July 2025 Report 2
JULY 2025 HIGHLIGHTS
- Israel’s continued evolution in drone warfare is marked by speed, deception, and adaptive coordination.
- Israel has employed AI-powered autonomous decision during combat missions.
- Ukraine has integrated the Link 16 secure digital tactical information exchange network into its air defense architecture, helping to defend against Russia’s mass strike drone attacks.
- A new Russian hybrid weapon is threatening Ukraine’s coastal regions.
- The Ukrainian State Design Bureau is developing a strike and reconnaissance UAV designed to engage targets at tactical and operational ranges.
- China has sanctioned eight Taiwanese firms that produce military and dual-use technologies.
- A Taiwanese firm has developed next-generation lithium pouch cells that improve drone flight time and payload efficiency.
- Taiwan’s “Porcupine Strategy" emphasizes asymmetric defense to deter a Chinese invasion.
EDITOR'S NOTE
In the opening days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s Aerorozvidka Air Reconnaissance Unit used drones to interdict and block a massive Russian convoy on a thunder run from Chernobyl to Kyiv. They did so by destroying slow-moving vehicles that stretched nearly 50 miles, causing Russia to abandon its advance. Meanwhile, about 80 Ukrainian drone operators formed a group chat on WhatsApp. They looked for Russian targets and passed on the information to artillery crews to devastating effect — one road into Kyiv became a turkey shoot for Ukrainian artillery.
These early triumphs didn’t appear out of the ether. They were the result of eight years of drone combat innovation and combat experimentation. As far back as the summer of 2014, this writer observed Ukrainian units jury-rigging commercial, off the shelf drones for use in ISR, as well as dropping small munitions on their enemies. Over the next eight years, the limited war in eastern Ukraine became a laboratory for the advancement of drone warfare tactics and technology. By the time Russia fully invaded in 2022, Ukrainian troops and volunteers had acquired nearly a decade of experience using drones for a wide range of combat roles.
Since February 2022, the use of unmanned systems on Ukraine’s battlefields has exponentially expanded on both sides, replacing many roles previously held by manned aircraft and other weapons. Both Russia and Ukraine have used small and medium-sized drones at unprecedented levels to conduct a range of direct strikes, targeting, and ISR missions. What began as ad hoc substitutes for limited artillery and airpower reserves has since evolved into an entirely new mode of warfare — a battle fought for supremacy of the “air littoral,” that low-altitude airspace within which small drones mostly fly.
Small, tactical drones are much more than tools. They comprise an entirely new combat ecosystem. By layering and combining drones of different types — spanning the gamut from ISR platforms, bombers, one-way strike weapons, and signal repeaters — Ukrainians have replicated the airborne “stacks” that American manned aircraft operated over Iraq and Afghanistan. At a fraction of the cost, the Ukrainians have leveraged their growing drone arsenal to field self-contained, air littoral kill chains that mimic the advantages of air superiority wherever they are applied.
With the ground war mired in a battle of attrition in which ammunition supplies are limited and advances are measured in hundreds of meters, drones are potent a force multiplier, offering a way to precisely put a warhead on its target and to thereby limit the number of wasted shots.
Drones are also a force multiplier for Ukraine’s limited manpower reserves. A handful of skilled drone operators can inflict significantly more casualties on the Russians than a simple infantryman. One National Guard commander recently told this writer that his brigade had a 70% reduction in casualties when they shifted to primarily drone warfare. During one battle over the span of about a week, he said it wasn’t unusual for each of his drone operators to have recorded more than 50 kills.
The sheer amount of carnage the Ukrainians are inflicting on the Russians through drone strikes is quite literally killing off so many Russian soldiers that, on many sections of the front line, the Russians’ manpower advantages have been wiped out. And this summer, a Ukrainian brigade near Kharkiv captured Russian soldiers without the use of infantry. They only used FPV drones and ground drones, or UGVs, to corner the Russians and then lead them back to the Ukrainian lines to be taken into custody.
Ukraine’s defensive effort has not obeyed the traditional rules of attritional warfare, in which a country’s military-industrial might is measured by its ability to produce things like artillery shells and tanks. Instead, Ukraine overcame its attritional disadvantages by leveraging the strategic and tactical potential of cheap, attritable weapons — as well by empowering the creativity of its soldiers and civilians to develop and field an eclectic ecosystem of novel, unmanned platforms.
To those of us who closely follow the drone war over Ukraine, as well as other conflicts where small drones are playing significant roles, it’s abundantly clear that drones are much more than souped-up Javelins or mortars. They truly are a revolution in warfare.
Yet, let’s be clear — fighter jets and stealth bombers and tanks still matter. The arrival of small drones has not fundamentally changed the basic tenets and mission sets of modern warfare. Even so, drones dramatically expand our combat options, as well as those of our enemies. There’s no doubt that China, North Korea, and Iran are using the war in Ukraine as a battle lab for their own drone warfare doctrines and technologies. Thus, the kind of war that we are seeing today in Ukraine is a preview of what we will experience against a modern adversary who brings drones and other novel technologies to the fight.
Drones do not force us to reinvent all aspects of warfare. But we need to reframe everything we already know against this new reality that we see playing out in Ukraine. In particular, the Ukrainian battlefield stands in stark contrast to America’s most recent combat experiences against terrorists and insurgents.
Just imagine the carnage we would have suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan if our enemies had access to FPV drones. Those of us who served in those wars are lucky that they predated the drone warfare revolution by a few years. But our good fortune has expired, and we should not assume that we are pre-destined to win the next war without a heavy toll in blood and treasure.
Change is Not a Linear Process
The Pentagon has wisely taken steps in recent weeks to launch the U.S. on what we hope to be a crash course expansion of our nation’s combat drone arsenal, as well as a sweeping refinement of our drone warfare doctrine (an aspect of preparing for a drone war that often gets overshadowed by the technological attention-grabbers).
Despite these recent leaps in the right direction, we still see pockets of intransigence within our military ranks. Case in point is the Army’s latest update to its “Tank Platoon” tactical manual, known as ATP 3-20.15, late last week.
When encountering small drones, the manual says to spot the FPV, make hand signals, close hatches, signal HQ, and change formation. Then the kicker: the manual depicts a squad of M1 Abrams main battle tanks taking aim at a passing drone and then shooting it down with their main 120 mm cannons.
Needless to say, such a course of action is wildly divergent from reality. In the real-world, you’ll have seconds, probably won’t detect the drone until the last moment, if at all — and FPV drones flown in erratic, bumblebee patterns by highly-operators are notoriously hard targets for sharpshooters, never mind a tank turret.
Regarding the U.S. Army’s updated tank manual, one Russian military commentator wrote on Telegram that if you follow these procedures, “There will shortly be no tank platoon at all.” The point of highlighting all this isn’t to poke fun at whoever wrote and published the U.S. Army’s tank manual. It is to underscore the lethal consequences of not taking the drone threat seriously, or of misunderstanding the trends in tactics and technologies on Ukraine’s battlefields.
This example also reiterates our emphasis at the Vector Report on both technologies and tactics. For no matter how quickly technology evolves, and no matter how robotic the battlefield of the future becomes, human courage and skill still rule the day.
