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When I was in Kyiv last September, I visited a recovery center for wounded soldiers. One of the soldiers I talked to recounted how he was in an armored personnel carrier that was hit by a Russian drone. He was severely wounded, but his colleagues quickly pulled him out of the vehicle because they knew it would be hit a second time. As indeed it was; he survived the night hiding in some bushes where he could hear more drones circling overhead looking for targets. He was evacuated but lost both legs.
It is hard to exaggerate how rapidly and completely modern battlefields have changed over the past three years since the onset of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. The early days of that conflict saw the Ukrainians taking out large numbers of Russian armored and support vehicles with Javelin anti-tank missiles and Turkish TB-2 drones, and in some cases with highly accurate guided artillery. Today, these weapons are gone. The ground war is being waged almost exclusively with FPV drones on both sides. In contrast to the TB-2 or more sophisticated American equivalents like Predators and Reapers, an FPV drone is based on a small hobbyist airframe piloted by an operator who can see what the drone sees through goggles or a small TV monitor.
These drones have three important characteristics. First, they are extremely cheap in comparison to their older predecessors, which cost around $5 million each. Being cheap means they are expendable; you can today buy a hobbyist FPV drone for a few hundred dollars. While many of the parts previously came from China, both Ukraine and Russia have built up large domestic drone industries. Ukraine has reportedly been losing some 10,000 drones per month; they are better regarded as expendable ammunition than as weapons platforms.
The second important characteristic is accuracy. An FPV drone carrying an explosive charge can be piloted to strike an armored vehicle at its most vulnerable point, can fly through a building’s open window, or can go after individual foot soldiers. Moreover, training a drone operator is much less expensive and time-consuming than training a pilot. I know this because I’ve taught myself to fly FPV drones over the past several years.
Finally, battlefields have become completely transparent, both during the day and at night. The sensors carried by drones can see everything, and therefore can hit everything.
This combination of cheap drones, accuracy, and transparent battlefields has had big implications for armored warfare. Anything large like a tank or APC can be hit, which is one of the reasons the Russians have been relying on waves of foot soldiers to storm Ukrainian trench lines. Something similar is happening at sea. The Ukrainian Navy, despite not having any capital ships, has chased the Russian fleet out of the Black Sea. It did this through a combination of ballistic missiles (like the Neptune that sank the Russian flagship Moskva early in the war) and long-range sea drones that have taken out large numbers of smaller ships.
All of this suggests that modern warfare has been shifting rapidly from the large, expensive platforms that characterized military procurement up to now, to large numbers of smaller, intelligent, expendable weapons. This is why Elon Musk has been railing against the F-35 fighter jet, one of the mainstays of the U.S. Air Force, which can cost over $100 million each.
This shift I believe is coming, but the path is a bit more complicated than Musk suggests (that’s true of almost everything that comes out of his mouth these days).
Part of the reason both Ukraine and Russia have become so reliant on FPV drones is that neither country has been able to achieve air superiority over the other. Current U.S. and NATO combined arms doctrine calls for gaining air superiority as the first priority in modern combat. This begins with the systematic destruction of enemy air defenses anywhere near the FLOT—the “forward line of own troops”—as well as the destruction of enemy aircraft both in the air and on the ground. Once air superiority is achieved, friendly aircraft and drones can range freely over the battlespace and go after strategic, operational, and close air support targets. This is what happened in both Gulf wars, when the United States was able to destroy Saddam Hussein’s army largely from the air. This was also the situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban never had an air force or serious air defenses, and the United States was able to use slow-moving platforms like the A-10 or Apache helicopters for close air support. In these earlier wars, the United States was able to see and destroy anything that moved.
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So how would combat against an FPV drone-equipped army change this scenario? Israel’s current war against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon against drone-equipped enemies has been extremely one-sided because Israel had air superiority from the beginning. Almost all of the IDF’s destructive force has been delivered from the air with older precision (and sometimes not so precise) weapons. But it would seem FPV drones still confer some advantages in terms of cost, scale, and accuracy. Israel has gone after what it regards as high-value human targets like Hezbollah’s chief Nasrallah with air-delivered bombs, but it also used an FPV drone to kill Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s chief, in a manner that avoided the collateral damage that accompanied on the strike on Nasrallah.
FPV drones may make a big difference in future wars, depending on the specific scenario. In a war with China, the United States will meet a much more sophisticated foe and may not be able to win local air superiority early on. A perhaps more pressing issue concerns supply chains. The United States is rapidly depleting its stocks of precision-guided munitions with simultaneous wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Despite repeated warnings since 2022, NATO countries have not made the necessary investments in their defense industrial bases to meet the requirements of an extended war.
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On the naval front, U.S. carrier task forces have proven their worth in low-intensity wars in the Middle East. But ever since the end of the Cold War, it has been widely recognized that they would be extremely vulnerable in a war with a peer competitor. This calculus is ever more true with the rise of China. China currently deploys a huge inventory of conventional medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) along its coastline. The entire U.S. force posture in the Eastern Pacific would be vulnerable to MRBMs in a full-scale war with China.
This is where naval drones come in. The cost of a modern Ford-class carrier is now in the range of $13 billion, and that figure doesn’t include its air wing or the other ships in its task force. A carrier has a crew of some 6000 personnel, and losing a single ship would constitute a major strategic catastrophe. By contrast, small, cheap naval drones will be able to go after important targets like the troop carriers and amphibious landing ships that would be required for an invasion of Taiwan.
But politically, we will hit a brick wall if we consider replacing any of our large platforms with small, cheap, expendable autonomous drones. Each big platform, whether an aircraft carrier, F-35, or Abrams tank has a huge domestic constituency that consists of the companies, workers, and surrounding local communities that produce them. Manufacturers have been very strategic in spreading out supply chains to as many Congressional districts as possible to widen their base of political support. Something similar occurred in the early 1940s, when the mainstay of the U.S. Navy was the battleship. It was clear from the mid-1930s that they would have to give way to aircraft carriers, but it took Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the Coral Sea to convince the Navy and its supporters to shift investment to fast carriers.
It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the nature of future warfare will be changed with the rise of FPV and naval drones. But it won’t happen overnight, and we have to recognize that the current battle in Ukraine has its own specific characteristics that may not be replicated in other parts of the world, with other adversaries. The change is coming, but the major obstacles remain, as always, political.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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