Drones: The New Center of Gravity in Modern Warfare
War has always been a contest of adaptation. Gunpowder, tanks, and nuclear weapons each reshaped the way battles were fought. Today, it is the drone—cheap, expendable, and ubiquitous—that has become the new center of gravity on the battlefield.
Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) no longer play a supporting role; they define the tempo of modern combat. They collapse the concealment window from hours to minutes, spot for artillery in real time, and deliver loitering strikes at a fraction of the cost of traditional missiles. Every night, in skies over Ukraine, drones saturate defenses, exhaust interceptors, and force commanders to rethink how wars are fought.
Russia’s Unprecedented Practice Ground
No country has accumulated more live-fire experience with drones than Russia. Every day, Russian units launch swarms of Shahed loitering munitions, saturating Ukrainian defenses with cheap, long-range attacks. On the tactical edge, Orlan-10 reconnaissance drones circle over trench lines, feeding coordinates to artillery batteries within minutes. Lancet loitering munitions dive onto howitzers and air defense systems. Even commercial quadcopters, adapted to drop grenades or act as kamikaze craft, are now embedded at the platoon level.
This is not a handful of demonstrations; it is systematic, daily use under the harshest conditions—dense electronic warfare, GPS jamming, and constant attrition. Russia’s military has effectively turned Ukraine into the largest laboratory of drone warfare the world has ever seen. Each loss becomes data. Each strike, a lesson. No Western power has anything close to this scale of real-world practice.
The Ukrainian Counterweight
Yet Russia is not learning in a vacuum. Ukraine has matched its adversary blow for blow, and often innovates faster. Kyiv has embraced a decentralized model in which brigades procure directly from manufacturers, volunteer groups crowd-fund FPV (first-person-view) drones, and battlefield feedback loops result in design changes within weeks. Interceptor drones now ram Shaheds mid-air, and multi-million-unit procurement targets signal a determination to make drones a national industry.
The result is a duel of adaptation: Russia refines its Shahed and Lancet designs, while Ukraine invents new countermeasures almost as quickly as the threat emerges.
Technology, Scale, and the Wider World
For decades, the United States dominated drone warfare with Predator and Reaper systems. Yet those aircraft excelled in uncontested skies, striking insurgents without electronic interference. They were not designed for peer conflict saturated with jamming. Now the Pentagon is racing to catch up, pivoting to “attritable” swarms under its Replicator initiative. Thousands of cheap, smart drones—paired with counter-drone systems—are slated to deploy in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
China, meanwhile, looms as the sleeping giant of drone warfare. It is already the largest producer and exporter of drones globally, with doctrine emphasizing swarms, autonomy, and manned-unmanned teaming. Though untested in a high-intensity war like Ukraine, its industrial base could flood any future battlefield with numbers that neither Russia nor America could easily match.
Iran and Turkey also play outsized roles. Iran’s Shahed drones—now produced under license in Russia—have proven the effectiveness of long-range, low-cost strikes. Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2, meanwhile, demonstrated in Syria, Libya, and Nagorno-Karabakh that even medium-end systems can tilt regional balances. Israel, uniquely, has built layered defenses against these threats, experimenting with lasers and cheap interceptors to bring down drones at a fraction of the cost of firing a missile.
The Domains of Drone Dominance
Drones now operate across five interlocking domains:
ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance): Constant observation shrinks decision times, exposing every movement.
Loitering munitions and FPVs: Cheap, precise strikes against armor and artillery make traditional force concentrations perilous.
Deep-strike swarms: Mass launches of Shaheds force defenders into unsustainable economics unless cheaper countermeasures are fielded.
Electronic warfare and resilient C2: The ability to maintain links—or operate autonomously—under heavy jamming is the true test of survivability.
Counter-UAS: Guns, lasers, interceptors, and jammers now proliferate; the side that masters cheap defense gains the upper hand in cost exchange.
Russia has made visible progress in each of these areas, above all in integrating drones with artillery and glide-bomb aviation into a lethal “triangle.” But its reliance on foreign electronics and Iran-built designs shows the limits of its technological depth.
Sidebar Explainer: How Drone Swarms Actually Work
A drone swarm is not just a group of drones flying together. The power comes from coordination. Instead of one operator controlling one aircraft, swarms distribute decision-making across many units, often guided by pre-set algorithms or AI.
Key features of a swarm:
Autonomy: Swarm drones can navigate and adjust to jamming without constant human input.
Coordination: They share data—whether through direct communication or synchronized pre-programming—so that targets can be divided automatically.
Overload effect: Even advanced air defenses can only track and shoot down so many objects at once. By sheer numbers, swarms saturate radars and missile batteries.
Flexibility: A swarm can mix different roles—some drones jam radars, others carry explosives, while others act as decoys.
Why it matters: Swarms flip the economics of air defense. Shooting down a $20,000 drone with a $2 million missile is not sustainable. This is why militaries worldwide are racing to pair drones with cheap countermeasures like lasers, guns, and interceptor drones.
The Balance of Preparation
Russia today is better practiced than any other power at fighting under constant drone surveillance and electronic interference. Its forces are accustomed to battlefield transparency, nightly saturation raids, and the constant whine of FPVs overhead. Yet preparation does not equate to superiority.
The United States retains deeper technology. China holds unmatched industrial scale. Ukraine, forced by necessity, has become an equally inventive and hardened practitioner. Israel leads in defense, Turkey in mid-tier exports, Iran in cheap strategic strike. The race is no longer about one country’s lead, but about how quickly each can integrate drones into systems of war—production pipelines, countermeasures, electronic warfare, and doctrine.
The Verdict
Drones have shifted from tactical gadgets to strategic instruments. They blur the boundary between infantry weapon and airpower, between missile strike and artillery barrage. They saturate skies, drain budgets, and alter the cost-benefit calculus of war.
Russia, by sheer scale of combat practice, sits today at the forefront of drone warfare experience. But the rest of the world is watching closely—and preparing to outproduce, out-innovate, and out-integrate. This is not a monopoly. It is an arms race, one that will define battlefields far beyond Ukraine.
