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UKRAINE UKRAINE'S DRONE INITIATIVES The Military Show: MASTERS of Drone War - Even US Can't Believe What Ukrine is Doing PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct0G-vZHbMk
MASTERS of Drone War - Even US Can't Believe What Ukrine is Doing The Military Show Jul 6, 2025 1.76M subscribers #militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis Ukraine has redefined modern warfare through an unprecedented drone transformation. From backyard-built quadcopters to AI-guided swarm attacks deep inside Russian territory, its military has become the global leader in low-cost, high-impact drone warfare. This revolution—driven by improvisation, innovation, and industrial scaling—has stunned NATO and reshaped global defense strategies. Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: / @themilitaryshow #militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis #themilitaryshow SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/Sw8VSBYn Peter Burgess COMMENTARY The emergence of Ukraine as a 'drone superpower' is really good mews. My global knowledge is quite good, but still quite limited. I do not have a good feel about Russia and perhaps also towards Russions ... but I have a much better feel about the countries that have been part of the former Soviet Empire and have had to 'Kow-Tow' to Russia and Russians. At one point in my career I did international government work in Kazakhstan and Ukraine and learned something of the human dynamic that existed between the Russians and the people of these other places. The Russians were in power, but this was not popular! In the Mid 1990s, Russians had me 'removed' from an international team of the World Bank / KPMG working in Kazakhstan because of my considerable experience and commitment to the goals of the international consultancy. At the time I was furious that KPMG had not put up a more substantive objection ... but it may well have been something that saved my life. The Russians were, in fact, playing 'hard ball' and people like me needed to be taken off the field. Something similar happened to Jeffrey Sachs who had a much higher profile than me. He was doing similar work in Russia itself, and I understand his work was summarily discontinued in much the same way that happened to ne in Kazakhstan. Peter Burgess Transcript 0:00 They started with wedding drones and duct tape. Now, they're taking out nuclear bombers thousands of miles inside Russian territory. Ukraine’s drone revolution has left the world stunned—including U.S. officials who can barely believe what they’re seeing. In just three years, Ukraine has transformed from a nation with barely any drone capability into the undisputed master of drone warfare. We’re talking about a military that once had to retrofit off-the-shelf quadcopters—now pulling off precision AI-guided swarm attacks and launching drone ambushes so deep into Russia, they make Cold War espionage look tame. But this story isn’t just about flying robots. It’s about how one underdog nation rewrote the rules of modern warfare—and forced the world’s biggest powers to follow its lead. Let’s dive into what may be the fastest and most radical military transformation in human history—and why no one, not even the Pentagon, saw it coming. On February 24, 2022, when Russia launched the invasion, Ukraine’s entire military drone arsenal consisted of 1:03 about 20 Turkish-made Bayraktar drones and some scattered volunteer units flying modified consumer quadcopters. But desperation breeds innovation like nothing else. Within weeks, Ukrainian volunteers were setting up workshops in garages, basements, and abandoned buildings, taking DJI Mavic drones – the ones people use to film their vacations – and turning them into precision weapons. Both military and volunteer enthusiasts would outfit drones with grenades with zip ties and electrical tape, creating slow-guided missiles that cost maybe $2,000 if we’re generous. And yet, those systems could take out Russian tanks worth millions. The key here is that Ukraine has exploited Russian tank vulnerabilities – the thin armor plating near the turret provides a key access point to the spare ammunition inside the tank. And given how even the modern T-90M tank owes a large part of its design philosophy to the Soviet-era tanks of the 1950s and the 1960s, that vulnerability never really got patched out completely. So regardless of what tank Russia deployed to the front, it could meet the same fate at any 2:03 time. Of course, the initial system was full of downsides despite its potential. For one, the small drones could only feasibly carry a single grenade or another small ordnance. The drone’s slow speed and low maximum altitude of around 200 to 300 feet, combined with a small 3-mile range from its controller, meant that they could only be used directly on the front and spotted and taken out by regular gunfire. But these drones would end up being just the start of a major technical progression. Enter the First-Person View drone revolution. Most FPV drones that Ukraine would end up using after 2023 started as racing drones. Enthusiasts use controllers with monitors on them and race the drones around abandoned buildings or nature parks while avoiding obstacles. Ukraine took that same technology, slapped some explosives on it, and suddenly had kamikaze drones that could thread the needle between trees, dodge defensive fire, and slam into targets with surgical precision. The detonation method for most of these drones was 4:00 simple enough: when the “payload” collided with anything at a high enough speed, it would simply explode. The targets remained the same: tanks and infantry support vehicles, vital pieces of equipment, and even human troops. The numbers tell an incredible story. In 2023, Ukraine produced close to 600,000 FPV drones. By 2024, Ukraine announced they were ramping up that number to 1.5 million drones of all types. But 2025? They’re setting a goal to produce 4.5 million FPV drones alone. That’s more than 12,000 drones produced every single day. To put that in perspective, Ukraine’s drone production is outpacing Europe’s artillery ammunition shipments to the country, which were estimated to be almost 1 million in 2024. And while artillery shells are basically expensive bullets that leave the barrel on a parabolic trajectory, drones can be guided, rerouted, or even recalled if they get compromised. One of the major advantages of these drones is that they are light, incredibly easy to transport, and don’t require significant supportive equipment. Most importantly, they could be operated via the internet so long as 5:03 the drone’s receiver could connect to cellular data. All of these factors would make them prime candidates for conducting the famous Operation Spiderweb. This is where Ukraine proved it wasn’t just good at improvising anymore. The country’s “drone squads” were operating at a level that even seasoned military professionals found hard to believe. Ukrainian intelligence spent 18 months planning an operation to hit Russian strategic bomber bases. Not the ones near the border where you might expect drone attacks, but bases deep inside Russia, with one of them 3,000 miles away in Siberia. That’s like launching an attack from New York and hitting targets in Alaska. Here’s how they pulled it off: Ukrainian operatives smuggled drones across five Russian time zones using cargo trucks with retractable roofs. The military-grade drones were tucked away in fake shipping containers rolling down Russian highways. Ukrainian drones hit Belaya Air Base in Siberia, Olenya Air Base in the Arctic Circle, and two major air bases relatively near Moscow itself: Ivanovo and Dyagilevo (dee-AH-gih-leh-voh). Satellite imagery later confirmed the destruction 6:01 of at least 12-13 aircraft, with Ukrainian sources claiming they took out 41 total, which would be about a third of Russia’s entire strategic bomber fleet. And Ukraine took them out with drones that cost maybe $400 each. The psychological and geopolitical impact was massive. For the first time since World War II, a non-nuclear power had successfully attacked nuclear-capable strategic bombers deep within a nuclear power’s territory. Russia started putting old car tires on their remaining bombers’ wings, hoping it would somehow protect against drone attacks. But let’s talk about how exactly Ukraine pulled off what might be the most impressive industrial transformation in modern history. Remember, this is a country that was getting bombed daily while building the world’s most advanced drone industry from scratch. The traditional way countries build military capabilities is through massive defense contractors, billion-dollar facilities, and procurement processes that take decades. Ukraine went in a different direction, creating a distributed network of over 500 suppliers ranging from major companies to literal garage workshops. And the military gave these suppliers a generous budget that was directly 7:02 coming from NATO financial and military donations. What ended up happening was an exponential growth of drone manufacturing capabilities. Based on the yearly figures mentioned earlier, you’d think they managed to double or triple production year-over-year. But the reality is far more impressive. In early 2024, Ukraine was producing about 20,000 FPV drones per month. By January 2025, they’d ramped up to 200,000 per month. That’s a tenfold increase in production capacity in less than 12 months, accomplished while under active bombardment. And these new factories weren’t just cranking out cheap junk. The success rates of these drones improved from about 30 percent in 2022 to 70 percent for high-quality systems by 2024. So Ukraine was making more drones while also improving their reliability and performance at the same time. It basically went against the common “pick two from fast-cheap-good” trope of business services. Of course, we can’t underestimate the costs of creating these programs from scratch. But even there, Ukraine had managed to turn traditions upside down. Ukraine allocated over $2.5 billion for drone procurement 8:01 across 2024 and 2025, signing contracts with 76 different companies, ranging from small production to full-scale factories. Overall, the country is spending around $60 million per month to distribute drones. But that entire investment was a drop in the bucket compared to the $250 billion that NATO has donated to the country throughout the first three years of the war. And yet, Ukraine’s drone industry ended up outputting capabilities that would have cost hundreds of billions using traditional military procurement, as drones were responsible for 60 to 70 percent of Russian equipment destruction in 2025. But it’s impossible to discuss how drones upended the concept of warfare without going deeper into the actual drones themselves. Unfortunately, there are dozens of types of drones scattered across several different categories. Let’s start with the bread and butter of Ukraine’s drone arsenal: the FPV attack drones. These are the descendants of those racing drones we talked about earlier, but they’ve evolved into something much more sophisticated. The most successful models include the KH-S7, Kolibry (Hummingbird), and the Shrike. Now, 9:00 these might not sound intimidating but think of them as flying guided missiles that cost about $400 to $500 each. The basic concept is an exercise in simplicity. Take a racing drone frame, add an explosive payload weighing between one and three pounds, stick a better camera on the front and a larger battery to account for the increased weight, and you get a precision weapon that can take out a million-dollar tank. But Ukraine didn’t stop with basic attack models. They developed interceptor drones specifically designed to hunt other drones. They look like fighter jets the size of pizza boxes, capable of hitting 300 kilometers per hour – that’s 201 miles per hour – while carrying small explosive charges. Some of these interceptor variants got really creative, using simple wooden sticks aimed at enemy drone propellers. It’s not exactly high-tech, but devastatingly effective, and best of all, repeatable. If the drone manages to untangle itself from the target once the propeller is out, it can fly back to base and even get a new stick. Then there are the fiber-optic controlled versions, which might be the most backward-looking technical solution of the entire war. As electronic warfare got more sophisticated, radio-controlled drones would end up getting jammed by developing Russian and Ukrainian 10:03 countermeasures. So both sides ended up going back to the drawing board to implement 20th-century 10:07 solutions for a 21st-century problem: they ran cable-powered drones. These drones are connected to hair-thin fiber optic cables that stretch up to 12 miles behind them, providing completely jam-proof connections. It’s like the world’s deadliest kite string. And to showcase just how prevalent they’ve become, soldiers have started finding bird’s nests made from cables left over from downed drones. However, short-range first-person-view drones tell only a part of the story. To really underscore how effective drones can be, we need to turn to the other aspects of warfare, such as the navy. The first thing you need to remember here is that Ukraine doesn’t really have a navy. When Russia invaded, Ukraine had maybe a handful of patrol boats and some coastal defense systems. While its coast is 1,200 miles long, all of it is on the isolated Black Sea, making an international naval invasion practically impossible. Unless of course, that invader was Russia, which had an entire Black Sea Fleet with dozens of warships, submarines, 11:00 and naval aviation. So what did Ukraine do? It invented an entirely new category of naval warfare. The MAGURA V5 is probably the most famous of these naval drones. Picture a small speedboat, maybe 18 feet long, packed with explosives and controlled remotely. The drone is deployed on the water, a process that Ukraine practically pioneered for actual combat. But here’s where it gets wild—Ukraine started adapting these things for roles nobody had ever tried before. In December 2024, a MAGURA V5 equipped with R-73 air-to-air missiles successfully shot down a Russian helicopter. A robot boat destroying an aircraft had literally never happened in the history of warfare before Ukraine figured out how to do it. The other part of Ukraine’s sea drone arsenal is the Sea Baby drone, which serves as Ukraine’s heavy hitter for naval operations. These systems were responsible for the dramatic attack on the Crimean Bridge in July 2023, and they’ve been systematically hunting Russian warships ever since. Modified versions were equipped with heavy machine guns and started engaging Russian helicopters, essentially turning robot boats into floating anti-aircraft platforms. The strategic impact has been incredible. Ukrainian naval drones 12:03 have sunk or destroyed 10 Russian warships in 21 confirmed attacks. Russia went from having naval supremacy in the Black Sea to being afraid to operate its ships anywhere near Ukrainian waters. This development was unprecedented in naval history: a fleet being systematically defeated by a nation that didn’t even have a traditional navy. Additionally, to truly understand how dramatically Ukraine’s capabilities evolved, let’s look at their long-range strike program. These aren’t the small tactical drones we’ve been talking about so far. They are essentially cruise missiles built in Ukrainian workshops. The UJ-22 was one of the early success stories, a winged design that could hit targets up to 500 miles away. But Ukraine’s engineers weren’t satisfied with that range. By 2024, their long-range drones were routinely hitting targets over 600 miles from Ukrainian territory. Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesperson Andrii Yusov commented that “Ukrainian long-range unmanned aerial vehicles can hypothetically operate up to 2,000 kilometers” (or 1,200 miles) away from the country. The production numbers for these 13:00 long-range systems show how seriously Ukraine takes this capability. The aim is to produce 30,000 long-range drones in 2025, enabling dozens of drones to strike Russia each day. This is in contrast to 2024’s procurement numbers of around 6,000 units. The five-fold increase in drone procurement will allow Ukraine to continuously expand its list of potential targets inside Russia, which includes vital ammunition storage, control centers, military bases, oil refineries, and even threaten population centers when needed. Two large attacks in August and September 2024 targeted the area of the Russian capital itself, aiming for crucial industrial buildings. This showcased the capabilities of Ukraine’s drones to the Russian public, which is under constant pressure from the Kremlin’s propaganda. And even the systems and tactics that the drones used changed. The “original batch” of long-range drones were essentially slightly slower missiles with smaller ordnance that had limited guidance and correction capabilities. The range and maneuverability steadily grew, but they were still “locked on” to a target from launch to detonation. But the latest evolution is the B-1 dive-bomber, designed to loiter in the air for hours before 14:04 selecting and engaging targets. These platforms represent a completely new category of weapons: patient, intelligent hunters that can patrol vast areas and strike when conditions are optimal. The capabilities of Ukrainian drone operators to deftly deploy small drones, maneuver them around Russian defenses and countermeasures, and achieve impressive accuracy are nothing short of remarkable. This underscored how much experience the Ukrainian troops have accumulated over three years, making them some of the most capable military units in existence. One of the most notable units is the famous Magyar’s Birds, which published monthly statistics for March 2025 showing over 11,600 sorties (or operations) of drone launches alone, culminating in over 5,300 attacked targets spread across Russia’s buildings, major military equipment, and troops. But human operators could become even deadlier if they get assistance from artificial intelligence systems. This is where things get really futuristic, and where the implications for future warfare become almost scary. One of the key ways artificial intelligence develops is through 15:03 absorbing real-life footage and data, processing it, and creating connections and patterns between these scenarios. Without it, AI has a difficult time differentiating targets and even flying the drone in the first place. This is where the sheer scale of drone warfare in Ukraine comes in. A non-profit Ukrainian digital system called OCHI is just one of many systems that centralize and analyze video feeds from drone footage. According to the company’s founder, Oleksandr Dmitrev, OCHI has been given access to feeds from over 15,000 drone crews working on the frontlines, collecting two million hours (or 228 years) of battlefield video from drones from 2022 to 2025. That’s a monumental amount of data that could be used to train the system to distinguish between “friendly” and “enemy” positions as well as prioritize vital enemy equipment. And the potential for using these drones will only grow. In 2024, Ukraine had used only 10,000 drones with built-in intelligence systems, which is a small fraction of the 1.5 million produced in the year. Considering the three-fold year-over-year increase, we might be looking at 30,000 or more 16:03 of these drones in 2025. But those drones have a chance to be significantly more effective than human-guided ones. Here’s how this works in practice. Traditional drones require constant human control. A pilot has to guide them to the target, identify what they’re looking at, and decide when to attack. An AI-guided drone can do much of that on its own. Reportedly, AI has been able to identify 64 different types of military targets automatically, navigate to objectives even when they lose contact with human operators, and make basic tactical decisions in real time. And this was back in late 2023 before those millions of hours of footage could be put to use to further refine the systems. Accuracy and reliability could perhaps be the most affected by AI guidance. Manual drones succeed in hitting their targets maybe 10-20% of the time. Smart drones with integrated intelligence? They’re hitting 70-80 percent success rates. That means instead of needing eight or nine drones to guarantee hitting a target, Ukraine might only need one or two. But here’s where it gets really interesting. These smart-systems can work together in ways that human 17:01 operators simply can’t match. Multiple drones can coordinate attacks, share targeting information, and adapt their tactics based on what other drones in the swarm are seeing and doing. It’s like having a hive mind of flying robots that can out-think and out-maneuver human defenders. The Spiderweb operation we talked about earlier? Those drones used smart systems to find and strike their targets even when they lost contact with Ukrainian operators thousands of miles away. Once they set off and received geo-locked data on the (stationary) target, the robots literally completed their missions on their own. Ukraine’s Delta situational awareness system serves as the brain that coordinates all of this. It connects acoustic sensors, reconnaissance drones, attack platforms, and human operators into a single networked intelligence system. It’s a sort of battlefield-only internet where every sensor, every drone, and every soldier can instantly share what they’re seeing and coordinate responses in real-time. And Ukraine’s successes aren’t just important for Ukraine. Remember that we started by suggesting that the U.S. is awed at what Ukraine is doing? Well, that’s because pretty much every nation out there is now scrambling to keep up. 18:01 NATO immediately established the specialized Joint Analysis Training and Education Centre (or JATEC) in Poland to study Ukrainian innovations alongside Ukrainian developers. The alliance that had spent decades perfecting expensive, sophisticated weapon systems is now suddenly trying to learn lessons from a country that builds tank killers in garage workshops. The United States launched something called the Replicator initiative. On the surface, the Department of Defense reported that it’s an investment to counter China’s increasing capabilities. However, the actual reason for its existence lies in its name, replicating Ukraine’s approach of producing large numbers of low-cost autonomous systems. The Pentagon’s 2025 budget included $1 billion specifically for expanding attack drone production while cutting funding for some traditional helicopter programs. China’s response was even more dramatic. The People’s Liberation Army completely reorganized its Strategic Support Force, creating three separate branches focused on the kind of integrated drone-electronic warfare operations that Ukraine had perfected. And this is just the start. European nations launched the largest rearmament effort since the Cold War, 19:03 with over $841 billion (in U.S. dollars) in new defense spending approved across the bloc. Countries reinvigorated military spending loans and incentives to “re-arm” Europe in light of Russia’s increased aggression toward the West. And this all stems from the inherent economic paradigm shift from the prevalence of drone warfare. Ukrainian FPV drones cost no more than $2,000, but are fully capable of destroying Russian tanks worth millions of dollars. Strategic bombers worth hundreds of millions of dollars each are getting taken out by drone swarms that cost less than a decent pickup truck. Even AI-guided drones have costs that rarely go into six figures per unit, and they become increasingly cost-efficient with every new improvement and larger production orders. The cost-exchange ratios of using drones are so high that traditional military economics stopped making sense. The broader economic impact was substantial. The global military drone market is projected to reach $47.16 billion by 2032, up from about $14.14 billion in 2023. Mini-drones 20:00 and autonomous systems are essentially expected to dominate future procurement. This underscores a significant concern that NATO analysts will need to ponder for years to come: just how cost-effective is traditional military equipment when compared to the rising dominance of drones? And the important question now isn’t whether other nations will try to replicate Ukraine’s drone innovations. It’s whether they can adapt their military thinking fast enough to keep up with the pace of change that Ukraine has unleashed. Based on what we’ve seen so far, that’s going to be a much harder challenge than most military establishments are prepared for. Thank you for watching, and if you want to tune in for more analyses of how the War in Ukraine is shaping global economics, geopolitics, and even human progress, subscribe to The Military Show.

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