As Russia and Ukraine both turn to drones for long-range strikes, their strategies reveal contrasting approaches: Russia’s reliance on Shahed drones overwhelms Ukrainian defenses, while Ukraine’s innovative kamikaze drone raids target critical infrastructure deep inside Russia, showcasing the evolving future of unmanned warfare.

Aided by the interruption of U.S. air defense missile deliveries, the winter of 2023-2024 saw Russian strategic raids using cruise, ballistic and hypersonic missiles as well as Iranian Shahed-136 drones, broadly inflicting critical damage to Ukraine’s economy and knocking out 50% of Ukraine’s heating and electrical capacity.

Shahed drones directly inflicted a fraction of that total damage, as Ukrainian air defenses usually shoot down between 70 to 100%. But this doesn’t mean Shahed drones are wholly ineffective.

First, Shaheds are deployed synchronously in missile-attack raids to overwhelm and confuse Ukrainian air defenses. This approach was seen in a mass Iranian drone and missile attack on Israel this April.

Second, unlike missiles, Russia can more sustainably expend hundreds of Shaheds monthly to keep Ukrainian air defenses on constant alert and wear down civilians. Even when not landing hits, the continual state of siege impacts the economy and encourages more Ukrainians to leave the country.

Finally, every surface-to-air missile costing hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars expended to kill a Shahed is a favorable exchange for Russia, hastening depletion of Ukraine’s air defense inventory. Ukraine has focused on deploying cheaper, shorter-range methods to counter Shaheds, including self-propelled anti-aircraft guns and even aerial shootdown by tail/door gunners on helicopters or light airplanes. But this distributed force isn’t cheap either, and Shaheds still can inflict much damage if allowed to get through. So, some valuable missiles are still expended against them.

GERAN-2: RUSSIA’S EVOLVED IRANIAN DRONE WANTS TO ACCESS 4G NETWORKS

Last year, Russia stood up a Shahed drone factory in the Tatar-minority Alabuga Special Economic Zone following tech transfers from Iran. The factory is adjacent to a technical college that supplies high-school-age students compelled to work the production line as “interns” if they want to graduate.

The factory supposedly targets monthly production of 1,500 Shahed drones (designated Geran-2s in Russian service), but available evidence suggests it’s churning out roughly 500 monthly—still plenty to catapult toward Ukraine.

Though built for attrition, Russia would still like to improve the penetration rate of Shaheds. Already, its jam-resistant Kometa-M navigation system has reduced losses to electronic warfare (EW). This winter, Russia also deployed a number of faster, rocket-powered Shahed-238s. But their use was not continued. An export catalog listing the unit price as $1.4 million apiece perhaps hints that greatly increased costs overwhelm added penetration value.

More affordably, some Shaheds have received black, radar absorbent paint to improve stealth during night attacks. Some Shahed wrecks are found with onboard cameras, perhaps to generate reconnaissance or damage assessment imagery prior to destruction. Russia is also developing more lethal warheads, including thermobaric and incendiary devices, and oversized conventional warheads useable for shorter-range strikes.

But most intriguingly, some Shahed wrecks show 4G cell modems taped onto the hull, allowing the drones to employ Ukraine’s phone network—potentially for re-targeting midflight, to aid with navigation and targeting accuracy when affected by GNSS denial. However, late in 2023, Ukraine deployed a secrecy-shrouded national level satellite navigation spoofing system, called Pokrova, to mislead drones and cruise missiles. Ukraine’s Air Force said it was “working effectively…to protect critical infrastructure.” Prokrova may be behind a September 7 incident when six attacking Shahed drones rerouted into Belarussian airspace, necessitating destruction by jet fighters.

Ukraine has particularly sought to target Russia’s drone industry through sabotage and long-range drone strikes. One likely sabotage incident—an explosion at the ZOMZ company manufacturing Lancet optics—may account for an observed hiccup in monthly Lancet usage. In another incident, Ukraine converted an A-22 Aeorprakt ultra-light microplane into a drone that flew 600 miles toward the Alabuga Shahed factory, striking the adjoining student dormitory, injuring six. In August, a Neptune cruise missile struck a Shahed depot and training facility in Krasnodar.

UKRAINE’S LONG-DISTANCE STRIKES IN RUSSIA

In July, Ukraine allegedly launched more long-range kamikaze drones (524) than Russia did against Ukraine (426) for the first time. Ukraine’s campaign is not nearly as destructive, however, as long-range drones are the only strike weapon, not complements to more effective missiles. Nonetheless, over two years these indigenously retrofitted fixed-wing kamikazes have attacked military, economic and politically symbolic targets over a thousand miles away from Ukraine’s border into Russia.

Russia has often failed to anticipate Ukraine’s innovations, but usually adapts after the initial splash, deploying more air defenses and moving combat aircraft to more distant bases. Ukrainian drone attacks sometimes scale up to more than 100 aircraft, peaking at 144 in September. Ukrainian minister Oleksandr Kamyshin spoke of plans to build 10,000 drones in 2024 with ranges exceeding 100km in 2024.

It seems doubtful the raids, particularly against symbolically important targets in Moscow, have had their desired effect in decreasing civilian confidence in and support for the war. But some have caused material damage to military and industrial targets.

Ukraine’s most effective strategic attacks have targeted Russia’s oil sector, where a relatively small explosive payload can go a long way. These attacks have damaged 10-15% of Russian oil facilities, perhaps causing a 20% rise in domestic diesel prices. That’s billions of dollars worth of lost wealth for comparatively miniscule cost in UAVs. However, it still falls significantly short of the crippling effects of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector.

AIRBASE ATTACKS

Ukraine has managed to pickoff especially high-value aircraft in these raids, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M strategic bombers, Il-76 cargo jets, Su-24 and Su-34 tactical bombers, MiG-31 Foxhound interceptor/hypersonic missile carriers and even a rare Su-57 stealth fighter.

The cost efficiency of such attacks is exceptional, but the rate of attrition isn’t crippling, despite decreasing the efficiency of Russia’s bombing campaigns by compelling them to base further away from Ukraine’s borders. The biplane-like speed of typical kamikaze drones means that a “deep” target may benefit from hours of early warning via radar before the strike arrives, enough for aircraft in flyable condition to flee the base and ensure that personnel evacuate. 

This, combined with Russia’s air defense efforts, prevents larger scale destruction of aircraft on the ground. Still, some valuable aircraft will not be flyable on short notice, and destruction of weapons, fuel and base facilities has intrinsic value. On August 22, a formation of Ukrainian drones was detected at night approaching Marinovka airbase, 260 miles east of the nearest Ukrainian-held territory. Personnel and most of the bombers evacuated in time. But the drones that survived the air defense gauntlet still destroyed two Su-34 and one Su-24 tactical bombers in the repair area, and damaged three more sheltered in hangars. 

Both Ukrainian and Russian airbase attacks have repeatedly demonstrated the importance of reinforced hangars and high-quality inflatable decoys to divert or curtail damage by kamikaze drones and missiles.

FIBER OPTICS: UN-JAMMABLE BUT ENTANGLE-ABLE?

Jamming has proven to be one of the most effective weapons against drones. In the summer of 2022, a RUSI report estimated that jamming accounted for 90% of drone losses, which it estimated to be in the tens of thousands each month, particularly civilian-grade sUAS used by infantry. 

As the fortunes of electronic warfare fluctuate daily, with friendly and enemy EW sometimes decimating drone fleets, operators are increasingly interested in reverse cord-cutting: ditching wireless entirely and controlling drones via an unspooling fiber-optic cable.

One might say Ukraine and Russia have reinvented the wire-guided anti-tank missile, only slower and much cheaper. But fiber-optic drones aren’t only un-jammable, they can also transmit higher-resolution video feeds. 

Of course, cabling contributes to weight and can limit range. It seems to pose major entanglement risks, though recent accounts suggest this risk is more manageable than expected. And being able to operate persistently without interference day after day is an advantage many operators are willing to sacrifice some flexibility for.

Ukraine is particularly banking on the German HIGHT HCX fiber-optic drone. This has a maximum payload of 11 pounds, some of which is allocated to one or two 3 pound fiber optic spools, each measuring six miles long for a maximum reach of 11 miles. The cable transmits data at 1,000 MBpS from its 10x zoom camera. HCX can reportedly fly in circles and over water and trees. Reportedly, the big R&D challenge was calibrating cable tensions to a steady 8 ounces and cable texture to avoid mid-flight twisting due to rotor-wash. Reportedly, HIGHT could start building up to 3,000 HCXs monthly in November with partner ODM GmbH if tests prove successful.

KILLER AI, NO LONGER A HYPOTHETICAL 

While fiber-optic drones have great potential, Russians and Ukrainians have long seen AI-assisted automatic targeting as the holy grail for overcoming limitations posed by EW and radio command links broadly.

The “easier” form of AI assistance involves recognizing and locking onto a target, allowing the drone to retain accuracy in its terminal attack run, despite typically losing its command link due to low altitude and self-defense jammers. As a human still selects the target, this doesn’t pose novel ethical issues.

But more ambitiously, a drone could be able to autonomously detect and identify targets and prosecute attack runs without human instruction, flouting jamming entirely. Essentially, this entrusts an AI algorithm to correctly identify targets and attack them without oversight—posing risks of civilian collateral damage or friendly fire.

“Killer AI” has been a subject of debate for many years. But by late 2023, both Russia and Ukraine began limited operations of loitering munitions with automatic targeting capabilities. Moreover, American Phoenix Ghost loitering munitions supplied to Ukraine starting in 2022 appear to have substantial autonomous attack capabilities.

Starting in December 2023, videos of strikes by Lancet drones exhibited an automatic target locking interface, drawing boxes around a target. The key enabling component was an American NVIDIA Jetson TX2 AI computing chip.

Russian officials attributed either lock on capability of human designated targets, or full hunter-killer autonomy; however, the latter capacity seems redundant given that Lancet videos almost invariably feature footage recorded by an overwatching drone that likely also acquired the target per SOP.

But these videos eventually revealed flaws in Lancet’s auto-targeting system—in one case, diverting a Lancet away from a CV90 fighting vehicle to blast a rubble pile at the last minute. The auto-targeting interface vanished from Lancet videos then resurfaced in a batch of 21 videos generated by Russian special forces (SSO) directing strikes allegedly from behind Ukrainian lines. These videos now featured UI displaying an image-matching AI target ID capability, identifying T-72, Leopard 2, 2S1 and M109 vehicles.