Ukraine and Russia are constantly trying to innovate on the battlefield to maintain their advantages, and one commander says that’s a difficult environment for traditional manufacturing contracts.
Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu via Getty Images
A commander in Ukraine’s 14th UAV regiment said combat drone tech can change in a month.One example is the evolving need for new hardware to counter jamming techniques, he said.Military contracts like a three-year agreement wouldn’t be able to fulfill those demands in time, he said.
A Ukrainian commander overseeing a drone battalion said the speed at which his decentralized manufacturers can alter their battlefield tech gives them an edge over traditional defense production lines.
“We say to them: ‘Here, after three months, this antenna no longer works, this GPS module no longer works.’ We tell them: ‘This and this needs to be changed,'” said a battalion commander for the 14th Unmanned Aerial Vehicle regiment to the Ukrainian military channel ARMY TV.
“They say: ‘No problem.’ And in one month, on the dot, they implement it,” added the commander, referring to drone producers in Ukraine. He was identified by his call sign, Kasper, in an interview published on Sunday.
“We can plan all according to the rules and try to aim where we are going to be in 5, 10, 15, 20 years,” Kasper said.
But he said the “realities of war” mean his unit must continuously give feedback to manufacturers, who in turn roll out changes quickly.
Kasper compared that to production lines for drones like the Iranian-designed Shahed, which Russia has been manufacturing at scale for the war.
“Let us say you are creating a production line and planning to make one Shahed. There is a three-year contract for it planned in advance, it already has pre-written technical specifications, pre-written set of components,” Kasper said.
Installing new components or tweaking designs would, therefore, be difficult, he said.
“They already received the money. ‘I gave you the Shahed according to the specifications, so what do you want from me? I don’t really care!'” Kasper said.
He cited an example of Ukraine’s evolving battlefield needs: GPS-jamming countermeasures for larger drones. These require special hardware like receivers or antennae that allow operators to switch between frequencies.
If those measures don’t work, the drones need an inertial navigation system so they can fly blindly out of jamming range, or perhaps a camera that lets the pilot navigate the drone through visuals, he added.
“So if the drone sees that it is being jammed, it transitions to the visual navigation and is moving forward, or transitions to the inertial navigation and is moving forward, or it has a multiband antenna that jumps from channel to channel. And it is impossible to jam it,” Kasper said.
That’s not to say that Russia is limited to traditional military contracts. Both sides have active volunteer organizations that donate thousands of civilian drones for combat, though Ukrainian units believe they’re maintaining a lead in innovation over Russian forces.
One way that Russia has brought new tech to the front lines is through fiber-optic drones, which allow them to bypass electronic jamming. Ukrainian developers, meanwhile, are scrambling to adopt the same technology for first-person loitering munitions.
All of this is happening as militaries worldwide watch the war closely for lessons to glean from what’s become a yearslong open conflict between two major modern forces.
Seeing how much of the battlefield now hinges on drones, some countries have begun prioritizing uncrewed aerial vehicles or novel anti-drone defenses.
The US, for example, is awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to firms such as Teledyne and Anduril to make loitering munitions. In October, Anduril also announced that it secured a $249 million Defense Department contract to produce 500 Roadrunner drones and an electronic warfare system.
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