- A commander in Ukraine’s 14th UAV regiment said combat drone technology could change within a month.
- One example is the evolving need for new devices to counter jamming techniques, he said.
- Military contracts such as a three-year deal will not be able to meet these demands in time, he said.
A Ukrainian commander overseeing a drone battalion said the speed with which his decentralized manufacturers can change battlefield technology gives them an advantage over traditional defense production lines.
“We tell them, ‘Here, after three months, this antenna doesn’t work anymore, this GPS module doesn’t work anymore. We tell them: ‘This and that must be changed,'” a battalion commander for the 14th unmanned aerial vehicle regiment told Ukrainian military channel ARMY TV.
“They say: ‘No problem.’ And in a month, on the dot, they implement it,” the commander added, referring to drone manufacturers in Ukraine. He was identified by his call sign, Kasper, in an interview published on Sunday.
“We can plan everything according to the rules and try to target where we will be in 5, 10, 15, 20 years,” Kasper said.
But he said the “realities of war” meant his unit had to provide constant feedback to manufacturers, who in turn rolled out changes quickly.
Kasper compared it to production lines for drones like the Iranian-designed Shahed, which Russia has produced on a war scale.
“Let’s say you’re setting up a production line and you’re planning to make a Shahed. There’s a three-year contract to pre-plan it, it already has pre-written technical specifications, pre-written set of components,” Kasper said.
Therefore, installing new components or changing models would be difficult, he said.
“They have already received the money. “I gave you Shahed according to the specifications, so what do you want from me? I don’t really care!” Kasper said.
He cited one example of Ukraine’s evolving needs on the battlefield: GPS jamming countermeasures for larger drones. These require special equipment such as receivers or antennas that allow operators to switch between frequencies.
If those measures don’t work, the drones need an inertial navigation system so they can fly blindly out of jamming range, or perhaps a camera that allows the pilot to navigate the drone through footage, he added.
“So if the drone sees that it’s jamming, it switches to visual navigation and moves forward, or it switches to inertial navigation and moves forward, or it has a multi-band antenna that bounces from channel to channel. And it’s impossible to jam that,” Kasper said.
This does not mean that Russia is limited to traditional military contracts. Both sides have active volunteer organizations donating thousands of civilian drones for combat, though Ukrainian units believe they are maintaining an innovation edge over Russian forces.
One way Russia has brought new technology to the forefront is through fiber-optic drones, which allow them to bypass electronic jamming. Meanwhile, Ukrainian developers are trying to adopt the same technology for first-person roaming munitions.
All this is happening as militaries around the world watch the war closely to learn lessons from what has become a multi-year open conflict between the two major modern powers.
Seeing how much of the battlefield now depends on drones, some countries are beginning to prioritize unmanned aerial vehicles or new anti-drone defenses.
The US, for example, is awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to firms such as Teledyne and Anduril to produce bare munitions. In October, Anduril also announced that it secured a $249 million Defense Department contract to produce 500 Roadrunner drones and an electronic warfare system.
