DRONESWhy Ukraine’s AI Drones Aren’t a Breakthrough Yet
Machine vision, a form of AI, allows drones to identify and strike targets autonomously. The drones can’t be jammed, and they don’t need continuous monitoring by operators. Despite early hopes, the technology has not yet become a game-changing feature of Ukraine’s battlefield drones. But its time will come.
Despite early hopes, machine vision has not yet become a game-changing feature of Ukraine’s battlefield drones. But its time will come.
The technology, a form of AI, allows drones to identify and strike targets autonomously. They can’t be jammed, aren’t restrained by the length of optical-fiber cables and don’t need continuous monitoring by operators.
But performance has been limited, according to Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. The Institute for the Study of War wrote, ‘Promises of an immediate AI … drone revolution are premature as of June 2025.’
Problems include poor camera quality, difficulty hitting moving targets and inconsistent software performance. Ukrainian army units often prefer more reliable alternatives such as optical-fiber drones.
Nonetheless, Ukrainian developers continue refining AI-controlled drones. More than 100 companies in the country are working on such guidance systems. Some are already testing drone swarms, which would overwhelm even strong defenses.
‘Swarms of drones are an advanced technology that will allow the military to stay not one, but several steps ahead of the enemy,’ Herman Smetanin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, said last year.
Ukrainian soldiers tell me that AI-targeting struggles in certain terrain, such as hills and forests, and works best on flat, open ground. Cost is also an obstacle.
A drone may have AI for completing an attack in case its operator loses control due to jamming in the space close to the target, called the last mile. But soldier Dmytro of Ukraine’s 413th Separate Battalion of Unmanned Systems says, ‘We rarely see last-mile AI drones on the battlefield because they’re just too expensive right now. Adding advanced chips and extra cameras drives up the cost significantly. I’d rather have three standard drones than one with onboard AI.’
At the outset of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Ukraine relied on off-the-shelf drones controlled by radio links. Civilian drone hobbyists helped with operation, and volunteers trained troops to stream drone footage via Google Meet to watch the battlefield in real time.
These first-person view (FPV) drones could be deployed virtually anywhere and gradually evolved into the centerpiece of battlefield operations. Fighting without drones became unthinkable, and every technical detail began to matter in improving their performance.
As their usage expanded, electronic warfare systems were increasingly jamming their radio links. By mid-2024, Russia had sidestepped that problem with drones that carried a spool of optical fibre through which they sent back their images and received control signals.
