February 2025 Vector Report 1
FEBRUARY 2025
HIGHLIGHTS
- Drones continue to play a pivotal role in Israeli combat operations.
- Wire-guided FPV strike drones are increasing in range and steadily reshaping the nature of unmanned combat on the Russo-Ukrainian battlefield.
- Ukrainian forces recently claimed to have developed a radar system that can effectively detect
wire-guided FPVs. - As trench warfare evolves in Ukraine, the importance of UGVs is increasing.
- Taiwanese unmanned systems manufacturers are looking to grow their international
market reach. - In planning to defend against a Chinese invasion, the Taiwanese military has identified the most likely maritime invasion landing spots — the so-called “red beaches.”
- Taiwan is searching for a location to stand up a drone warfare training facility.
EDITOR'S NOTE
The cover page picture of this Vector Report illustrates the present state of the drone war between Russia and Ukraine. The image, drawn from a pro-Russian Telegram channel, shows a Russian soldier equipped with multiple means of defending himself from Ukrainian drones. On his back, he wears the Harpy series CKJ-1704 Mobile drone suppressor backpack, meant to defeat drones via electromagnetic means. In his hands, the Russian soldier wields a TOZ-34 smoothbore hunting rifle. A kinetic option against fiber-optic-wire tethered drones, which are effectively un-jammable and prolifically present on the battlefield. The soldier in this image signifies that there is no single solution to counter drones, just as there is no single solution for drones to defeat the latest countermeasures. About a year ago, both sides of the conflict were searching for ways to defeat the other’s electronic warfare defenses. Some Ukrainian developers made headway with automation, particularly in the terminal phase of a kamikaze strike. This approach allows a human operator to hand over control to an automated control system once the drone nears the signal jamming bubble surrounding a target. The Russians, for their part, leaned into tethered drones as a solution to jamming.
Through battlefield natural selection, tethered drones are now the go-to option for both camps to
defeat electronic warfare defenses. That’s not to say that a breakthrough in automation couldn’t
kickstart another transformation of the drone warfare landscape. Yet, for now, tethered drones are
the way. And this leads us to another photo. This time, it is of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
observing a counter-drone demonstration by US forces at Powidz, Poland on Feb. 15.
On the next page is another photo, also publicly available via the Department of Defense’s DVIDS
database, that shows Secretary Hegseth operating a “Dronebuster” counter-drone system. According to the website of Viking Arms Ltd, the Dronebuster’s manufacturer: “The Dronebuster is a compact,
light-weight, cost-effective CUAS tool that can defeat [commercial off-the-shelf] drone threats.”
The website adds: “The Dronebuster is the only handheld electronic attack system authorized by
the U.S. Department of Defense.”
I’m sure the Dronebuster is an effective tool. But it would be worthless against a Russian,
wire-guided FPV strike drone. A Ukrainian soldier armed with Dronebuster would be extremely
limited in his mission to defend against Russian drones. In fact, an over-reliance on directed energy CUAS systems, such as the Dronebuster, will get you killed on the front lines of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Again, the point of this example is not to impugn the Dronebuster. Rather, it is to critique the lethargy of the Pentagon’s adaptations to the drone warfare revolution. The traditional ways of acquiring new hardware do not work in this era of rapid-fire transformation — both in terms of technologies and tactics. The pace of transformation is a moving target, and the Pentagon isn’t leading its aim far enough ahead. It is continually aiming at a drone warfare landscape that is already obsolete. As these pages have repeatedly stressed, the pace of drone warfare transformation on the Russo-Ukrainian front is measured in weeks. A solution that works today could be obsolete by next month. In such a fluid environment, there’s no such thing as a perfect product. And there should never be such a thing as “the only handheld electronic attack system authorized by the U.S. Department of Defense.” If we tie ourselves to one solution, we doom ourselves to failure. There is no perfect technology, and whatever drones or CUAS systems we have on hand today were likely engineered to match drone threats that existed a year or so ago. This approach woefully fails to match the pace of drone warfare transformations on the Russo-Ukrainian battlefield. Consider, as well, the sheer volume of output needed to sustain a drone war. According to Ukraine’s First Deputy Minister of Defense Ivan Havryliuk, the Ukrainian military in 2025 is receiving 200,000 drone per month. That number includes both FPV strike drones and other variants.
“We started the first quarter of 2024 with 20,000 per month. Today, this figure is about 200
thousand per month and is on the rise,” Havryliuk said, according to the Ukrainian defense news
site Militarnyi. Also, it’s important to note that 96.2% of the drones delivered to the Ukrainian military last year were domestically produced. In October 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine’s annual drone production capacity is at around 4 million. And in 2025, Ukrainian manufactures aim to produce 30,000 long-range drones. In short: not only are Ukrainian drone manufacturers able to outpace their American counterparts in terms of evolutionary pace and overall production capacity. We have a lot of ground to make up. The Russians, too, are building out their unmanned forces. In December 2024, Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov announced that Russia would stand up a new “Unmanned Systems Force” by the third quarter of 2025. Russian media sites report that by 2030 this new force will comprise some 210,000 personnel spread across 277 military units. "We will develop technologies for the development of air, land and maritime robotic systems, as well as interference-resistant control systems based on artificial intelligence and machine-to-machine interaction technologies,” Belousov reportedly said in December, according to the Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti.
The Russians, despite their Soviet-legacy system, have shown themselves to be remarkably adaptive at drone warfare. They keep pace with the proverbial speed of war — meaning they don’t spend years entertaining bids from multiple manufacturers who produce products that, by the time they reach warfighters’ hands, are already obsolete. It’s unclear how deterministic small drones will be in America’s next conflict. Manned fighter jets and tanks and aircraft carriers and missiles still matter. Those fundamentals remain unchanged. But there’s little doubt in this author’s opinion that small drones will dominate the infantry soldier’s combat experience. We might be able to win the next war with our moribund procurement practices — but at what cost? It is the front-line soldier who will pay for our lack of agility. We must correct our course today, while we still have time.
The race for drone warfare dominance will be won by the country that is the most flexible, adaptive, and agile at incorporating the latest updates in technology and tactics across its forces. We must harness the entrepreneurial spirit of America’s commercial sector to generate superior drones and counter-drone systems. But we can’t ignore the endgame. After delivering their products, manufacturers must remain available 24/7 to rapidly modify their products according to battlefield realities. And our troops must be technologically savvy enough to communicate their needs to the engineers. That’s the only way to match — and to hopefully outpace — whatever innovations the Russians and Chinese generate.
