Death by Drone

Thinking about: Modern warfare

Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Vladimir Putin assumed that he could simply send soldiers, tanks, and artillery across the border, and that would be the end of that, but this turned out not to be the case. Although the Ukrainians lacked the troops and weaponry of the Russians, they were brave, determined, and ingenious. They started using drones for surveillance and before long, weaponized them. I was somewhat stunned the first time I saw a video of a drone dropping a bomb on Russian soldiers. How clever, I thought—and how deadly.

Drone operators use controls similar to those used by hobbyists who fly remote control (RC) airplanes. With their left thumb, they control the speed and left-right direction of the drone, and with their right thumb, they control its tilt and up-down pitch. Some drones are also equipped with First-Person View (FPV) cameras that let their operators, by wearing special goggles, see the world from the drone’s perspective.

Drones are more likely than artillery and rockets to score an exact hit on their target. Drones are also cheaper to build and operate than airplanes, and it is easier, cheaper, and quicker to train a drone operator than it is to train a pilot. Furthermore, it requires considerable courage to shoot at someone while you are being shot at in return. This is often the case with pilots, but not with drone operators.

Being the target of a drone attack is doubtless a terrifying experience. Drones are hard to shoot down. Run from them, and they follow you. Hide from them in a building, and if there is an open door or a hole in the wall, they might come inside in pursuit of you. One suspects that those who have experienced drone attacks, if they survived them, would thereafter be susceptible to night terrors. It wouldn’t be surprising, however, if drone operators also paid an emotional price. Because FPV technology lets operators see the terror on the faces of those they hunt down, it wouldn’t be surprising if they subsequently experienced “role reversal” nightmares, in which they imagined themselves in the role of hunted rather than hunter.

The obvious way to fend off drones is to shoot them down, but because they are small, moving objects, this is difficult to do. An alternative way to deal with drones is to jam the radio signals used to control them. In the Ukraine, this tactic worked for a while, but then operators started communicating via exceedingly thin fiber-optic cables. As a drone flew, the fiber leading back to the operator would spool out. Before long, many areas were so covered with cables that walking through them was difficult. It looked like a monstrous deranged spider had spun a haphazard web.

Widespread use of drones has dramatically altered the battlefield equation. Foot soldiers are now quite vulnerable, even if they hide in trenches. Fortunately, tasks that used to put them at risk, such as transporting supplies and evacuating the wounded, are increasingly being performed by ground robots. Tanks and artillery are easy for drones to target. On the water, ships are being sunk by naval drones, some of which can submerge. Furthermore, although jets and bombers may be hard to hit while they are flying, they have to land, and when they do, they become easy targets for drone swarms. On June 1, 2025, Ukraine employed this tactic in Operation Spider’s Web, in which a swarm of drones, the total cost of which was under a million dollars, was used to destroy Russian aircraft worth billions of dollars.

By building and launching cheap drones by the thousands, nations can overwhelm opponents that rely on relatively few big, expensive weapons for their defense. Drones also make it possible to attack a nation by selectively attacking its infrastructure and economy. One can imagine, for example, simultaneous drone attacks taking out large parts of a nation’s power grid. (Those high-voltage transmission towers are such easy and obvious targets.) By attacking data centers, drones could disrupt access to “the cloud,” and as a result, credit cards would stop working and trading on financial markets would come to a standstill. Furthermore, a single drone strike could put an integrated-circuit factory out of commission. Fabrication of those circuits requires an ultra-clean, particle-controlled environment. By blowing a hole in the wall or roof of a fabrication plant, a drone could contaminate that environment.

Such attacks, I should add, can be launched not only by other nations, but by extremist groups within a nation. It is also conceivable that a time will come in which wars, rather than having front lines, are waged everywhere and all at once.

A strong case can be made, then, that what America needs is not the development of a “Golden Fleet” of warships—made of steel rather than aluminum!—but a robust defense against drones that, disassembled, easily fit in a one-car garage—and are made of plastic rather than metal. One hopes that the powers-that-be in Washington recognize this danger and act decisively to address it.

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