Why Ukraine’s use of drones isn’t the ‘future of war’ that you might imagine

This semi-automated, unpiloted air war is a result of a century of innovations. “Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur,” wrote the Italian general Giulio Douhet in 1920.

Douhet was imagining that the skies – limitless, unconstrained by trenches and barbed wire so iconic of the frontlines of the Great War – would become a new battlefield. In that era’s early aeroplanes, Douhet saw the future of war.

Countless military intellectuals have made their own claims about what war will be like. Today, many look to the drone war over Ukraine – that heir to Douhet’s air campaign with its deliberate targeting of civilians and rear communication lines – as the shape of things to come.

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Military futurists often mistaken

“We must recognise”, wrote Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the preface to UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review, that “the very nature of warfare is being transformed on the battlefields of Ukraine and adapt our armed forces and our industry to lead this innovation”.

Because in Ukraine, drones now account for most casualties, far more than the artillery, the UK must adapt accordingly. Such is the future of war.

Or is it? Studying the war in Ukraine as an anthropologist, I am accustomed to such military futurism. Most futurists get it wrong – yet the inaccuracy of predecessors is not an obstacle for new prophecies.

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Here is a clue: seeking to attract foreign defence producers, the Ukrainian government invites them “to co-create the future of warfare with Ukraine – accelerating development, production, delivery, and access to new markets!” The point here may be less to guess what will happen, than to shape the present, to create new markets or solve pressing political problems.

Ukrainian battlefields may point to a kind of future; it’s only that defence intellectuals and politicians have the story backwards. Automated drone swarms above de-industrialised, depopulated towns are not pulling us into a technological future of remote warfare.

Rather, they are a response to scarcity in a highly globalised world, in which a shortfall of artillery shells resulting from the decay of Ukraine’s once-powerful military industries, and from unreliable supplies by Western partners, could be temporarily amended using £200 consumer drones from AliExpress combined with retrofitted grenades.

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Waging war with few resources

Ukraine’s post-Soviet industrial decline destroyed its once-powerful military industries in the 1990s. The resulting poverty has led to demographic shrinkage, leaving the nation with fewer young people to recruit for the war with Russia after 2022.

If drones are interpreted primarily as the spearhead of a new “high-tech” era, then we may conclude that nations need to spend more on drones, AI, and autonomous weapons. But the picture changes if drones are instead understood for what they are in Ukraine – adaptations to industrial and demographic decline.

When considering the future of war – or war in Europe – Ukraine provides an unsettling answer to the question of what happens when states attempt to wage mass war without the demographic and industrial resources that this demands.

In interviews I’ve conducted with soldiers and support personnel, drones appear not as symbols of futuristic triumph, but as tools for managing decline and depletion: fewer people available for rotations on the frontline; fewer shells for field guns; troops stuck deep in the ‘kill zone’ and resupplied with energy drinks carried by cargo drones.

Shortages of recruits, despite Ukraine’s coercive draft, can be temporarily helped by saturating the air above the emptying frontline with small attack drones. But drones will not solve the demographic crisis that underpins the shortage of troops; nor can they change the fact that in Ukraine, as in any liberal democracy, a coercive draft undermines government legitimacy.

UK’s shortage of troops

So what kind of future does the UK’s Strategic Defence Review offer when it models British strategy on Ukraine? It commits billions to drones and AI, promising to combine them with “the heavy metal of tanks and artillery” to make the British army “ten times more lethal”.

However, the UK also faces its own long-running crisis of military labour. The army has missed its recruitment targets almost every year for more than a decade and the armed forces are losing more full-time personnel each month than they recruit.

Ukraine’s small drones emerged as a way of fighting a large war with a hollowed-out state, supply chains dependent on unreliable allies, and an acute shortage of soldiers.

When British politicians and defence intellectuals import a vision of the future of war from Ukraine, they import an austerity technology. The drone is a way of getting around recruitment failures and under-investment by substituting relatively cheap machines for politically costly human bodies – a way of managing British decline.

In both Ukraine and the UK, the roll-out of drones has much to do with how states deal with the fact that they cannot, or will not, mobilise the people and industrial capacity that their strategic ambitions would require.

Four years into war with Russia, the Ukrainian government, despite lip service to technological future of war, seems to have drawn some salutory lessons, increasing its spending on domestic military manufacturing and looking for ways to reduce battlefield mortality.

It is perhaps easier for Ukraine to do that, as Russia is an immediate existential threat and there is no hubris of past empire and no perceived sense of strategic self-importance that does not match the reality.

Dr Taras Fedirko, who is Ukrainian, is a lecturer in organised crime and corruption at the University of Glasgow