Begun, the Drone Wars Have

Of course someone already worked up this graphic and posted it on social media.

Donald Trump recently had a meeting with Vladimir Putin in which he fawned over Putin and basked in the glow of the former KGB recruiter’s calculated flattery—more evidence, if we needed it, that on the world stage, Trump is an easily manipulated rube. Or rather, he is easily manipulated by the kind of person he admires and wants to emulate: the dictatorial “strongman.”

Fortunately, European leaders rallied in an attempt to neutralize the effects of this summit. Europeans are starting to figure this out, at least a little, and they realized that a bunch of them had to go to Washington, DC, to provide Volodymyr Zelensky with a kind of diplomatic bodyguard and present Trump with a show of strength.

Tom Nichols describes the result.

Trump’s attempt to spin the Anchorage meeting, however, did not sway Zelensky or several European leaders, who in an extraordinary show of diplomatic concern all rushed to Washington two days after Trump’s return. In contrast to Zelensky’s previous visit to the White House, when he arrived alone to be ambushed and insulted to his face by Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance, this time the Ukrainian president came to town accompanied by the leaders of five NATO nations, along with the NATO secretary general and the president of the European Commission. The Alaska summit was never a good idea, especially without some signal from Putin that he was actually ready to stop the killing, but the response from European leaders is the clearest evidence yet that Trump was on a path to selling out Ukraine to the Kremlin.

Fortunately, someone at today’s meeting appears to have talked Trump out of the idea of trading land for a temporary peace, an especially encouraging change because the White House already had a map of Ukraine in the room that seemed to be color coded almost perfectly in line with Putin’s wishes. When the group discussion concluded, Trump called Putin and then issued a somewhat scrambled statement on Truth Social, in which he said that he had gained the Russian dictator’s assent for a bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelensky.

In other words, there was no clear result. Tom provides this arch conclusion: “Alaska is still part of the United States, America is still in NATO, and Kyiv remains free—and in this second Trump presidency, perhaps that counts as a good-enough day.”

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The Drone Wars

This means that we remain in the status quo ante, and what happens on the battlefield will be more important.

Just before the meeting in Alaska, there was news that Russia had made a small breakthrough on the frontlines in Ukraine’s east. The breakthrough was quickly suppressed, and apparently 800 Russian troops are now encircled by the Ukrainians in the breakthrough area. Probably the most interesting line in that report is the key role played by “Ukraine’s highly mobile drone detachments.”

This is one of the big stories of the past year or so of the Ukraine war. Drones have gone from one component of war to a dominant element—certainly the distinctive feature of the Ukraine war and a herald of what future wars will look like.

As Yoda might have said: Begun, the drone wars have.

This is part of the reason a British observer went to Ukraine earlier this year and found them strangely confident.

This confidence stems from the country’s growing military self-sufficiency. Ukraine’s drone industry is impressive in term of technological edge, adaptability, mass and speed. In production of drones and artillery, Ukraine is strengthening by the day. It has no reason to envy many of its European neighbors, and much to teach them.

Others are speculating that drones may have “made traditional warfare obsolete.”

Drones are not only effective but relatively easy to obtain. Ukraine can make drones in tiny machine shops, and it has been producing them each year by the hundreds of thousands or even millions. For example, one such shop in Kyiv, making use of the services of people such as a former expert cross-stitcher who has decided to put her skills to work to defend her country, produces over 1,000 drones per year. And there are more than a dozen such shops in just that city alone. Overwhelmingly, drones are fabricated from commercially available hardware and open-source software. And classes on drone-making are available online.

Thus, if drones have made tanks and troop aggregations impossible, they may have made the stalemate essentially permanent, and they possibly can continue to do so without a whole lot of fancy and expensive Western aid.

I’ve been meaning to write about this, because I was turned on to this issue earlier this year by a young new writer who just posted an interesting brief overview of how drones are being used in warfare, including Ukraine’s “Operation Spider’s Web,” which used drones to mount an attack on Russia’s strategic bombers as far away as Siberia. This is a brave new world in which great powers have to factor into their strategic nuclear deterrent their ability to defend against tiny little drones.

You might recognize the name of this young writer: Walter Tracinski. This is my oldest son, who is just headed off to college this week, where he will be studying history with an emphasis on military and diplomatic history. But he’s also being lured into the family business, so to speak, and he has started a Substack called Stories of Freedom.

See his introductory post, which explains the name.

Welcome to Stories of Freedom!

His Substack is free, but he has also set up a GoFundMe to defray college expenses.

Basically, I have raised a defense policy geek. As you will see, the origins of this go back to when we has very young, but it has been magnified by the fact that his formative years have coincided with the Ukraine War.

So I was alerted to the full extent of how thoroughly drones have transformed war when I was proofreading the senior thesis he wrote for high school. (And yes, we sent him to the kind of school where you write a senior thesis.) He has posted this to his Substack, and it’s a good overview of the war so far and its lessons. I think you will find that the apple has not fallen far from the tree.

Here’s what Walter had to say about drones on the front lines.

[A]s drones have become more prevalent and artillery fire more targeted, it has become more dangerous to fight in these comparatively open trenches. Through 2024 there has been an evolution away from trenches and towards underground positions. By the end of 2024, the frontline ceased to resemble the long static trench lines of 1917 and 2023. The open trench lines, such as those Richard Pendlebury of the Daily Mail saw in his visits to Ukraine, provide excellent cover against indirect fire, tank assaults, and most other artillery fire. But a drone can easily target soldiers in that trench, turning it from a vital protection to a possibly deadly trap. To avoid this, soldiers instead dig their positions farther underground. The front line has now become primarily small fighting positions spread out across a region, with soldiers in dugouts farther underground, or in basements when available.

Soldiers then only come up a few at a time to take their fighting positions and move around trying to remain as hidden as possible, fearful of watching drones.

Being underground avoids the risks of drone strikes on positions, as long as soldiers properly defend the entrances to their dugouts. These positions are also safe from most artillery and can only effectively be struck by large and extraordinarily expensive bombs, which it would be impractical to use on a small squad.

Ukrainian tactical adaptation has allowed them to nullify many of Russia’s advantages in manpower and equipment. Much of this adaptation has been fueled from the ground up, as small units find problems and begin fixing them, and then these changes move up the chain of command until the entire army has adapted. It has allowed Ukraine to remain nimble in the face of Russian quantitative advantages.

Some of this has changed even in the past few months.

But here’s the part that really hits home.

Adopting drones poses a problem for NATO militaries. The current infrastructure for weapon procurement is tailored to a slow, cautious, bureaucratic process that prioritizes large and expensive systems that sometimes take a decade to be developed. In Ukraine, drone systems must be developed much faster. New systems are sometimes developed and implemented in weeks and become obsolete in months.

The greatest enemy of military victory is incompetent or malicious political leadership, under which the US now suffers. The second-greatest enemy, as usual, is stifling bureaucratic inertia.

But the drone wars have begun, whether we’re prepared for it or not.

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