caesar
In the battle of expensive missiles, radar, and interceptors versus Iran’s cheap drone and missile volleys, so far quality seems to win over quantity, but it won’t forever. When Iran launched a large volley of missiles and drones at Israel in 2024, it cost Israel about $1.35 billion to defend against. Israel nor the US can be sure they can manufacture enough missiles fast enough to replenish their arsenals, and whether their budgets can afford to replenish systems at a high rate of use. The longer the conflict, the more cost becomes important in deciding who can keep fighting long enough to win.
Other Lessons
Swarms of Al-enabled drones are still far from a reality. Humans still pilot almost all the drones. Unmanned technologies need people to make them work. You can’t just invent, produce, and adapt the technologies; you also need to train operators and maintainers. Without crews, they’re just plastic and metal things.
Unmanned weapons haven’t produced victory on their own. Early in the precision-guided munitions revolution, theorists preached wars were winnable at great distances with cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs and minimal casualties, which sounds suspiciously like the between-the-wars claims about air warfare. Unmanned weapons have yet to do much more than contribute to grueling wars of attrition as the body counts mount.
One of the most obvious lessons of history is that the preservation of States and civilization lies in the ability to allow for changed conditions.
P.R.C. Groves
Drones on the Ukraine, Russia, Iran, and Israel battlefields show the extraordinary flexibility that these systems provide to organizations willing and capable to experiment, adapt, and innovate, and the US Department of Defense is not such an organization. The American lag in the drone revolution is not just a question of capacity—not enough money invested in the companies or systems that make these new types of drones—but one of will, despite recent announcements of intent to expand drone capability that will no doubt die in committees and budget meetings. The US must break the inertia of the Pentagon’s decades-long love affair with expensive systems and the byzantine complexity of their procurement system with its routine cost overruns, me-too add-ons to satisfy politicians, and eternal delays by committees deciding on program minutia to make someone’s donor or brother-in-law happy back home.
In sum, the Department of Defense must stop thinking only about the wars it wants to fight and is ready for and get ready for the wars it will fight and is not ready for.
The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries
Historians rarely have to worry about innovation on the battlefield other than to report on it, but Curtis and Maria had to concern themselves with an evolving, hand-written record by an obscure but important historical figure who innovated while he fought for survival.
And Finally...
On 15 November:
1940: The Coventry Blitz in central England ends. While it wasn’t the first Luftwaffe raid on the factory city, the 500-plus German planes that dropped bombs for ten hours, losing only one bomber to anti-aircraft fire, devastated the city and killed over five hundred people, even though factory production resumed in about three months.
1966: Gemini XII splashes down in the west central Atlantic Ocean after just a little under four days in space. The 10th crewed Gemini mission, commanded by James A. Lovell, was the last of the program, completing 59 orbits and three spacewalks.
And today is NATIONAL CLEAN OUT YOUR REFRIGERATOR DAY, if for no other reason that it’s, well, pretty nasty in there, ya gotta admit.
The cost assymetry you higlighted is the Pentagon's worst nightmre. When a $20,000 Shahad can force a $1.35 billion defensive response, the economic calculus of warfare fundmentally shifts. The transition from exquisite Predators to comercial quadcopters represents more than technology change, it's a complete restructring of military thinking that challenges every procurement assumption made over the past three decades.