The Drone Wars
Top Stories of the Year: #3
I’m counting down the top stories of 2025 a few weeks early this year, while I run a Thanksgiving Sale—well, post-Thanksgiving, by now. This sale ends Sunday, so move on it.
You can also give a gift subscription.
Or donate to support The Tracinski Letter.
And of course, buy my new book, Dictator From Day One, to get ahead of the Christmas rush.
The real top stories of 2025 are the ones in my book, which describes the five prongs of Donald Trump’s attempt to seize absolute power over the American political system.
He has so far received the most effective opposition in the judicial system, which is why he is working hard to subvert it. That is the topic of one of the chapters of my book, where I look at Trump’s efforts to twist the courts and make them subservient.
I linked recently to one example out of many of Republican-appointed federal judges who have stood up for the rule of law. The problem is that this bipartisan support for the rule of law tends to hit a wall. Here’s how I put it in my book.
This is another hallmark of Supreme Court rulings under Chief Justice John Roberts. Time after time, a federal judge issues a straightforward ruling blocking a clear overreach of executive power. This ruling is regarded as obvious by most federal judges, liberals and conservatives alike, including many Trump appointees. But then the case reaches the highest court, where the political imperative of supporting a Republican president suddenly takes precedence over the laws and the Constitution.
We just saw a similar pattern with the Supreme Court’s suspension of a district court ruling that found the mid-decade Texas congressional redistricting to be a blatant racial gerrymander—another sensible ruling that went down in a nakedly partisan vote in the Supreme Court. Note the complaint in the dissent from Justices Sotomayor and Jackson: “Today’s order disrespects the work of a District Court that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge—that put aside every consideration except getting the issue before it right.”
The next big case where we’re waiting to see where the Supreme Court comes down is a lawsuit trying to block Trump’s runaway power to set tariffs without Congress. A lot of big companies seem to have high hopes that the tariffs will be struck down, and despite refusing to stick their necks out early on, they are now lining up to get refunds.
Let’s hope they’re right. The constitutional “originalism” of the Supreme Court’s conservatives has proven to be something of a sick joke, and if they reverse the lower courts on this issue, they will have euthanized another big chunk of the Constitution.
Again, buy the book.
Now to #3 in my countdown of the top five other stories of 2025.
The Great Realignment
The next big story is the continued survival of America’s allies, despite the best efforts of the man in what’s left of the White House.
I mostly covered this in the form of Ukraine’s persistence in spite of Trump’s open hostility, as displayed in the shameful ambush of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in March, which I heralded as the sign of a Great Realignment.
The big story here is an overall geopolitical realignment in which the US is allied with—well, we’re allied with the bad guys now.
Don’t just take my word for it. Here is Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”
Trump’s vision aligns with the Russian vision, with Vladimir Putin’s vision. And this is not bluster. This is the cold, hard reality.
We can see reflections of this in the way Trump lackey Kash Patel has been wrecking the FBI’s foreign intelligence-gathering capacity and undermining the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing relationship with our allies. And there has been a legislative effort to transfer counterintelligence activities to the control of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a longtime Kremlin sympathizer. The foxes are in charge of the henhouse.
We also saw this in the new pro-Kremlin peace plan loudly announced in mid-November, presented with an ultimatum that Zelensky must accept it by Thanksgiving. You might have noticed that we are well past Thanksgiving now, and Zelensky has done no such thing. Even before Thanksgiving, Trump dropped the deadline and soft-pedaled the proposal: “That was not a plan. It was a concept.” Or maybe it was concepts of a plan.
The plan failed because it was largely dictated by Russia.
The U.S.-backed 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, which became public last week, drew from a Russian-authored paper submitted to the Trump administration in October, according to three sources familiar with the matter….
The paper, a non-official communication known in diplomatic parlance as a “non-paper,” contained language that the Russian government had previously put forward at the negotiating table, including concessions that Ukraine had rejected such as ceding a significant chunk of its territory in the east.
So this was always just a Russian fantasy, laundered as a US demand. And Steve Witkoff, Trump’s favored envoy, was caught coaching the Russians on how to flatter Trump and sell the deal to him.
All of this meant that the deal was dead on arrival in Europe.
The first and foundational lie Trump sold to the American people is that he is a great deal-maker. He is only a great self-promoter. For example, see an overview of one of Trump’s fake trade deals, which are all PR photo ops with no enforceable promises on either side. That’s why after promising to negotiate a deal to end the Ukraine war immediately, he has dithered around for a year, neither cutting Ukraine off completely nor putting any significant pressure on Vladimir Putin. Trump has, in effect, been irrelevant.
Begun, the Drone Wars Have
But all of this assumes that Ukraine and Europe have the choice to say no to Trump and Russia, that they are not trying to stave off an inevitable defeat. Then again, the “inevitable” defeat of Ukraine has been the central Russian talking point since they invaded Ukraine, even as it is the Russians who have suffered one catastrophic loss after another.
The biggest news this year is that Ukraine has been gaining some measure of independence from US support. It is not total. Ukraine still needs key things from the US, particularly the sharing of intelligence such as real-time satellite images monitoring the battlefield.
But the battlefield has become less dependent on tanks, artillery, air support, and the kind of big, expensive weapons systems that only the US can provide. All of those would help, mind you, and they would help a lot. But in the meantime, Ukrainian innovation has been transforming the nature of 21st Century warfare with the increased use of remotely controlled drones, an area where Ukraine now has a massive production capacity and where they are way ahead of us in the development of technology and tactics.
I mentioned this in the middle of this year.
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 then went on to quote the research posted by my oder son on his blog.
[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.
But of course, the war is rapidly and constantly evolving. Here is a reasonably good recent update from the Institute for the Study of War.
The Kremlin is hyping the importance of the capture of Pokrovsk in order to portray Russia’s battlefield advances as inevitable. That sense of inevitability is being echoed by some members of President Donald Trump’s negotiating team trying to pull together a peace proposal for the Ukraine war.
But nothing is inevitable. In reality, Russia has paid a heavy price for its relentless campaigning in Donetsk. Over the past 20 months, Russian forces have advanced only about 25 miles from Avdiivka to Pokrovsk. Russian forces lost at least five divisions’ worth of armored vehicles and tanks (more than 1,000 armored vehicles and over 500 tanks) in the Pokrovsk area since beginning offensive operations to seize Avdiivka in October 2023 through the summer of 2024.
Since then, Russian forces have changed their tactics to deprioritize mechanized assaults in favor of small unit infantry infiltration missions, likely to preserve vehicles that have low survivability against Ukraine’s drones. This switch has enabled Russian forces to continue advances at literal footpace and at high losses.
In just the Pokrovsk area, Russian forces gained only about 12 square miles in October this year. During the same period, they reportedly lost 25,000 troops.
Part of the story here is that the Russians are able to continue the war simply through their sheer indifference to human life, including the lives of their own troops. In a civilized country, an offensive that claims so many lives for so little would be unacceptable.
The other part of the story is that the Russians have been adapting their tactics to respond to Ukraine’s advantages, which will require Ukraine to adapt further in response. This is the future of warfare that is being developed, day by day, month by month, in Ukraine.
America Last
The most important thing for Americans is that this is all being done mostly without us and despite us.
Trump campaigned on the motto of “American First,” but he has instituted an actual policy of America Last. This fact was underscored recently when the ex-parrot site introduced a new feature indicating the geographic locations of social media accounts. The results were revealing.
The account MAGANationX, with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”, is actually operated from eastern Europe, according to the Daily Beast. Another popular profile, IvankaNews, an Ivanka Trump fan account with about 1 million followers that frequently posts about illegal immigration, Islam and support for Trump, was revealed to be based in Nigeria.
Another user also uncovered several additional cases. Dark Maga, a smaller account with roughly 15,000 followers, is run from Thailand. MAGA Scope, which has more than 51,000 followers, operates out of Nigeria, while MAGA Beacon is based in south Asia.
Users on Reddit also joined the exposé effort, posting examples of accounts that appeared to misrepresent their origins. One Reddit user posted a screenshot of a woman who claimed to live in Texas but instead appeared to be located in Russia; as of Sunday, the user named in the post appeared to have a US location, though X had flagged the possible use of a VPN, which allows users to mask their real location. Many in the comments posted other examples they found.
The US is being brought to a state of helpless subservience to foreign dictatorships.
That’s why one of the most important things I wrote this year was a call for liberal democracies in Europe to step up and take America’s place.
To my friends in Europe, I want to extend an apology—and an urgent warning.
I am profoundly sorry that Americans are failing you in this dangerous and difficult time, after you have stood with us over so many years. I didn’t vote for this, I didn’t want it, I fought against it. But I am an American, and this is my country’s choice and its policy—and I am heartily ashamed of it.
Now the warning: Europe needs to become one of the great powers of the world, and do it fast—or you will get carved up by them….
Yet it is absurd to think of Europe as a nonentity with no standing in the world. The countries of Europe, excluding Russia, represent 700 million people. Europe is composed of advanced and developed societies, great centers of science and culture—and taken all together, it is the world’s third-largest economy, on a par with the US and China. Europe also makes up a large part of NATO, the world’s most powerful military force. Even without the US, you are more than a match for poor, backward, depleted Russia—and the UK and France have their own nuclear forces, which provide a deterrent against other nuclear powers….
Liberal democracy is a superpower that can make a country, or a continent, great. The world needs to have at least one such liberal democratic power, to a serve as a refuge, a protector, and an example for the rest of the world. If it is not going to be America—for who knows how long—then it had better be Europe
Dear Europe: Become a Great Power—or Get Carved Up by Them
To my friends in Europe, I want to extend an apology—and an urgent warning.
Europeans are only slowly and reluctantly coming around to this view, and the interesting questions is whether they can step up to fill the gap, or whether America will come back to its senses in enough time.
Take advantage of the last days of the sale. Subscribe now at 10% Off.
Give a gift subscription.
Or donate to support The Tracinski Letter.
And last but not least, buy my book.