Drones in Ukraine: How Sophisticated are Russian Drones? Can They Rival the US in Manned-Unmanned Teaming?

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

A lot of the specifics are understandably not available when it comes to what might be learned about the Russian military tactics and their use of drones for natural and understanding operational security issues. 

Russian Drones

One of the things senior US military leaders did say was that their use of drones in the 2014 incursion of Ukraine and Crimea was quite significant and did seem to get attention, as did their use of EW which some are surprised. 

The battlefield hasn’t seen much of at least the extent that’s been detected or seeing – Russians are known to have a sophisticated electronic warfare attack possibility. As far as what might be needed to defend against this one of the things that’s taken place, there’s been a decentralized command and control among the Ukrainians. It’s very smart. 

If you don’t have a centralized hub, that’s a target that you can take out. Not only are you not emitting signature that’s detectable to an enemy. But you’re also were targets to hit you have a built in redundancy. Now, to answer your question about drones, that technology not only exists to a large degree, but it’s also proliferating globally, in a very substantial way. 

AI and algorithms enable a measure of autonomy so that unmanned systems can discern sensor information, bounce it against an existing database use AI to make an immediate determination as to what the optimal shooter or the optimal countermeasure might be. 

So there are sensor detection, there’s data processing, much of which increasingly happens at the point of collection, instead of needing to come back to a central hub, or database of some kind. That is a phenomenon that is a paradigm changing type of technology, because it massively truncates what they call sensor to shooter time, the Army is having massive breakthroughs with this, the Navy’s working on it with Project overmatch. Sure enough, the Air Force is making progress. 

It’s not clear how potential adversaries – how far along are they? And a lot of that is unknown. You can read what the Russians will say in the paper about their drones. They do have a handful of new drones and they do tout them as being sophisticated.