Ukraine will help us with drone warfare
I don’t think anyone could have foreseen this development at the outset of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the U.S. and Ukraine plan to build a drone factory in the U.S. as part of a new defense partnership combining American manufacturing with Ukraine’s battlefield-tested drone technology.
Speaking in an interview with far-right influencer Laura Zoomer, Zelensky said the agreement would expand on an initial drone cooperation deal reached with the U.S., describing the project as beneficial to both countries. …
Zelensky told Loomer that Ukraine’s drone capabilities continue to advance, with some systems now capable of operating at ranges more than 1,800 miles, adding that engineers are working to extend the distance even further.
A White House official told Reuters that the details of the agreement were under discussion ahead of Zelensky’s planned meeting on Tuesday with President Trump.
It’s a little bit like our military partnership with Israel, which has much greater depth and width. The Buchanan wing of the right is against both, but has mostly ignored the obvious benefits or lied about them.
This is a very interesting part of the article, however:
Zelensky met with Loomer this week in Kyiv after the far-right influencer, who is a loyal ally of Trump, reversed her long-held vocal opposition of U.S. military aid to Ukraine amid the Russian war.
She cited her firsthand experience witnessing air raid sirens while visiting Ukraine helped change her perspective and issued an apology to Ukraine and its government for her past critical comments.
It’s not common to change one’s mind so publicly on such an issue.
Drone warfare seems to be the wave of the future, and we need to play catch-up on it.
This reminds me of what I commented here in the spring ‘23 (iirc):
Spring has sprung
I got stung
I’ve seen the shape of things to come
Drone swarms
The Hill needs a proofreader; Laura “Zoomer” actually Laura Loomer.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia needs to drone up as well. Killer drones hunting Houthis.
Killer drones from the sky
Slaughter bots that fight and die
Five thousand drones to make them pay
Five thousand men will die today
Or something like that.
Perhaps I make a distinction without difference but it seems to me the US is doing fine on the positive side of drone warfare and in need of catching up on the anti-drone side of drone warfare. This can, but won’t necessarily involve drones as anti-drone weapons.
I don’t know if publicly changing one’s mind about Ukraine now is that startling, honestly. Support for Ukraine circa 2022-23 was pushed almost as hard and loudly as support for covid lockdowns and BLM a few years earlier. The Biden Admin and European leaders just repeated platitudes while gushing over Zelensky in his ‘fatigue’ T-shirt. It seemed that we were shoveling money at Ukraine for the same reason we were shoveling it at “green energy” or ‘religious’ charities settling illegals hither and yon. There was every reason for someone like Loomer to see support of Ukraine as another con job.
Years later a lot of Ukraine skeptics/critics jumped off a cliff into looney land (Tucker Carlson being the most infamous example). The Russians had Candace Owens and Andrew Tate over at some propaganda conference recently. And after getting humiliated by Trump and Vance in his first Oval Office meeting with them in early 2025, Zelensky seems to realize that he needs to provide some demonstrable value on his end, and that Bidenites are no longer the ones cutting checks. Russia is allied with Iran and China, and Ukraine is wisely allying against Iran. The relationship now looks more reciprocal and less abusive (to the taxpayer).
“Perhaps I make a distinction without difference but it seems to me the US is doing fine on the positive side of drone warfare and in need of catching up on the anti-drone side of drone warfare. This can, but won’t necessarily involve drones as anti-drone weapons.”
I think you are right, sdferr, but from what I know about electronic warfare, this is a problem everyone has right now. You can shut down all of the drones in your area that require signals (meaning they don’t have a cord to the operator, which is a thing on some drones) by jamming the signals. The problem is that jamming also takes out your own drones and lots of your own communications network. Air defenses can be overwhelmed by swarming drones or having drones approach a target from multiple angles. We’re basically at a stage where defense hasn’t caught up to offense yet.
This is excellent news! I’ve been saying for a while that Ukraine, Russia, China, and Iran are all well ahead of us in drone warfare, and if we don’t want a Pearl-Harbor-level disaster we need to get moving pronto. Since the other three are avowed enemies of the United States, we need Ukraine to help us catch up.
Unfortunately this come-to-Jesus moment has come as a result of a small (thankfully) disaster in the Iran war. Reports are that we lost about $20 billion worth of equipment and our allies lost about $80 billion worth of infrastructure. Worse, without Ukrainian-style drone defenses we expended most of our anti-missile missiles trying to take out cheap Iranian drones, leaving us very exposed. This has undoubtedly contributed to the desire of both us and our allies to avoid finishing off the Iranian regime.
So this is one case where an about-face is a very good thing. Facing Iran unprepared was a bad thing. Facing China unprepared would be a disastrous thing.
”Perhaps I make a distinction without difference but it seems to me the US is doing fine on the positive side of drone warfare and in need of catching up on the anti-drone side of drone warfare.”
This is an important distinction. The Ukrainian drones under discussion and the Iranian drones we face are not nearly as good as the missiles we have had in our arsenal for decades. That’s why the Pentagon brass going back years never took them seriously. What they are, however, is a whole lot cheaper, which allows them to be built in huge numbers — numbers that can overwhelm any current air defense system.
This is hugely important. In the recent campaign against Iran US forces were expending up to eight PAC-3 Patriot missiles to take out a single Shahed drone. We can build only about 750 Patriot interceptors *per year*. Iran can build 100 Shaheds *per day*. So we were expending a year’s worth of Patriots to take out a day’s worth of Shaheds. It is no wonder we ran out of Patriots.
Note that we shouldn’t have been expending *any* Patriots on a Shahed. They aren’t sophisticated enough to warrant a Patriot, which should be saved for incoming ballistic missiles that can’t be stopped any other way. But in the run-up to the Iran campaign both Trump and Hegseth mockingly turned down Ukrainian offers for drone defense, and we paid a price for that. So this is one about-face I’m glad to see. It speaks well of them and us.
A lot of lives will be saved because of this if we ever have to fight China. Maybe it will even cause them to call off the war.
Drones are an existential threat to our military industrial complex. If a drone costing just a few thousands of dollars can travel 1800 miles then our multi billion dollar carriers are in grave danger and building future carriers will be foolish.
I read somewhere earlier this year that our carriers attacking the Houties pulled back several hundred miles because Naval brass worried that a drone would strike one and do enough damge to put it out of action for months if not years.
Some will argue that we need to upgrade the defensive capabilites of the carriers, but that would greatly increase the cost of operating them and could not guarantee that one would not be sunk or badly damaged.
Europe sent military “experts” to observe both sides during our Civil War. The amount of carnage in the first half of the Great War (WWI &WWII I put as the same war) showed they didn’t learn much. Learn from this.
Bumping this post from Karmi on Saturday.
https://thenewneo.com/2026/07/25/open-thread-7-25-2026/#comment-2858975
“Moment Ukraine backseat gunner shoots down Russian drone from open cockpit – as Putin’s Russia is hit by new wave of long-range strikes LINK
Ukraine looks like it will come outta this Russian reinvasion as a major World Player—and arms supplier. Trumps “Legacy” will certainly contain his many missed opportunities with Zelensky & Ukraine. “
Check out Dzyne and about 100 other drone companies that are new startups
Then check Anduril with their drone Fighter Jets, Drone Helicopters and much more
Finally check out Saronic making 20 ft , 50 ft and 200 ft autonomous ships
rjb1:
Au contraire’. They learned that entrenched defensive positions are very deadly and they learned from the Russo-Japanese war that entrenched positions could be defeated, but they had not dealt with entrenched positions that left no flanks; no way around the trenches. It took years to develop combined arms, communications, artillery methods that didn’t tip your hand, and effective munitions.
What were the French and Belgians to do? Just give the Germans all the seized territory?
The Germans didn’t learn not to attack empires and nations with vastly superior resources (that includes manpower).
Great comment/s & info, mkent!!!
AesopFan, thanks! I’ll add – ‘Trump’s approach to Ukraine has been one of the clearest self-owns of his second term.‘
I would say the Germans ran out of men and the Americans showed up in massive numbers. 2 million by spring of ‘18 and about 10,000 men per day during the summer ‘18. Germany was spent.
Edit
Confederates ran out of men also.
@rbj1 They also had observers for the siege of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese war. The siege featured machine guns, barbed wire, artillery, trenches, and sandbags. Sound familiar? It cost the Japanese dearly to take the port.
I would put the end of WWI just a few years ago, in that the developments during that war modeled modern warfare right up to the present: Industrial war using combined arms and large armies, with artillery, aircraft, tanks, machine guns, mines, and barbed wire. All offshoots of WWI. We are seeing the end of an age.
— rbj1
Who didn’t? I suspect the men actually doing the observing learned quite a lot. But convincing their superiors of it, and getting it put into practice, would be hard for multiple reasons. Institutional inertia, vested interests, even when the best path forward was clear implementing it would take time and resources.
The British sank a number of battleships at Taranto in the early stages of WWII, and even after that the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor to something similar was something a lot of people had a hard time getting their heads around. Large institutions, military or civilian, have a tremendous innate inertia.
— om
Oh, they learned it, all right. One of the great dreads of the German general staff in the run up to WW II was another two-front war. Their problem was the geography tended to force them into that situation.
Germany has had this problem ever since Bismarck reunited it in the 1870s. It’s individually arguably the strongest European polity, militarily and economically. At least in potential, anyway. After 1871, a unified Germany could quite arguably take on France, or Britain, or Russia and have the outcome not be a foregone conclusion. Their problem was these potential enemy states surrounded them, so any time war broke out with one it tended to spread to the others and open up a two-front war.
A whole lot of Western European power politics from 1871 to 1945 suddenly makes sense when you look at it from that POV. It’s not that the Germans didn’t know better, it’s that they saw no other options but to try and thread the needle.
Logistics:
They never learned it, always a trick. The Schleifen plan didn’t work, Barbarossa didn’t work, taking on two much larger powers didn’t work. Twice.
But they did manage to destroy European existing civilization. You have to give them that.
We do have expensive missiles to shoot down cheap drones. That is why the Israelis have a 4 tier system.
Arrow 2 and 3
David’s Sling
Iron Dome
Iron Beam
It is always being improved because at first Israel was sending $100,000 interceptors to shoot down $1,000 rockets. Eventually they learned to use the right interceptor but just as important they invented detection systems that figured out telemetry and if a missile will hit an open field, then they just let it.
As America is not under daily missile attacks as Israel has been for years, we had no need to invent a layered anti-drone system.
How considerate of them@
Google search — does ukraine have better sea drones than america. AI Overview:
US may have used a Ukrainian sea drone recently — in an attack — nope, but maybe their technology — here’s this:
UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vessels) for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet & Crimean Bridge. A blog post from August 5, 2023. No telling what Ukraine has by now on the UUVs.
At the time of those mysterious bunches of drones were being reported around the US — I suspected Ukraine was helping America advance its drone technology.
Here’s one approach to drone-killing:
https://www.facebook.com/FrontlineDiary/posts/pfbid036ACNgYcJaCgq9bHrMUDeCNUknSS3JxUaxSjm5RDoJha2ybVBfnpu1H8kBjEyd5Rl
It seems to me that Russia should be the one now begging for a cease-fire. They reached a milestone in January – the length of the current invasion of Ukraine is now longer than the length of WWII from the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 to V-E Day. I’m not going to say who is “winning” and “losing” but I doubt if that is what Vlad had in mind at the time.
— FOAF
The question is: does Putin have a face-saving exit route? Is there a way he can back off and survive the aftermath, certainly politically and maybe physically?