A fascinating scene marks the midway point of the new film, Porcelain War. This documentary, which won the 2024 Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize, chronicles the story of a group of Ukraine’s citizen-soldiers based in the city of Kharkiv. The scene in question occurs as an artist-turned-soldier speaks about matters of geopolitics, and how and why he doesn’t believe the Russian military will stop with Ukraine for reasons of empire and history. As he speaks, the screen displays falling munitions plopping into a tiny Russian bunker nestled along a canal, footage courtesy of a quadcopter’s eye in the sky.
The voiceover carries an unsettling effect as the macro reasons for the war juxtapose with one micro reality of it. The people profiled in Porcelain War aren’t grizzled generals speaking in impenetrable acronyms and martial terminology, but reluctant soldiers who feel they have no choice other than this.
“He [Vladimir Putin] is not going to stop here.” The bunker explodes. The calm, weary voice continues. “It’s not a civil war.”
The fight for the air littoral
Drones such as this quadcopter have impacted the Russo-Ukrainian War in manifold ways since its outbreak in 2014, ominous harbingers for anyone invested in the future of armed conflict.
“Drones have opened up an entirely new warfighting domain,” Nolan Peterson, a former U.S. Air Force Special Operations pilot with over a decade in Ukraine as a war correspondent, told me in an interview. “I don’t think we in the U.S. really yet understand how different things are going to be in our next war.”
Peterson—a 2004 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy—describes a “fundamental reshaping” of the air littoral, the space between the ground and high-altitude aircraft which was “Never really contested [before]. But now these armies are competing to establish dominance between, say, surface to 1,000 feet and maybe 20 to 50 kilometers on either side of the contact line.
“The reach of a Javelin [fire-and-forget missile] is maybe five kilometers, tops. Most mortars can go five, six kilometers. Your average, run-of-the-mill FPV [first-person-view] drone has a reach of fifteen kilometers.”
This reach and breadth of drones in the air littoral—up and out from the front—is one with which infantry troops in eastern Ukraine are all too familiar. A Ukrainian company commander I’ve gotten to know during my own journalism trips there texted recently that the state of the ground battle in Kharkiv Oblast is “Pretty bad … the Russians are just picking us apart with drones while we do the same to them … they have thermal drones they use for grenade drops at night now, and without EW [electromagnetic warfare] there is really no way to [counteract] them … it’s just really hard to move [much of the time.]”
“If ground forces want to have any level of operational effectiveness, they will need a ten-kilometer buffer from enemy drone pilots,” another ground soldier, JD, texted me. JD is an American military veteran who’s now part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He’s currently in the west of the country rehabbing various combat injuries. “My second to last job [before getting wounded], the mission plan called for two days to place some charges in a Russian thoroughfare. Instead, it took six days because the surveillance was so intense we could only move when it was raining or prohibitively windy.
“Several times we spent 48-plus hours lying motionless under trees waiting for the next rain ... the greatest threats are no longer in your 360-degree sectors. They are above you.”
For veterans of the Global War on Terror such as myself, this can be a lot to take in. Control of the skies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was just a give-in, something we never had to consider while on dismount patrols through local markets, or on counter-IED missions along long strips of highway. But we’re a long way from having to bargain with local sheiks to help locate a fallen reconnaissance drone the size of a grand piano. There’s a steady refrain from every Western vet I’ve encountered in Ukraine and kept in touch with since: this war is different, this war is the future, and it’s all because of what’s up there.
Drones at scale and in acquisition
Then there’s the scale of drones now in Ukraine. According to the Institute for the Study of War, more than three million drones were utilized by the two militaries in 2024 alone. Counter-drone EW defense systems are being built and tested and rushed to the front—about as fast as new drones that can evade them are.
“EW still has a lot of challenges,” JD, the American fighter, texted. “As new equipment makes it to the front, pilots adjust and begin using different frequencies, rendering the EW useless. Each jamming antenna can only cover a range of 100 frequencies … because both sides rely so heavily on drones, it is also not possible to always use a largescale jammer. You’ll down your own drones, as well.
“The only real aid in avoidance is a good increase in detection devices. A lot of handheld, simple-frequency scanners are making it to the front, which at least lets you know if something is coming your way.”
It’s become a constant, rapid-fire arms race, one that may not seem sustainable in the long view but then again, why wouldn’t it? For Ukraine, this is matter of survival.
“[Ukraine’s] limiting factor is manpower,” Peterson, the journalist, said. “So, they’d rather burn through an astronomical amount of drones. You see the numbers. Ukraine’s drone-production capacity per year right now is four-million drones. Which is insane … When the war started [in 2014], it was 5000, maybe.”
Overlooking the destroyed city of Bakhmut in August 2023, an artilleryman with Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade smiled politely when I asked him about the impact of American-provided Switchblade drones. They were good, he allowed, but so expensive. His unit preferred inelegant, cheaper alternatives provided by various Ukrainian start-ups. Even when those weren’t effective, he continued, they could call up the engineers in Kyiv and explain why. Then a new batch of reconfigured drones would arrive within the week, adjusted to operator preferences.
No American defense contractor can match that sort of customer service, even for an ally, even for our own Department of Defense. “The whole, inherent advantage of drones in the first place is that they’re cheap and attritable systems,” Peterson said.
“Most recce [reconnaissance] drones are purchased by Ukrainian volunteers who fundraise, and the FPVs are all assembled in Ukraine,” JD texted. “We make our own bombs at the front … I’m not sure there’s any template. We’ve just all figured out our own ways to improve our explosives. I prefer making mine with C4 and ball bearings packed into Lviv hazelnut chocolate candy containers. They’re the perfect size and shape.”
Another factor in the drone race, a huge one, is adaptability. There’s no set drone environment at any point in time in Ukraine, because there’s never one set environment. A 600-mile front means a lot of different things can be true and effective at once.
“Every AO [area of operations] has a cluster of drone pilots flying missions specific to what their company’s needs are. We shoot down friendly drones on a regular basis,” JD continued, “because there is no governing body that provides any flight control … leaving us clueless as to who is flying, and where, at any given time.”
Applying these lessons forward
Ever since Russia’s renewed invasion began in early 2022, the war in Ukraine has been likened to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. This comparison is often made to validate the justness of Ukraine’s defense, a fight between a sovereign if fledging democracy and a larger autocratic regime seeking to dominate it. This historical parallel may extend past the moral sphere and into the operational one. The Spanish Civil War served as a sort of battlefield laboratory for various powers to test new military equipment and tactics, Nazi Germany, in particular. Could the war in Ukraine be serving a similar role for interested parties? Today’s experiences by Ukrainian and Russian soldiers could well become tomorrow’s classroom lessons for war planners and strategists.
“Drone superiority is a matter of survival as this beast evolves,” JD texted. “In just a couple years, amateurs who are playing MacGyver have already made ground operations nearly impossible to carry out effectively. As the drone game continues getting dialed in … rainy days are becoming the only chance either side has to engage the other.”
Regarding that evolving beast: just this week, the journalism outlet The Counteroffensive published an exclusive look at a massive drone offensive carried out in December by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Billed as “the first ever all-drone assault,” it involved multiple units and upwards of 30 total aerial and ground drones, some mounted with machine guns. The Ukrainians claim to have lost zero drones in the mission.
Whenever this war ends, Peterson envisions it having broad global consequences. “The limiting factor here [in Ukraine] is the military’s ability to procure and distribute these things. It’s not the industrial base’s limitations to produce them.
“Ukraine will be the drone arsenal of democracy,” he continued. “There will be an emergence of a drone-industrial ecosystem. It’s in our interest, as a fellow democracy with shared ideals, shared values, to tap into that experience and human talent that’s been forced to step forward. And it’ll be in their interest to work with us and the rest of Europe, to deter the continued Russian threat.”
That’s the big not-so secret in Ukraine: even if someone can foresee the end of this war, they don’t foresee an end to the adversarial relationship with Russia. Even a firm ceasefire will be treated with great skepticism by much of the Ukrainian population. And so the drone enterprise seems likely to continue to grow and grow. Even as those closest to the zero line appeal for otherwise.
“I hope no one in the world has to fight like this in the future,” the Ukrainian commander texted me when I asked about what his experiences might mean for any wars to come, whether in eastern Europe or beyond. “There is no place to rest, to think. It is hell.”
Matt Gallagher is the Writer-in-Residence of the Institute For Future Conflict at the US Air Force Academy. He is the author of four books, including the novels Daybreak and Youngblood, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has appeared in Esquire, ESPN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, and Wired, among other places.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Air Force, Defense Department, or the US government.