July 2025 Report 1
June 2025 HIGHLIGHTS
- Israel’s drone warfare capabilities have entered a new stage of saturation, integration, and operational precision.
- New Israeli drone companies push boundaries in autonomy, stealth, and multi-sensor intelligence.
- Both sides of the war are experimenting with new ways to combat the threat of fiber optic guided FPV strikes drones.
- Russia and Ukraine are both developing counter-drone lasers.
- Ukraine is scaling up production of its analogue to Russia’s Lancet-3 loitering munition.
- For Taiwan, drones are playing an increasingly vital role in the country’s full spectrum, defensive buildup to counter the growing threat of a Chinese invasion.
- An upcoming exercise highlights how Taiwan’s defense strategy is shifting rapidly to adopt operational lessons from the war in Ukraine.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Over the past two weeks, Russia has stepped up its unmanned, area air strike campaign against Ukraine, hammering cities and civilian settlements practically every night with waves of hundreds of Shahed-type one-way attack drones, along with bursts of missile launches.
The campaign is notable, perhaps historic, for it marks the first time that precision-guided munitions have been used to achieve something similar to the area bombing effects sought by British Bomber Command in World War II. Namely, to collapse civilian morale and the national will to fight through the relentless, unmerciful, and indiscriminate bombing of civilian population centers.
Russia is pivoting, step by step, toward a total air war campaign to match its overall maximalist war aims in Ukraine. Yet, so far, Russia’s unmanned area offensive against Ukraine has not reached the levels of British air operations in World War II. By 1944, Bomber Command was sending some 600 or 700 bombers a night at a target. The latest Russian mass attack on Ukraine on the night of July 3 to 4 comprised 539 strike drones and decoys, as well as 11 missiles. This disparity widens further when you consider the destructive power of a British Lancaster bomber, which could carry up to a 12,000-lb“blockbuster” bomb, or more typically a mix of bombs ranging from 500 pounds to2,000 or more pounds. In contrast, each Shahed-type strike drone carries a warhead between 50 to 90 kg.
While the mass of Russia’s nightly drone onslaughts is escalating, the munitions aboard those drones foreshadow far deadlier possibilities. Downed drones over Kyiv have been found with cluster munitions, clearly intended to kill civilians or first responders out in the open. And others have been found with incendiary munitions.
The Ukrainian military news site Defence Express reported in May that Russia has begun arming some of its Shahed-analogue, one-way strike drones with a domestically produced 90-kg warhead called the KOFZBCh, which stands for "shaped-charge-fragmentation-high-explosive-incendiary warhead.”
According to Defence Express, the 90-kg KOFZBCh’s “explosive remained unchanged” when compared to the standard 50-kg warhead typically carried by Shaheds. Yet, the report added: “The incendiary action is achieved by using a powder mixture of metal hydrides giving a high combustion temperature of up to 3,500°C.” This is not the type of warhead needed to destroy critical infrastructure sites or hidden military facilities. This munition is meant to kill civilians and ignite urban infernos.
Russia does not yet possess the military-industrial might to sustain an all-out, unmanned area bombing offensive against Ukraine. But it’s getting closer. With thousands of drones and missiles already in reserve, Russia is now capable of domestically manufacturing nearly 70 Shahed-type strike drones a day — up from about 21 a day last year — according to Ukraine’s military intelligence service, the HUR. Based on that estimate, Ukraine could soon face nightly strike drone barrages of up to 500 drones. The July 4 attack, which achieved that number, represents a chilling harbinger of what’s to come.
The human toll of Russia’s nightly barrages remains nowhere near that of World War II bombing campaigns, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. It’s not even close to America’s bombing of North Vietnam, which by 1966 had killed an estimated 52,000 civilians, according to Pentagon estimates. Despite their heavy human tolls, these previous attempts at mass bombing failed to break the bombed nation’s will to fight.
British and American air power theorists and practitioners in World War II came to grips with the ultimate futility of their efforts to break German national morale through bombing. Writing in 1942, Maj.Alexander Seversky, one of America’s chief advocates of airpower, underscored the resilience of civilian populations to bombing.
He wrote, “Another vital lesson – one that has taken even air power specialists by surprise — relates to the behavior of civilian populations under air punishment. It had been generally assumed that aerial bombardment would quickly shatter popular morale, causing deep civilian reactions...The progress of this war has tended to indicate that this expectation was unfounded.”
Regarding the toll American bombing exacted on North Vietnamese civilians, the CIA’s contribution to the 1969 National Security Study Memorandum came to a similar conclusion.
According to the CIA’s authors: “The experience in bombing North Vietnam, then, appears to once again demonstrate that an attack by a clearly foreign power tends to increase support for the indigenous government and to increase social cohesion in spite of the hardships created by the war.”
Russia’s attempts to bomb Ukrainians into submission is not likely to do much better. From ground level in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities and settlements, it’s clear that Russia’s escalating air campaign is reinforcing rather than eroding Ukraine’s national will to resist.
No corner of Ukraine is safe from Russia’s drone and missile attacks. There is no safe haven where Ukrainians, quarantined from the war’s direct effects, are growing apathetic to the war and yearning for a return to easy living at any cost.
Shared Suffering
After Russia’s first invasion of eastern Ukraine in2014, the war devolved into trench combat along a relatively static front line. A cease-fire nominally went into effect in February 2015, but daily combat continued for years in the form of sporadic artillery attacks, sniper potshots, and drone bombing raids. During the eight years preceding the full-scale invasion, the war in the east mirrored, in many ways, America’s national wartime experience during the post-9/11 era.
In a scenario familiar to America’s GWOT generation, a narrow slice of Ukrainian society shouldered the war’s burden. Consequently, a warrior caste emerged and drew apart from the rest of society. The eastern warzone comprised a static swath of territory that only extended as far from the front lines as far as the range of the weapons used.
Beyond this limit, life went on pretty much as normal. Even in front-line Ukrainian cities such as Mariupol, where one could often hear artillery explosions from the city center, citizens adapted to the new normal of living with a war on their doorstep. It’s amazing, really, what humans can get used to.
Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 changed all that.
And now, as Russia ramps up its nightly drone and missile strikes, circulating its ire from one city to the next each night, Ukrainians’ understanding of their national identity is being consistently reinforced by the experience of shared suffering and a united agreement about the unquestioned evil of the enemy they face.
Russia’s unmanned area bombing campaign highlights yet another, extraordinary way in which unmanned technologies are transforming warfare. The limiting factor in the Allies’ mass area bombing raids of World War II was, for the most part, one of manpower. By the war’s latter years, British Bomber Command was suffering loss rates of about 5 to 6% on each raid. For their part, the Americans regularly suffered higher loss rates during their daylight missions.
According to historians, the overall survival rate for airmen in British Bomber Command was about 50/50. (Out of some 125,000 aircrew who served, 55,573 were killed.) These loss rates underscored the fact that strategic bombing is impractical without first establishing air superiority.
For this reason, it wasn’t until the P-51B Mustang long-rage fighter went into service that the “Americans had overturned the balance of war in the air,” as Max Hastings wrote in Bomber Command. Israel’s recent and dominant air power victory over Iran further underscores the importance of air superiority. Russia, notably, has never established air superiority over all of Ukraine.
Apart from the toll in trained personnel, the military-industrial effort required to sustain the Allied strategic bomber campaigns was extraordinary. Historians have since explored whether the investment was a wise one, since U.S. and British strategic bombing failed to win the war in Europe without a ground invasion, as some air power theorists had promised. It wasn’t until the atomic bombings of Japan that air power truly precipitated a nation’s surrender.
Much more could be written about all this, (including the staggering inaccuracy of so-called precision bombing in World War II) but the main point to be made is that nightly swarms of unmanned systems, such as Russia’s Shahed-type strike drones, are on track to replicate the effects of a strategic bombing campaign without its prohibitively high costs in manpower and material.
To sustain its nightly punishment of Ukraine, Russia has only to keep churning out droves of relatively inexpensive kamikaze drones. Even so, history speaks clearly about the failure of indiscriminate air attacks to break a nation’s will. And what we are witnessing in Ukraine in our time corroborates this fact.
The price of freedom is set by those who wish to destroy it. And, based on the current trend toward a total air war against Ukraine’s cities and settlements, it appears as if Russia intends to punish Ukrainians for the democratic dreams they’ve chosen for themselves.
Unfortunately, Russia will continue to kill Ukrainian civilians in pursuit of an objective that is bound to fail, for the Ukrainian nation, emboldened in their spirit of resistance by each new Russian atrocity, will continue to resist until they’ve won their freedom.
— Nolan Peterson, Editor
