Professor Michael C. Horowitz

And we now see Russia and Ukraine launching millions of drones at each other every year to devastating effect, generating about 80% of the casualties right now on the battlefield.

What Ukraine has figured out, though, is how to make those attacks strategic

and how to use them in combination with Ukraine's forces and using these drones in combination to help them regain territory from Russia.

Because the drones themselves are just missiles or just artillery, frankly, that we just call them drones.

It's the ability to use them in combination with Ukraine's ground forces and equipment that then can help them regain territory.

And Ukraine is really making an operational innovation in that way, helping them make progress in the war.

So the drones themselves can be anything from costing hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.

And Ukraine is really innovating in the way that they build them.

Since one of the things that Russia did to counter Ukraine's drones early on in the war, and then especially in 2024, was what's called electronic warfare.

Because these drones rely on a data signal, on a connection essentially between an operator

and the drone to direct it to the target.

If you can disrupt that data signal, you can prevent the drone from hitting its target.

But Ukraine is now innovated with drones like the TFL-1 that can operate autonomously even if the data link is disrupted for the last several kilometers before hitting a target, which means even if Russian electronic attacks occur, Ukraine's drones, an increasing number of them can now still hit their targets and cause damage and hold back those Russian invaders.

Absolutely.

That's another way that Ukraine has tried to evade electronic warfare.

Ukraine will essentially plug in fiber optic cables into the drones.

This limits their range, of course.

They can only go several miles then at most.

But by using sort of thick fiber optic cables that are difficult to cut, they then can undermine Russia's ability to use jamming to take those drones out of the sky, helping them operate effectively.

And they can use some of those defensively, keeping them up in the air to conduct surveillance or sometimes even to go to intercept Russia's drones that are coming to hit Ukraine.