April 2025 Vector Report 1
APRIL 2025
HIGHLIGHTS
- Drone warfare between Israel and adversarial forces in Gaza and Lebanon has escalated to
unprecedented levels since the breakdown of the ceasefire. - Emerging Israeli companies such as InfiniDome, High Lander, and Cando Drones are
carving out critical roles in the nation’s growing drone ecosystem. - Ukrainian forces are using unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, for a range of kinetic
strike missions. - Drones still have a long way to go before they replace infantrymen on Ukraine’s
battlefields. - Radio-controlled FPV drones still have some advantages over tethered variants.
- Anti-drone netting has become prolific on the Ukrainian front lines.
- China’s Strait Thunder: 2025A exercise is a challenge to Taiwan’s sovereignty and could
signal what an actual invasion would look like. - Taiwan’s Red Cardinal III VTOL drone has undergone some major upgrades.
- A drone training program for Taiwan’s reservists faces many challenges.
EDITOR'S NOTE
A series of new executive orders this week both underscored and added energy to the need to
reform our nation’s defense procurement processes. The war in Ukraine has taught us many lessons, and one that stands out is that our current way of acquiring new weapons systems is ill-
suited to match this new era of high-intensity warfare in which tactics and technologies often have a shelf-life measured in weeks.
Rather than focusing on expensive, silver bullet platforms, Ukrainian developers solve problems
one at a time and do not delay deliveries for the sake of perfect products. Their priority is to get
effective, modular tools in warfighters’ hands as rapidly as possible — and then maintain open
feedback loops with warfighters to upgrade and modify that hardware at the so-called “speed of
war.”
Since 2014, unmanned technology development in Ukraine has been a bottom-up process. And it
largely remains so today. Many of the technical and tactical changes that are transforming the war
are not being dreamed up by PhDs in corporate boardrooms — they come from soldiers in the field who understand battlefield realities and are trying to make the most of their limited budgets. This bottom-up flow of innovation is something the American military has much to learn from.
One challenge is that the pace and direction of evolution is not uniform across Ukraine’s front
lines. Each section of the war zone is its own micro habitat with its own laws of natural selection.
Because of this, not every new technology or tactic is relevant across the entire war zone. And it’s
tough to collect lessons learned from all these stovepiped battlelabs and then collate them into a
single drone warfare doctrine.
If we expand our scope, this same observation could also be said about drone warfare across the
globe — from the Arctic to the Himalayas to America’s southern border to the open deserts of the
Middle East to Myanmar’s tropical forests. The tactics and technologies of unmanned combat are
being tested and refined in a variety of environments at the hands of an eclectic assortment of
warfighters.
Each time you think you have an answer to a drone warfare problem, an adversary will concoct
some new technology that scrambles the whole game again. We’ve seen this play out time and
again on Ukraine’s battlefields, where many American drones are too expensive, over-engineered,
and often obsolete by the time they reach the front lines.
A U.S. drone manufacturer might spend a year or more designing and testing a drone. When it
finally gets into a warfighter’s hand, that drone is suited to operate within a drone warfare
ecosystem that is already extinct. Because of this, many Ukrainian battalions prefer cheaper, more
modular systems that are built in Ukraine and can be rapidly modified to match and defeat the
latest Russian technological advances. After all, the inherent value of drones remains their
scalability and expendability. And for the sake of saturating the war zone with drones, Ukrainians
typically prefer cheaper systems that they can afford to lose.
Amid all this flux, one point is important to highlight. When we talk about drone technology
transformation, we’re not talking about a top-to-bottom re-imagining of the entire drone. In fact,
the actual bodies of most drones haven’t changed much over the past decade. Changes most often occur within the electronic guts of the drones, so to speak, mainly affecting how drones receive their command signals from human operators, the quality of sensors, battery output and endurance, how they integrate automation, or how they manage to navigate in a GPS-denied environment.
Each time you adapt a drone, you don’t have to redesign it from scratch. Instead, it can be as
simple as replacing one outdated flight controller — a component the size of a postage stamp —
for a new one. A number of videos and photos have appeared on Russian social media over the past few weeks, reportedly showing small FPV drones built from wooden sticks — one video is of a transport drone comprising a wooden crate, four engines, and some flight control hardware. One
Australian firm has sent Ukraine fixed-wing combat drones built from cardboard.
The lesson from all this is that we should think about drone technology along the lines of the
venerable B-52 bomber, which first flew in 1952 and remains operational today. Over the past 73
years, the B-52’s fuselage has changed in relatively small ways, but its avionics and its weapons
are completely different from the days of Curtis LeMay. That kind of modular adaptability — the
ability to keep a single fuselage in service while you swap out old pieces of electronic hardware for a new ones — is the way we should think about drone adaptability. It should also be the way we think about our procurement processes when supporting our drone warfare buildup.
We are setting ourselves up for failure if we approach the procurement of small, tactical drones like we procure an entirely new manned fighter aircraft every couple of decades. When we pick winners and losers in the drone procurement marketplace, we shouldn’t think in terms of discrete products — and we certainly shouldn’t assume that today’s winners will be relevant a year from now. (Remember how many experts predicted Turkey’s Bayraktar UAV was going to transform warfare, only to have it become obsolete in Ukraine’s full-scale war in a matter of months.)
Rather, we must think of drone warfare as a service. The pace of transformation is far too fast for any product in development today to be at the leading edge a year from now. We need to have the B-52 mentality — to create products that are like balls of clay that can be constantly remolded to match battlefield realities. For that to happen, American drone manufacturers need to offer more than technological tools, they need to offer pipelines of communication with America’s front-line forces so that, while in combat, they can transmit feedback to engineers who are endlessly working on updates to software and hardware to keep pace with, and hopefully outmatch, what the Chinese are doing. Many Ukrainian drone developers, for example, have teams of technicians who go out to the front lines to perform maintenance and upgrades on their drones. That’s something every American drone manufacturer should be prepared to do.
Previous editions of this report have covered these points before, but they merit repeating, namely because America’s procurement practices remain moribund in their old ways, and each day that passes means one less opportunity to reform our behaviors before the first salvo of the next war is fired.
