The Future of War

The character of war is changing rapidly and profoundly. This change is most visible in Ukraine and in the Iran-Israel war, but indications of its spread are in conflicts around the world, from Syria deep into Africa. It is tempting to identify it as the unmanned systems revolution, but such a rubric is far too simplistic to capture the extent and profundity of the changes in warfare now underway. We now can see only the initial glimpses of the current transformation’s full effects, and it is too early to encapsulate that transformation in words, ideas, or programs. It is already apparent, however, that the US and all major militaries must begin changing their concepts of how to wage war and all facets of their war-waging institutions to keep up with and prepare for the rapid and dynamic developments now gaining speed and momentum.

Past as Misleading Prologue

The author and Kimberly Kagan have elsewhere observed that the war in Ukraine is to the next major great-power war as the Spanish Civil War was to World War II.¹ The Spanish Civil War was a laboratory in which prototypes of most of the technologies that would make the Second World War so dramatically different from World War I were tested against one another. The Soviets and Germans provided the opposing sides with tanks, aircraft, and other systems both to achieve desired political outcomes and to observe the large-scale live-fire exercise that revealed the strengths, weaknesses, and best uses of those systems. The other great powers observed and drew their own conclusions.

But the tests were of limited value in forecasting the character of the next war because of the limitations of the combatants’ capabilities. Both sides in the Spanish Civil War were far weaker than any great power, with extremely limited defense industrial bases (DIBs) of their own, and they received only relatively small numbers of early prototype weapons. One could catch glimpses of what modern airpower or tanks could do and what air defense and anti-tank systems would look like or how they would perform, but those glimpses were far from a full preview of German blitzkrieg or Soviet deep battle.

The war in Ukraine is similar to the Spanish Civil War in that Ukraine’s Western backers have provided relatively small numbers of advanced weapons, though often older versions than the ones they themselves use. Ukraine, in addition, has until recently had a limited ability to use its own DIB at scale. The Russians, for their part, have used their arsenal of advanced weapons and systems and have partially mobilized their own extensive DIB. However, their ability to mobilize their industry has been affected by sanctions, and the actual “modern” characteristics of many of their systems have turned out to be overhyped.

It is easy to argue, therefore, as some have done, that the US and its allies have relatively little to learn from the fighting in Ukraine because “we wouldn’t fight that way.” The US and its NATO and Pacific allies and partners have extensive inventories of advanced systems that they have not shared with Ukraine but that they would certainly use in a major war. The combined DIB of the US and its allies dwarfs Ukraine’s in size and capability. Russia, for its part, entered the war a relatively weak great power, at least as measured by conventional rather than nuclear capabilities. It lags far behind the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the ability to produce large numbers of modern weapons and systems at scale, and it has not been able to produce the most modern systems—true fifth-generation aircraft or hypersonic missiles, for example—at all. A war between the US and the PRC today would not look like the war in Ukraine, and it is tempting to extrapolate from that fact that one can marginalize or dismiss the lessons to be drawn from Ukraine and the Middle East.

But Russia and Ukraine are not the opposing sides in a civil war. Each is a powerful country in its own right with a serious DIB and a fully modern military. The Russian DIB can outproduce Ukraine’s partners in some important areas, such as artillery and other munitions. (Russia has had to turn to North Korea for the majority of its artillery munitions and ballistic missiles, which reflects its inability to keep up with its own demands—but it still produces more than NATO does.) Ukraine has also expanded its DIB to produce NATO-standard weapons at rates similar to NATO’s own production of some systems and is working to increase that capability further. The main delta between the combatants in this conflict and those who would likely fight in, say, a Taiwan scenario is in the absence of large numbers of the most advanced systems mentioned above.

The initial period of war between the US and the PRC would almost certainly look different from anything seen in the Russia-Ukraine or Iran-Israel wars. Stealth aircraft of both sides would penetrate the adversary’s air defenses in ways that neither side has been able to do in Ukraine and that only Israel has been able to do in the Iran-Israel war. The naval war would see the most modern surface and subsurface vessels and munitions used against each other and against targets on land at a scale not seen in either of the current conflicts. One could list other differences.

But how long would that initial period last before the combatants ran through their arsenals of high-end systems? Stealth aircraft and hypersonic missiles are expensive and cannot be mass-produced, at least not with current technologies. Long-range strike systems are also relatively scarce and difficult to replace, as are the most advanced air and missile defense systems. A US-PRC war need not last long to wear both sides down to reliance on more traditional systems such as those dominating the current wars and to production levels not necessarily dissimilar to today’s levels. We should be leery of deciding that the US will have—and be able to use—sufficient numbers of its most advanced systems for long enough to force any future war to conclusion on its terms and therefore of deciding that the current wars offer as limited a glimpse of the future as the Spanish Civil War did in its time.

Characteristics of the Current Transformation of War

The character of war changes most rapidly during large-scale protracted wars. Peacetime preparations to transform war set conditions for transformation but rarely achieve it—until war actually comes, completing the transformation and then developing it further. Desert Storm was the anomaly in this regard, not the norm. The technologies that would lead to trench warfare and then to its demise in World War I were mostly well-developed before 1914, but the urgency of war brought them to their apotheosis within about 18 months. The urgency of escaping from the horrors of trench warfare then drove the separate lines of development in Germany and among the Allied powers that broke the stalemate another 18 months or so later. Armored warfare was well-developed as a concept before 1939, but German blitzkrieg changed profoundly between the invasions of Poland and France and then again before and during the invasion of the Soviet Union. Mechanized warfare in 1945 looked little like the initial German invasion of Poland. Both technologies and the ways in which they were employed changed rapidly throughout World War II until its end, whereupon development once more slowed down. None of the weapons or systems used in World War II were invented during the war, apart from atomic bombs, but the character of those weapons and systems and the means with which they were employed were transformed repeatedly in a few years. That is the normal pattern of military transformations.

The Russia-Ukraine and Iran-Israel wars have likewise not seen the introduction of any wholly new weapons or systems. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground systems (UGS), unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), and unmanned underwater vehicles all existed in militaries before the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, and most had been used in combat in one form or another. Integrated air and missile defense systems (IAMDS) have been used in war for decades, as have electronic warfare (EW), cyberattacks, and, of course, satellite-supported intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and communications.

These wars, however, have been the first to see several phenomena:

• Large-scale use of IAMDS against multiple large, complex long-range strike packages composed of ballistic and cruise missiles and long-range UAVs
• Fielding of tactical UAVs for surveillance and attack on the scale of millions on each side
• Fielding of EW so extensive and intensive that it can disrupt GPS signals and communications across areas spanning scores of miles
• Development of integrative systems to extract targeting information from thousands of manned and unmanned systems simultaneously and make that information available to individuals operating tactical UAVs and other systems in near-real time
• Initial integration of machine learning (ML) algorithms to support precise geolocation without any external communications and target both identification and engagement
• Use of precise long-range attack drones to hit critical components of military and economic infrastructure
• Use of UGS at scale for tactical resupply, casualty evacuation, mining, and mine-clearing operations
• Use of USVs at scale to disable or sink naval vessels alone or in conjunction with UAV or missile attacks

This chapter will focus on the first five of these phenomena, which are the most salient for the immediate future of land warfare.

The weapons and systems used in every one of these phenomena have changed and developed over the course of the wars, but none of them were invented during the conflicts. The task confronting the American national security community is to identify the lessons to be drawn from the changes these phenomena have already wrought in warfare, forecast the future developments of these phenomena, and forecast the possibilities for entirely new capabilities not yet seen on either set of battlefields.

IAMDS. The proliferation of drones has received the most attention thus far in discussions of lessons the Ukraine war might hold for the future, and those lessons are certainly important. But the implications of the ongoing air and missile campaigns in Ukraine and the Middle East are in some respects at least as profound for the future of American military operations.

It has long been assumed that, to paraphrase UK Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the missile will always get through. The patchy performance and limited deployment of missile defense systems before 2022 gave no real indication of how effective they would be or could rapidly become against large-scale and prolonged missile-strike series. US national security experts generally expected that the US could rely on its own missiles getting through to their targets and striking them precisely, but the experts also assumed that PRC missiles would be able to hit their aim points without much disruption. The ongoing conflicts call both assumptions into question.

The Russia-Ukraine and Iran-Israel wars have shown that certain kinds of cruise missiles are virtually useless against modern IAMDS, except as decoys and interceptor absorbers. Israel and its allies shot down every single cruise missile Iran fired at it in April 2024 before any had reached Israeli territory, and Ukraine regularly shoots down 90–100 percent of the cruise missiles Russia fires at it. Russian and Iranian cruise missiles are simply too slow and lack sufficient stealth or other masking capabilities to defeat the IAMDS fielded by Israel and Ukraine. More advanced cruise missiles presumably could defeat those systems, at least to some degree, but ordinary missiles that are easy to mass-produce, such as the Russian Kh-101 series, cannot be relied on to penetrate such defenses.

Ballistic missiles are more reliable penetrators, but they too can be defeated. Ukrainian forces have been able to use US-produced Patriot systems to shoot down Russian ballistic missiles, but the majority of ballistic missiles the Russians fire penetrate the Ukrainian IAMDS. It is impossible to assess from available open-source information what role Ukrainian Patriot launchers and interceptors play in the Russian penetration rates, but it is certain that the Ukrainians have not nearly enough Patriot launchers or interceptors to attempt to down every ballistic missile fired at them. Thus, the true penetration rate is impossible to discern from open sources.

The October 2024 Iranian ballistic missile salvo against Israel offers good evidence that a dense and well-provisioned IAMDS can, indeed, shoot down large majorities of incoming ballistic missiles.² That strike consisted of 180–200 such missiles. The actual number that impacted was never publicly confirmed, but some estimates put it in the dozens. Those estimates would indicate that the combined Israel-allied IAMDS downed well over half and possibly as many as three-quarters of the ballistic missiles Iran launched.

Quasi-hypersonic missiles perform better, naturally, but not perfectly. The Russian Kinzhal aeroballistic missile, which is not a true hypersonic weapon despite the Russian hype of it, often penetrates Ukrainian defenses, but not always—Ukrainian forces regularly intercept Kinzhals. Only the truly hypersonic Russian Zircon missile, designed originally for an anti-shipping role, appears always to be able to penetrate Ukrainian defenses.

Iran has not claimed to field hypersonic missiles, but the Houthis have asserted that their Palestine 2 missile has hypersonic characteristics. The Houthis have been able to penetrate Israeli-allied IAMDS with at least one such missile, but a US Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system reportedly downed at least one.

The Missile Will Only Sometimes Get Through. The lesson here is clear: Almost any missile lacking true hypersonic capabilities can be shot down, with penetration rates varying largely by the missile’s speed. Denser IAMDS naturally provide much better protection than sparser ones, but even relatively sparse IAMDS can protect areas the size of central Kyiv reliably. Consistent missile penetration therefore depends on either overwhelming the IAMDS or using the most advanced (and thus scarcest, most expensive, and least replaceable) missiles.

On the flip side, the US should not assume a priori that it will be unable to defend bases in the Pacific against PRC missile salvos. Nor should it assume that its own lower-end missiles will be able to penetrate PRC IAMDS to strike heavily defended targets on the Chinese mainland.

Defense against long-range UAVs is even more effective. Ukraine regularly downs nearly 100 percent of incoming Russian long-range UAV strikes, including even Russian decoy UAVs. Such long-range UAV strikes are therefore far more useful as distractions combined with missile strikes and as reconnaissance and reconnaissance-in-force efforts to locate Ukrainian air defenses and determine their ability and willingness to engage targets.

IAMDS Optimization Lessons. Ukraine and Israel have taken different approaches to the challenge of optimizing IAMDS engagement patterns to conserve scarce and expensive interceptors. The Israeli approach has emphasized optimizing engagement against projectiles with ballistic trajectories because of the extraordinarily high number of rockets and short-range ballistic missiles the country faced before the outbreak of the October 7 war. Israel’s IAMDS optimization thus reportedly relied on determining whether the incoming projectile was likely to hit desert or a valuable target and then refraining from wasting interceptors on projectiles that were going to hit only sand. However, the primary systems for engaging all incoming projectiles, from quasi-hypersonics to UAVs, appear to be the same set of antimissile systems (e.g., Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, supplemented by US THAADs and Patriots).

Ukraine faced a different problem earlier in the war that shaped its optimization strategy. Starved of the most advanced missile defense systems but confronted, by late 2023, with masses of Iranian-built Shahed long-range UAVs, the Ukrainians rapidly realized that they could not waste interceptors on such drones. They therefore fell back on much more primitive systems—shotguns and rifles fielded by what they call “mobile fire teams” that stand watch for UAVs and shoot them down. Ukrainian forces generally engage long-range UAVs with interceptors only when these more primitive systems have been unable to down them (or when the UAVs are close to sensitive targets). The Ukrainians are currently investing in their abilities to destroy or divert Russian long-range UAVs using EW before they need to engage them with rifles or shotguns, although the Russians will likely find at least some counters to this solution.

Future combatants will face the same challenges as Ukraine and must consider adjusting their own IAMDS optimization algorithms (and force fielding) accordingly. Interceptors that can down missiles will almost inevitably cost far more than long-range drones (to say nothing of tactical drones) and will be far more difficult to mass-produce. Similarly, the systems that can shoot down ballistic missiles (or hypersonics) must not be wasted shooting down cruise missiles. IAMDS usage algorithms thus must optimize for availability and cost as well as for the threat the incoming projectile poses to targets that matter, ensuring that the most expensive and rarest interceptors are used exclusively against the targets that only they can engage. The concept of an IAMDS, moreover, must be expanded to include ground-based primitive systems such as shotguns (or, when appropriate and necessary, systems like the Vulcan or other rapid-fire air defense systems) and integrate those systems into the same target engagement algorithms as the higher-end systems.

The Tactical Reconnaissance Strike Complex. The most profound innovation in the Russia-Ukraine war has been the integration of tactical UAVs; long-range rockets, missiles, and UAVs; tube artillery; and EW into a single coherent system that the author and Kimberly Kagan have described in detail elsewhere. We coined the expression “tactical reconnaissance strike complex” (TRSC) to capture the reality that this system combines the features of what the Russians called the “reconnaissance-fires complex,” which operates at the tactical level, with those of the “reconnaissance-strike complex,” which functions at the operational level. The TRSC combines operational-level assets with tactical assets to achieve tactical effects that can generate operational impacts.³

The offense-defense race between unmanned systems and EW is one of the defining characteristics of the TRSC and its implications for modern war. The author will consider that interaction in more detail below, but it must be kept in mind as the single most important factor currently driving the rapid innovation cycle occurring on the battlefields of Ukraine and Russia and as one of the most significant phenomena likely to profoundly affect future war.

Tactical UAVs. The proliferation of tactical UAVs with ranges of up to 50 kilometers is the most obvious and visible change in the character of modern war. Both sides are fielding millions of these systems annually, and tactical UAVs are becoming one of the most important combat systems on the battlefield.

UAV Characteristics in Current Conditions. A UAV, like almost any modern weapons platform, consists of three main components: the platform itself, its electronics (including sensors, avionics, and communications systems), and its software. Its communications capabilities also consist of three elements, in general: the link between controller and UAV; the data link the UAV uses to provide video or other intelligence to the controller, some integrative system, or both; and GPS or some other passive system used for geolocation. Attack UAVs can either have explosive payloads integrated into their bodies or carry ordnance to be dropped or fired on targets. Almost all attack UAVs are designed to provide data back to their controllers and integrative systems up to the moment of their destruction.

The three components of a UAV can change at different rates. Producing a large number of UAVs with different form factors or otherwise different physical characteristics takes much longer than generating and pushing software patches or updates. Upgrading electronics—communications systems or sensors, for example—usually goes faster than redesigning the platform but more slowly than improving software.

The basic UAV form factors used in both the Russia-Ukraine and Iran-Israel wars have not changed dramatically. Tactical drones are still primarily quadcopters or hexcopters similar to those in widespread commercial use before the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion. Innovations have extended their ranges and payloads somewhat, but not in a transformative way. The transformative innovations have come in the UAVs’ electronics and software and have resulted primarily from the urgent need to overcome advances in EW.

All three modes of communication used by UAVs are vulnerable to jamming, spoofing, and, sometimes, hacking. GPS jamming has become so pervasive on the battlefield that, on the whole, tactical drone operators no longer rely on GPS to geolocate their UAVs. They rely instead on knowledge of where the drone launched and imagery and familiarity with the terrain over which the UAV flies to recognize its location manually. Efforts are underway to automate this process through ML algorithms that will geolocate UAVs precisely by recognizing terrain using the drone’s onboard video feed. Such capabilities could be fielded at scale in 2025, largely obviating the need for external sources of geolocation information.

EW interference with (and hacking of) UAV control and data communications also has become pervasive and is a major challenge on the battlefield. Both sides have engaged in efforts to expand the frequency ranges on which drones can communicate, use frequency-hopping algorithms, and find other ways to adjust communications frequencies and modes dynamically. The latter allows them to find open wavelengths through which to control UAVs in flight even as enemy EW operators labor to identify and close those gaps. Large EW systems can generate blanket coverage of all or almost all usable frequencies, sometimes over wide areas, depriving drone operators of any ground-based means of controlling their UAVs. But both sides have innovated with using UAV-based satellite uplink systems to circumvent such ground-based jamming, and efforts to jam those UAV-based uplinks have so far had only modest success. The Russians also have fielded drones guided through fiber-optic wires that so far are proof against EW interference but suffer from various performance degradations because of the wire.

UAV electronics and control software are therefore locked in a tight race with EW innovations—a race that can see changes ripple across the battle space in a matter of weeks. Two clear conclusions emerge thus far from this race: The UAV operator cannot rely on getting any electromagnetic signal to the drone once it has taken off, but the EW operator cannot rely on blocking all signals to enemy drones either. Communications on and near the battlefield have become highly contested and are likely to remain so.

The primary UAV innovations thus far have been oriented toward defeating or mitigating this communications challenge, and those pressures are leading to intensive efforts to integrate full autonomy into reconnaissance and attack drones. Once UAVs are equipped with ML-driven visual positioning systems that can geolocate them using their own internal video feed as well as through AI/ML-driven target identification systems, such UAVs will be able to navigate, find, and attack targets with no external communications. We will consider the implications of such lethal autonomous systems (LAS) on the battlefield in Ukraine in more detail below, but for purposes of this section, what matters is that such systems will likely be fielded in 2025.

Quantity Has a Quality All Its Own. A defining characteristic of modern tactical UAVs is that they are inexpensive. Handheld quadcopter surveillance or attack drones can cost $3,000–$5,000. Quadcopters with one-way ranges up to 40 kilometers and payloads of 20–25 kilograms can cost around $25,000. This affordability and the relatively ready availability of parts to produce UAVs have enabled Russia and Ukraine together to put more than three million drones onto the battlefield in 2024 alone. That number will increase and possibly double in 2025.

The sheer number of drones on the battlefield is powerfully shaping the character of current war. Pervasive coverage of enormous areas with visual, thermal, and electromagnetic sensing has created the partially transparent battlefield long dreamed of by airpower enthusiasts. It is impossible to conceal a large concentration of vehicles or personnel for an attack on such a battlefield, and it is difficult to conceal vehicles at all.

Tactical attack drones are now also capable of destroying most objects on the battlefield, including tanks, often using means as simple as dropping shaped-charge anti-tank munitions directly onto turret hatches or other vulnerable points. Efforts to rig slat armor or other means of protecting vehicles have been generally unsuccessful, largely because drones under human control can find and attack any exposed point of vulnerability and strike repeatedly first to destroy any such protective systems and then hit the vehicle the systems were protecting.

The close integration of all UAV feeds with traditional fires systems such as tube artillery has proved deadly to traditional mechanized maneuver. When the drones themselves cannot destroy enemy vehicles fast enough or at all, their operators can engage friendly artillery to do the job. With enough warning and enough concentration of enemy force, the defender can choose to use long-range fires systems—drones, rockets, or missiles—to devastating effect.

These factors are the primary causes of the current positional nature of the war in Ukraine. An attacker cannot mass without being observed and, when observed, struck. Surprise cannot be achieved through concealment of location, force size, or composition. Vehicles lacking integrated counter-drone systems cannot survive on the modern battlefield. Drones are so inexpensive and pervasive that even infantry squads are suitable targets.

Russian forces on the offensive throughout 2024 repeatedly proved the folly of attempting massed mechanized assaults, as they regularly lost many of the vehicles they committed to such attacks for marginal gains, if they advanced at all. They largely abandoned massed infantry assaults as well. The gains Russian forces made, largely in Donetsk region, in the last quarter of 2024 came, by contrast, through penetrations made by small groups of infantry (two to five soldiers) infiltrating defensive positions, followed by reinforcements, which were usually also brought forward in small groups.

Pervasive tactical drones, properly integrated into a TRSC, have eliminated mechanized maneuver from the battle space for now. We will consider presently some possibilities for restoring such maneuver in different ways.

EW. The urgent need to find a defense against drones has driven dramatic improvements and changes in EW systems on both sides. The Russians in particular have invested in a complex of EW systems ranging from large-scale, high-powered systems with long ranges to handheld systems intended to take down individual drones. The Ukrainians also field such systems, although theirs are generally smaller and with more limited ranges.

The Russians achieved their most noteworthy EW success during the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. Russian forces massed enough EW, including long-range GPS jammers, to block even vehicle-to-vehicle communications in some cases, causing Ukrainian forces to bunch up in order to communicate and thus make themselves vulnerable to devastating artillery fire. Russian GPS jamming has rendered US-provided High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) rockets effectively unusable in parts of the battle space as well. (Ukraine has received only older HIMARS rockets vulnerable to such GPS jamming, not newer US systems that are reportedly more resistant.) Both sides have deployed handheld jammers to frontline troops in the trenches that they use to defend themselves against tactical UAVs.

EW has not proved a panacea against UAVs, however. UAV communications engineers on both sides have repeatedly circumvented or otherwise overcome EW successes to restore communications and navigation to their drones. Moreover, neither side has fielded enough EW systems to cover the battle space evenly, thus creating areas of vulnerability where drones can operate. The fielding of satellite communications on larger tactical drones has so far been largely effective and difficult to block, and the use of such communications together with human or machine visual positioning helps evade GPS jamming.

Large high-powered and long-range EW systems suffer from several challenges, at least at this stage of technology. These systems tend to overheat when used for long periods, for one thing, requiring either downtime in which large areas are uncovered or the deployment of multiple scarce and expensive systems close together to maintain coverage. These systems’ size also makes them vulnerable to attack. The Borisoglebsk-2 EW system, for example, is built on the chassis of an MT-LB armored personnel carrier weighing about 12 tons. But the full EW complex includes several vehicles and either generators (and fuel for them) or connections to civilian power. Ukrainian forces have managed to destroy a number of Borisoglebsk and other large EW systems. The systems can be geolocated by their emissions and targeted with tube or rocket artillery that does not rely on electronic communications of any sort. Ukrainian forces also have destroyed some of these systems with the drones they are intended to defend against, taking advantage of niche vulnerabilities I will not discuss further in this chapter.

Russian forces have thus found it necessary to keep such systems back from the lines and away from Ukrainian artillery as best they can and, more importantly, to ring them with air defense systems to defend against Ukrainian drones that somehow penetrate the EW blanket. The Russians have, in fact, created a complex of EW combined with air defense in depth, using smaller, tactical EW and air defense systems closest to the lines and larger, longer-range EW and air defense systems farther in the rear. This complex ties up many air defense assets and limits the effectiveness of the larger EW systems, although the air defense assets also provide cover to Russian forces and other installations in the area. Ukrainian forces, however, have achieved kills even against systems within such layered defenses.

Lessons for the US. The battle space in Ukraine is characterized by extremely high lethality delivered by a combination of systems, some of which rely on electromagnetic communications for terminal guidance. Anything that must be within range of tube or rocket artillery, to say nothing of tanks, mortars, or other infantry weapons, can be destroyed regardless of its EW capabilities. Surveillance has become so pervasive that any vehicle-sized system is likely to be observed (and anything emitting in the electromagnetic spectrum is almost certain to be observed). Systems that may appear “highly mobile” and “low profile” are, in fact, extremely vulnerable on the Ukrainian battlefield and require complex combined-arms protection arrays to survive.

This raises questions about the survivability of any EW or counter-drone system that relies on a continuous supply of high volumes of electricity. It also highlights the reality that any vehicle-mounted system is vulnerable. These circumstances do not mean that high-end counter-drone directed-energy or EW systems will be useless—they are, on the contrary, an important component of modern warfare. It does mean, however, that they are unlikely to clear the skies of enemy drones magically, that they will be part of the same offense-defense cycle affecting all other parts of the drone-EW complex, and that their survival will depend on their deployment within a complicated and dynamic defensive array against all the threats an adversary can bring.

Fratricide. A sizable proportion of the tactical drones lost to EW by both sides is, in fact, the result of fratricide. The fielding of individual EW systems combined with the ubiquity of drones and the impossibility of recognizing easily whether a drone is friend or foe has led to a situation in which soldiers seeing drones instinctively down them. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians have solved this problem. There does not appear to be a simple solution, moreover, because of the intensity of the EW contest and the unreliability of communications at the front line.

One could, in principle, kit out drones with identify-friend-foe (IFF) transponders, provide frontline troops with an intelligence picture that includes the ability to rapidly query whether a given drone is friend or foe, or otherwise attempt to use integrated data and communications to solve this problem. (Using markings or any physical characteristics can be dismissed out of hand because of the ease with which the adversary can spoof them.) Both sides are wrestling with questions about the echelons at which to place command of tactical EW and UAV operations and are considering, in part, how to optimize communications to reduce the fratricide.

But where communications are so unreliable, systems that rely on them are also unreliable. IFF transponder systems would need to be extremely sophisticated to be proof against enemy spoofing, particularly since both drones and IFF query systems will inevitably be captured quickly. Making integrated data systems fusing drone locations available for use by infantry soldiers is also likely to fail: Too many drones will be operating without reliable communications and, especially, without reliable digital geolocation that they can relay back to their controllers; the infantry soldiers will likely be without live communications a considerable part of the time; and soldiers hearing and then seeing a nearby drone will always be more inclined to down it than to leaf through a touchscreen to see if it is friend or foe. These problems will only grow as truly autonomous UAVs are fielded, since such vehicles will not need to generate electromagnetic emissions and may be designed not to do so. The “solution” for now appears to be accepting high percentages of UAV fratricide and simply fielding enough tactical UAVs to succeed nevertheless. The real solution will likely require significant changes in doctrine, training, and technology.

TOW Drones. The Russians have pioneered one mitigation to the EW problem—drones guided by fiber-optic cable they drag after them. The Ukrainians report that such drones are, in fact, generally proof against their EW systems and can be effective. Wire-guided drones suffer from obvious challenges, however, including the limitations on range, payload, or both imposed by having to carry and pay out the cable and the risk of the cable being tangled or cut. It is unclear whether such drones, which operate somewhat like the tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided (TOW) missile, will establish themselves on the modern battlefield or whether they are an ephemeral experiment that will be superseded by better technology.

Lethal Autonomous Systems Are Here. The more promising developments in EW-proof drones lie in the realm of autonomous systems. Both sides in Ukraine have amassed enormous datasets of manually identified military systems, soldiers, and other targets taken from drone feed. These datasets are exquisite training sets for neural nets, and both sides have used them to develop autonomous targeting systems. Neither side has yet fielded such systems at scale, but the developments appear to be far enough along that such systems will likely appear within 12 to 18 months at the outside.

Discussions in the US and allied states about LAS have hitherto turned heavily on the legal and ethical challenges involved in fielding them. How will such systems be designed to adhere to the law of armed conflict relating to collateral damage and civilian casualties? Who bears responsibility for violations of the law of armed conflict? Popular discussions continue to focus on the question of whether a machine should be allowed to kill without human oversight.

The urgent need to make systems proof against electromagnetic interference, ideally by eliminating their need to communicate at all once launched, has driven both the Russians and the Ukrainians to develop such systems. The delays in fielding them thus far are largely the result of pragmatic problems rather than ethical dilemmas, but the solutions of the pragmatic problems will likely create systems that can respond to the ethical dilemmas as well.

The problem both sides in this war face in developing fully autonomous lethal systems is that they use roughly the same kit—there are T-72s, BMPs, and other Soviet systems on both sides of the line. Close combat remains the norm, moreover, such that it is impossible to draw a neat geographical box near the front line within which any legitimate target can be identified as the enemy. The unreliability of geolocation in the current EW environment also degrades the utility of precisely drawn geofences near the front lines.

One partial solution in progress is the development of “last-mile autonomous” systems. Such systems are manually launched and human guided to a given engagement area that is deemed free of friendly forces and then set free, in what is likely the most seriously contested EW space, to find and attack legitimate targets on their own. These systems face the obvious challenge of penetrating densely EW-covered airspace to get to their free-fire zones, but careful route planning can partially alleviate this problem. The challenge of reaching the free-fire zone, nevertheless, is one of the main drivers behind the push to full autonomy—systems that can launch themselves, navigate to an appropriate area, and select and destroy targets without any human intervention.

Such systems must be able to distinguish between friendly and enemy forces on their own and without communicating back to a home station in real time. They must, in other words, ensure that they attack only enemy T-72s and not friendly T-72s. That ability to discriminate between friend and foe T-72s is a much higher bar to meet than the ability to avoid striking, say, a Toyota Hilux when looking for a T-72. The target discrimination being built into LAS under development in Ukraine will thus need to meet any reasonable requirement relating to law of armed conflict targeting.

The reasonableness of such requirements must flow from the standards already applied to human-directed weapons, moreover, not to some arbitrary standard of perfection. LAS cannot be required never to kill innocent civilians or cause collateral damage, because humans fighting in war are not so required. LAS must, rather, perform at least as well as humans in this regard—and the standards they must meet to avoid fratricidal attacks in close combat will likely ensure that they can. (Note also that the conventional battlefields in Ukraine, unlike the irregular warfare battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, are much less densely occupied by civilians, who generally flee as enemy forces approach, greatly reducing the risks of tactical LAS engaging civilian targets.) The ethical and legal complexities of LAS are real and must remain considerations in such systems’ development and employment. But discussions about LAS must consider the capabilities of the systems now being developed and proceed from the recognition that those capabilities inherently create systems that can address many of the legitimate and important legal and ethical concerns.

Kinetic Counter-Drone Systems. The limitations of EW in defending against drones highlight the importance of developing effective kinetic counter-drone systems that can be both man portable and vehicle mounted. The advent of truly EW-proof LAS will make such systems essential. Neither side has yet fielded effective kinetic counter-drone systems intended to defend against tactical UAVs at scale (the author is unaware of whether any prototypes have been tested or fielded). Both sides have fielded UAV prototypes that can attack helicopters and other UAVs using various means, from nets to ramming. But vehicle-mounted and man-portable systems have not yet appeared.

The challenges of spotting, identifying, and shooting down an attacking drone using vehicle-mounted or human-carried systems are considerable, to be sure. Such systems must avoid firing at every bird, for example, or even at every drone in order to permit friendly drones to operate. They should presumably be able to identify and down a drone only if, through its flight pattern, it poses a clear danger to whatever they are defending—a complex challenge indeed. But even though the challenge of defeating rocket-propelled grenades using kinetic defenses was also long regarded as almost impossible to solve, the Trophy system mounted on Israeli vehicles has proved quite effective. So there is no reason to assume that the counter-drone challenge will not be amenable to an appropriate kinetic defense.

The word “kinetic” here is used to mean simply defenses that actually destroy the drone rather than interfere with its electronics. Means of destruction can be bullets, nets, directed energy, or anything else that actually physically wrecks the drone before it can strike. Systems to defend exposed infantry must destroy the drone in such a way that its debris does not cause too much damage either.

The development and fielding of such kinetic counter-drone systems capable of defending individual vehicles and squads or fire teams are essential to restoring maneuver warfare. Such systems will likely become part of the defensive requirement of any system that must operate on the modern battlefield—they will become part of a redefinition of “armor.”

All such systems will be vulnerable to countermeasures. Any system can be overwhelmed by numbers, for example, or by drones designed to ensure that even their debris is lethal. The same offense-defense race will develop between drones and kinetic counter-drone systems that is now occurring between drones and EW. Such offense-defense races are inherent in warfare, however. For example, they also characterized the development of armor for tanks and tank main guns and main gun rounds. There are no panaceas in military technology. But kinetic counter-drone systems form one of the few areas of obvious technological requirement and development that has not yet seen significant advances in the Russia-Ukraine war but will likely come to prominence in the relatively near future.

Long-Range Attack Drones. Both the Russia-Ukraine and Iran-Israel wars feature the widespread use of very long-range (greater than 1,000 kilometers) one-way attack drones. The Russians (and, of course, the Iranians and their proxies) famously rely on Iranian-developed Shaheds and some indigenous variants, while the Ukrainians have produced their own long-range one-way attack drones.

These drones are inferior to long-range precision missiles in two main ways—their speed and their payloads. Their relatively slow speed makes intercepting them considerably easier than intercepting long-range missiles, permitting even individuals with rifles to do the job in some instances, as previously noted. Their relatively small payloads restrict their ability to attack most hardened and many softer targets effectively.

These drones offset their disadvantages by being much less expensive to produce and often more reliably precise. Their slow speed, in addition, increases their ability to collect intelligence in the course of their attacks, making almost every attacking drone a sensor, even if it fails in its strike mission. Such drones are designed and built to be rapidly modifiable with different sensors, communications systems, and software. Their low cost makes rapid experimentation in the field feasible.

These drones’ reliable precision offsets their limited payloads by allowing them to hit identified vulnerable components in large complexes that they could not otherwise heavily damage. They can hit control centers, critical valves, electrical junctions, or other soft but vital targets in refinery and other industrial complexes, sometimes taking them offline for weeks or months. They can take advantage of poor practices in storing ammunition or fuel to truly devastating effect, as the Ukrainians have shown on several occasions.

Their low cost also makes them suitable as decoys to distract and absorb attention and interceptors from air defense elements, thus allowing missiles to penetrate. On several occasions, the Ukrainians have used drones in such modes to permit missiles to destroy Russian advanced air defense systems (S-300 and S-400) that should have been able to down the missiles. The Russians have gone so far as to establish serial production of purely decoy drones made of Styrofoam and plywood without explosives that are intended only to distract Ukrainian air defenses and return intelligence.

Both the Russians and the Iranians have been experimenting with optimal strike packages that include long-range drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. The Russians dynamically adjust the compositions of their packages as Ukrainian defenders respond.⁴

The most important characteristic of such drones at this time is that they are cheap and plentiful, with ranges that rival Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles. The Ukrainian air force reported that it downed roughly 14,400 reconnaissance and strike drones in 2024. The Shahed-type drones reportedly have ranges in excess of 2,000 kilometers and possibly as great as 2,500 kilometers.⁵ Long-range one-way attack drones are unlikely to replace missiles, which are far better suited for many critical targets, but they will continue to supplement missiles and enhance their effectiveness by drawing off air defenders’ attention and resources. Such drones can and will also be used to strike targets whose value is not great enough to justify expending scarce and expensive long-range missiles to attack, potentially greatly broadening the set of vulnerable places that a defender must protect.

Implications for the US

Drones and EW. American ground forces are not currently prepared to operate effectively in an environment characterized by the phenomena described above. All US military vehicles are susceptible to destruction by the tactical drone systems being used in Ukraine; the US does not have reliable counter-drone systems, either kinetic or EW, to prevent the use of such drones; and the US does not currently field large numbers of tactical drones or the integrative software systems required to use them effectively. US forces can likely operate more effectively than Ukrainian forces in the sort of EW environment currently seen in Ukraine but are not immune to the effects of that environment.

American technological advantages in other areas will not remediate these problems. The US and its allies can likely establish air superiority or even air supremacy over any adversary other than the PRC, which will almost certainly be able to contest airspace. But air supremacy does not translate into UAV supremacy. A situation in which the US has air supremacy at the altitudes of fixed-wing aircraft but the adversary has supremacy at the altitudes of tactical UAVs is not only possible but actually likely in current circumstances.

Tactical drones are operated by small groups of individuals sprinkled throughout ground forces. Integrative control systems can function in dispersed nodes relying on cloud-based infrastructure—and it is noteworthy that the Russians have completely failed to prevent Ukraine from using such infrastructure despite Russia’s much-vaunted cyber capabilities. Destroying the adversary’s ability to use drones by relying on advantages resulting from air supremacy is tantamount to destroying the enemy’s necessarily dispersed ground forces from the air.

Long-range precision strike systems do not solve the problem either, for similar reasons. Finding lucrative targets for expensive and rare long-range strike systems against an adversary that can and will disperse logistics systems supplying its small, lightweight drones to the front lines will be difficult. Destroying those logistics systems with precision strikes will likely prove impossible.

The development of effective kinetic and EW-based counter-drone systems suitable for point defense is an urgent requirement for the US and allied militaries. Such systems must be affordable and suitable for mass serial production as well as rapid in-the-field upgrades to platforms, electronics, and software. They must be able to defend against tactical drones on the battlefield and long-range one-way strike drones aimed at targets thousands of kilometers from the front lines. They must be able to do so inexpensively and without diverting the attention and resources of IAMDS suitable for defense against missiles and other more advanced air threats.

The US must also reconsider its basing strategy in light of the developments in long-range one-way attack drones. Such drones could be used to strike military housing, logistics support centers, and other facilities in Europe that are not and cannot be readily hardened but that would not have constituted suitable targets for long-range missile attack. Reliable counter-drone systems can reduce the requirement to transform the US basing posture, but they will not likely eliminate that requirement, since reliability will be measured in percentages of kills, not clear skies.

US forward basing near potential future front lines will likely have to become much more dispersed and will have to field reliable tactical counter-UAV systems. Swarm tactics will develop to overwhelm those defenses, making large concentrations of forces vulnerable once more, even after counter-UAV systems are fielded. (This argument assumes that the cost and challenge of using drone swarms will limit their use to relatively lucrative targets, at least initially, but that assumption is tenuous and unlikely to hold over the long term.)

The US and its allies and partners can and should also derive the benefits that drone and EW capabilities offer the defender. The Russia-Ukraine war shows that, at least at the current level of technology, the drone-EW competition gives the defender a considerable advantage. The US and its allies will be on the defensive in the most likely conflicts for which they must be prepared and should have this capability in their arsenals. Effective point-defense counter-drone systems will reduce the defender’s advantage over time, to be sure, by allowing attacking forces to protect themselves while concentrating on the offensive, but the offense-defense race cycling at high speed will periodically restore it.

These technological developments will likely also demand changes in campaign design, as the author and Kimberly Kagan have argued elsewhere.⁶ The near impossibility of conducting effective maneuver operations in the face of a defending TRSC will likely impel attackers to first develop ways of temporarily neutralizing the defender’s TRSC and then sustain that neutralization long enough and deep enough into the defender’s rear to permit attacking forces to secure operationally significant objectives. Ukrainian and Russian forces are already experimenting with this approach on limited scales. “Concentrating for the attack” will thus likely come to require concentrating (and holding back and concealing) technological advances as well as forces.

The extremely rapid offense-defense cycle has implications for the DIB and stockage policies. It is unlikely that millions of drones produced before a war breaks out will be effective for very long after hostilities begin. Such drones will, at a minimum, need to be modified rapidly, especially in their electronics and software components. It is also possible, however, that the optimum strategy will rely less on stockpiling large numbers of systems that may prove obsolete quickly and more on sustaining the DIB necessary to produce large numbers of continually modified systems on demand.

IAMDS. The principal implications of the effectiveness of IAMDS in both the Russia-Ukraine and Iran-Israel wars are nearly self-evident and have been partially laid out above. The US and its allies must devise systems that optimize for cost and availability of defensive systems as well as for effectiveness. They must ensure that expensive interceptors are not wasted on decoy drones but rather reserved for the targets only they can engage. The scale of the requirement for interceptors is also daunting. Reports of shortages of Patriot and National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System interceptors are ubiquitous and concerning. One need only tally the number of missiles the PRC has stockpiled and consider the defense requirements of US forces in Japan, the Japan Self-Defense Forces, and Taiwan to reflect on the need for a fundamental change in US acquisition approaches to IAMDS interceptors and launchers.

The US military should not rely comfortably on the fact that it reportedly has geolocation and other capabilities to prevent an adversary from interfering with its long-range strike systems the way the Russians have interfered with US-supplied HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile System rounds. The PRC has considerably more technological and industrial capacity than Russia has, and the main lesson of these two current conflicts is likely to hold into the future: The missile will only sometimes get through.

Caveats

The author is a long-standing skeptic of overhyped “revolutions in military affairs” and has repeatedly criticized others for exaggerating the revolutionary impact of technology on warfare. The example of J. F. C. Fuller is particularly vivid in this respect. Fuller accurately observed transformations in the character of war that World War I had generated—predominantly but not exclusively by the advent of tanks and aircraft—and then extrapolated them to absurd degrees in his Gold Medal Essay on the future of war.⁷ The foregoing text reads, even to the author himself, like something of an echo of that essay, particularly in the confident and dispositive statements about what successful militaries will require in future wars. The first critical caveat to the argument above, therefore, is that changes in technology that appear for a few years to be absolutely transformative may not be so in the long run, and this chapter may be no more prescient than Fuller’s. Forecasting the full impact of technological innovations early in their adoption is extremely fraught and error prone.

The counterargument to this caveat is that tanks actually did transform the character of war, in conjunction with aircraft and other technologies, when properly integrated into existing and transforming military systems. Fuller did not really foresee what that integration would look like or what the transformed war would be, but he did capture a true inflection in the character of war based on his observations of changes in war as it was being fought. The observations in this chapter, drawn from actual combat in two theaters, are surely wrong in many important respects. The likelihood that the advent of mass drone warfare and the drone-EW race will not significantly change the character of war over the long term, however, appears very small.

Old weapons systems will not lose their value on the future battlefield suddenly, if at all. The tank has not suddenly become any more obsolete than it ever was just because of drones. Neither has artillery. On the contrary, those traditional systems and many others remain critical components of the full TRSC that the Russians and Ukrainians are fielding. There have been systems capable of destroying tanks since before there were tanks. The advent of airpower, long-range strike, and, now, drones has not made even towed tube artillery obsolete or irrelevant. Shell hunger correlates directly with battlefield performance even today. It is either possible to defend against attacking drones (in which case tanks, artillery, and other “archaic” systems can continue to function at least in part as intended), or it isn’t (in which case nothing will be able to survive and no movement will be possible). The loudest clarion call emerging from the current conflict is the development of such defensive systems and the integration of new technologies optimally with current capabilities, not the abolition of traditional systems.

The final caveat, however, is that success in future war will likely require significant adjustments in all aspects of military forces and their employment. Sprinkling hundreds of thousands or millions of drones onto military forces as they are currently organized, trained, and equipped will fail. It is impossible to see now what the next optimized forms of warfare and shapes of military forces will be, but we must begin to envisage and develop the next “interim” force to implement the requirements for change that we can see now, recognizing that all force constructs, in the end, are interim.

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