May 2025 Report 1
May 2025
HIGHLIGHTS
- Israel's strategic investments in drone technology are proving to be decisive in both defensive resilience and offensive reach.
- In response to renewed UAV incursions launched from Gaza, Israeli aerial defense units employed a mix of soft-kill and hard-kill systems.
- Israeli forces tested a UAV-based deception tactic using dummy drones to divert attention from true flight paths.
- Both the Russians and Ukrainians are developing drones with gas, liquid, and solid-state hydrogen fuel sources.
- Russia’s Archangel Rocket drone is a high-speed, long-range kamikaze rocket drone that has proven effective across a wide range of mission sets.
- Ukraine has a program that awards points to units that upload videos of their confirmed, successful drone engagements.
- The Russians are using heavy bomber drones, but in smaller numbers than the Ukrainians.
- China continues to escalate regional tensions by arming allies like Pakistan with advanced weaponry and maintaining pressure on Taiwan.
- As tensions between India and Pakistan escalate, international defense buyers have placed urgent orders for thousands of military drones from Taiwan’s UAV supply chain.
- The recent India-Pakistan conflict demonstrated the effectiveness of China-supplied drone
- defense systems
EDITOR'S NOTE
It’s no secret that the war in Ukraine is the epicenter of the global drone warfare revolution. That said, it still raises one’s eyebrows to see direct links between Ukraine and drone warfare trends in other conflicts around the world. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen several such examples. OSINT sources report that resistance fighters in Myanmar employed an FPV drone to down a junta-operated Mi-17 helicopter. This comes about a year after Ukrainians achieved their first shoot-down of a Russian helicopter using FPV drones, expanding the known limits of what FPVs could accomplish in an air-to-air intercept role. It seems that the Kachin Independence Army, the FPV-wielding resistance outfit fighting Myanmar’s junta, was taking notes.
An unverified image posted to social media purportedly showing the Kachin Independence Army’s FPV drone strike against a junta helicopter. To the west of Myanmar, the recent conflict between India and Pakistan provided another case study in how lessons from Ukraine are shaping conflicts farther afield. As our team member in Taiwan reports this edition, Pakistan’s counter-drone network — using Chinese technology — did well at downing Indian drones. “The recent India-Pakistan conflict demonstrated the effectiveness of China-supplied drone defense systems, particularly in neutralizing advanced UAV threats,” the Vector Report’s Taiwan team member writes, adding: “These integrated systems reportedly shot down 84 Indian UAVs, including advanced models like the MQ-9 Reaper and Israel’s Heron.” Pakistan’s multi-layered drone defense network, interwoven into its traditional air defense architecture, offers a bellwether for how conventional militaries will need to think about air defense in the drone era.
Our team member in Israel also reports in this edition how Israel has adopted and operationalized layered counter-drone defenses against threats from its enemies. Yet, I’d argue that the India-Pakistan conflict offers only a snippet of how comprehensive this re-imagining of air defense needs to be. The drones employed by India and Pakistan were not the small, tactical, FPV-sized drones that are so prolific on Ukraine’s battlefields — and which have been employed by both Ukraine and Myanmar’s rebels against helicopters.
Air defense plans must now include all of one’s airspace, beginning at ground level and including the complicated air littoral within which small drones can fly between trees and buildings and trace ground features like ridgelines and gulleys. Discerning tactical drones in this cluttered, confusing low-altitude environment requires specialized radars equipped with machine-learning algorithms that can intelligently discern a drone from a bird, and even determine a drone’s type based on its flight characteristics.
Competition for air littoral dominance is now an indivisible, essential part of any ground warfare campaign. Failure to clear your air littoral of enemy drones virtually guarantees that your forces will suffer casualties and destroyed equipment. Apart from those physical losses, your movement may also be stalled due to the psychological paralysis of persistent, lethal drone threats. This is not conjecture, for we have seen these exact sequences play out time and again on the Ukrainian battlefield when one side is able to overwhelm the other’s air littoral with unmanned platforms.
The India-Pakistan conflict never expanded into a full-on ground campaign. Had it done so, I imagine we would have seen more unmanned warfare tactics and technologies scraped from
Ukraine’s battlefields. The past few weeks have re-upped a lesson — a cautionary tale, perhaps — that we must constantly ingrain in our consciousness as we try to keep up with the rapid-fire evolutions in drone warfare. The lesson is this: our adversaries are learning from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and we’d better too.
In this edition of the Vector Report, our team member in Ukraine reports on one trend in drone technology that both Ukraine and Russia are pursuing, which has a direct impact on aerial
interception performance. Last summer, just after Ukraine had achieved its first helicopter kill with an FPV, the Vector Report spoke with a Ukrainian FPV operator who said that one essential element of modifying FPV drones for air intercept missions is the incorporation of special, high-output batteries that sacrifice endurance for the sake of producing surges in power (thus translating into greater acceleration and top speed).
With that in mind, in this edition our team member in Ukraine provides a valuable update on the development of alternative power sources for both Ukrainian and Russian drones, including Metal- Organic Framework (MOF) energy systems based on solid-state hydrogen fuel. “Once these alternative power source technologies become more developed, they could dramatically increase the performance of UAVs and other assets that currently run on battery power, expanding operational possibilities,” the Vector Report’s team member in Ukraine writes. It’s tough to keep your thumb on the pulse of each new drone warfare development that might turn out to be a paradigm shifter. I suspect that few experts and outside observers immediately recognized the looming significance of fiber-optic tethered drones when they first appeared on the battlefield.
Yet, new drone power sources that boost range and power output could radically re-define the current geographic and altitude limits of what we now understand to be the drone warfare shadow on either side of the Russo-Ukrainian zero line. Major advances in power source technology could also expand the performance limits of the drone platforms currently in service, thereby broadening their potential combat utility. In terms of air-to-air intercepts, if new power sources increase the endurance, acceleration, and top speed of FPV
drones, then they will be much more formidable threats against manned aircraft.
On an even simpler level, more advanced power sources could limit the number of spare batteries and generators that drone teams must haul to the front lines. A smaller logistical burden would make these units nimbler. They’ll also be better armed, since they can replace the weight of batteries they no longer have to carry with more drones. Not every advance in technology is a game-changer. But some are. The risk we face for not recognizing the genuine game-changers when they appear is that American troops will be on the
receiving end of our failures of imagination. The work by both Ukraine and Russia in developing more advanced power sources for their drones certainly merits close attention in the months to come. Once either side makes a significant breakthrough, we’ll undoubtedly see it echoed on some other battlefield.
