The New Arms Race

The meteoric technological evolution in military drones

We are witnessing what numerous experts consider a third phase in the employment of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) or drones in military conflicts. We have reached this point following a first stage at the beginning of the century, characterized by large and expensive strategic systems such as the Predator, Heron, or Global Hawk, followed by a second phase featuring more compact and economical tactical systems, though still purely military and high-priced.

In this third era, drones employed in conflicts have experienced a significant reduction in size, complexity, and cost, while exponentially increasing in numbers, capabilities, employment modalities, missions, and especially in lethality.

Accelerated Innovation Cycles

The distinctive characteristics of this third era are marked by innovation cycles that occur at an increasingly rapid pace. If months ago we spoke of weeks between the emergence of a technology and its adaptation or neutralization by the opposing party, the temporal scale has now been reduced to days.

Each innovation that emerges on the front is instantly published on social media through multiple videos, spreading immediately. Furthermore, their massive employment facilitates the adversary’s direct access to systems that fail or are captured, enabling analysis, studies, and reverse engineering to begin within hours of innovations appearing on the front.

With a traditional defense industry, whose acquisition and manufacturing cycles are measured in years, this was unthinkable and impossible to achieve. However, in this third phase, the paradigm has completely changed.

Determining Factors of the Innovation Process

What truly conditions this innovation process are several closely related factors:

First, the necessity of a nation defending not only its independence but its very existence. This has generated continuous and total support from civil society, the emergence of volunteer groups, entrepreneurial initiatives, and small emerging companies (start-ups) with an innovative and scalable business model. These organizations are based on the immediate application of technology, with a renewed mentality of trial, error, and correction, and high growth potential.

On the other hand, the direct feedback from the combat front to these entrepreneurial initiatives and start-ups. The interaction between combatants and civilian volunteers who dedicate themselves to seeking technological improvements for their army’s capabilities, or technical solutions for the protection of personnel, cities, and critical infrastructure.

This dynamic enables designing, manufacturing, and supplying specific technical solutions for particular front zones within weeks or even days.

Evolution in the Ukraine Conflict

Since the beginning of the Ukraine war with the Russian invasion in 2022, an exponential increase in drone employment has been observed. Initially, Ukraine led this process during 2022 and much of 2023, beginning with commercial drones, evolving toward their weaponization, and subsequently employing drones with image guidance through operator goggles (FPV), adapted from artisanal models manufactured by hobbyist communities.

From late 2023, Russia joined the rapid technological change, adapting FPVs to lead innovations in 2024 such as the employment of fiber optics in drone guidance.

This development became evident during Ukrainian advances in the Russian Kursk region, where in summer 2024 the first Russian FPV drones with fiber optics — the famous “Prince Vandal of Novgorod” (KVN) drone — based on an artisanal FPV and equipped with a fiber optic reel of several kilometers, countered the massive Ukrainian electronic warfare employment that inhibited radio frequency control. This allowed Russia to recover the capability to use its FPVs to attack Ukrainian logistics lines in that region, causing the retreat and loss of Ukrainian advances.

The Ukrainian reaction consisted of rapidly adapting their own solutions. Special brigades such as the 414 — known as “Ptakhy Madiara” or “Magyar’s Birds” — developed and mass-produced FPV drones with fiber optic guidance, achieving ranges of up to 40 kilometers from early 2025.

Since then, advances on both sides have been unstoppable. Operational advantages last very few days, as both parties have achieved similar technological levels and comparable manufacturing capabilities.

A recent example was the appearance of FPV interceptors, initially from the Ukrainian side but quickly copied by the Russian side, which can be observed in multiple videos intercepting ISR drones such as Zala, Orlan, or Supercam.

The Qualitative Leap: The Rubicon Center

From the Russian side, the qualitative leap has been provided by the emergence of Rubicon.

The Rubicon Advanced Unmanned Technologies Center is an elite Russian military unit specialized in drone warfare that has become one of the most effective and feared formations of the Russian armed forces in the Ukraine conflict. It was created in August 2024 by order of Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, with the objective of centralizing and optimizing drone usage based on experience acquired during the first years of the conflict.

On the Ukrainian side, an improvement in capabilities has been observed following the creation of the Unmanned Systems Force and Special Brigades such as the so-called Magyari Birds.

Key Success Factors

Rubicon’s success, as in the Ukrainian case with their special brigades, lies in the following aspects:

• Pilots and operators of highly experienced FPV and conventional UAS
• Electronic warfare teams and operators with deep knowledge of all UAS aspects
• Support from civilian volunteers, start-up companies, and research and development groups, including techno-volunteer communities, civilian or military initiatives, impulses from digital transformation ministries, and ecosystems such as Brave1 in Ukraine or the “People’s Defence Industry” (PDI) in the Russian case
• Direct application of own UAS experience for improvement and optimization of C-UAS systems. There is no better method to combat UAS than being an expert or operator of them
• Employment of signals intelligence (SIGINT). The front is saturated with sensors and it is necessary to have the capability to employ and leverage information in real-time
• Effective employment of the command and control chain to reduce the kill-chain — the time elapsed between target identification and its neutralization
• Dissemination and use of command and control systems down to the individual combatant level, converting each one into a sensor that sends real-time information to the control network and has access to all information that their companions upload to the network from their surroundings

And fundamentally, the existential necessity — especially in the Ukrainian case — to fight, which makes imagination and experimentation limitless when achieving operational advantages, even if they are temporary and ephemeral.

Lessons for Europe

How can lessons be extracted from all this from the European perspective? It is evident that if we consider a “drone wall” on NATO’s border to be the solution, we will have learned little.

Attacks such as the one on June 1, 2025, the “Spider Web” operation, where hundreds of FPV drones attacked strategic Russian airbases hundreds of kilometers from the Ukrainian border, taking off from trucks parked on roads just kilometers from those bases, demonstrate that a single drone wall is insufficient, as if we were defending a medieval castle. In this scenario, the enemy can attack any part of the territory from within, using each country’s own cellular communication infrastructure or employing satellite links.

Strategic Requirements

It is necessary to replicate the identified key points:

• Training and experience of our combatants to master ISR and FPV drones in detail, with the implementation of adequate tactics, techniques, and procedures
• Innovation and agile industrial capacity of more start-up, small, and medium enterprises, and less bureaucratized giants
• Integration and interoperability of sensor networks and effective real-time exploitation of all signals to constantly know the state of the nearly-transparent battlefield
• Employment of effective command and control networks, supported by AI-assisted decision-making tools that extract from the colossal volume of data those that provide necessary intelligence in each situation
• Combined exercises with “red team” drone presence that help identify gaps and weaknesses in our deployments

Conclusion

In summary, it is fundamental to extract conclusions and lessons learned from what is currently occurring in Ukraine, avoiding extrapolating solutions from past eras that would provide a false sense of security.