The world is starting to recognize the tremendous impact that drones and robots are having on the modern battlefield. Whether they fly, walk, wheel, or float, they are quickly becoming a necessity in warfare of today and tomorrow.
Science-fiction films have shown us what is possible to imagine, and once imagined, humans have the extraordinary ability to create and make it real. It is no different in the field of war.
Numbers matter when it comes to warfare. The larger population has a decisive edge in the battlefield, as that nation can commit more humans to the fight. As we have seen playing out in real time, over time, the larger nation wears down the smaller nation. Not unlike the grinding world wars, the front lines of today are horrific places where many perish in the name of holding the line – where strength indeed comes with numbers.
Enter autonomous machines – where technology meets human invention, and the calculations of war that have been in place for centuries shift abruptly. Where the humans are not eye to eye, but camera to camera. Sensor arrays replace hearing, seeing, and touch. Artificial intelligence, with recent dramatic advances, is ushering in an entirely new class of fighting. Where drone swarms, acting in concert, attack enemy strongholds or infrastructure. Where unmanned boats, planes, helicopters and tracked machines take the battle to the enemy.
Those with the best adaptive technology – and, critically, in the greatest numbers – on land, at sea, and in the air, will be the new leaders in the world of warfare. Those who manufacture the greatest number of machines, with the best on-board intelligence, will achieve military supremacy.
With North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) spending now committed to be in the hundreds of billions more than it was a few short years ago, the type and number of new machines will be staggering. Thousands of hulking tanks and fighter jets, and hundreds of naval warships and submarines will be joined by millions of drones of various shapes, sizes, and configurations, all capable of doing unique jobs; reconnaissance, laying mines, supplying troops, attacking fortified positions, stopping enemy machines such as tanks and trucks, and, of course, wreaking havoc on infrastructure, from military to civilian, depending on the aggressors’ intentions.
With the United States having dominated the post-World War II era of modern warfare by out-innovating, out-spending, and out-building its rivals, the dynamic today is dramatically different. The U.S. strategy of bringing manufacturing home, especially for critical electronics and microchips, is probably more about warfare leadership and preparedness, than it is about the economy and jobs. A weak manufacturing sector means a weak military, in this new world of advanced drones. It is not about how big your human population is; it is now about how much and how fast you can build, and how smart your machines are.
Ukraine is reportedly manufacturing about 200,000 drones per month. That is 6,600 per day and a roughly 900% increase in production compared to a year earlier. Furthermore, Ukraine has set an ambitious target of producing more than 4.5 million drones in 2025, so the monthly manufacturing capability will only increase. Today, there are over 150 drone manufacturers in Ukraine. A soldier’s quote from The Telegraph; “every grandma who used to sell sunflowers on the corner is now selling drone parts.” Of course, Ukraine is at war, and the drone surge is certainly part of its strategy to not only lead with technology and protect its troops, but to nullify the advantage that comes with Russia’s much larger population (144 million versus 38 million in Ukraine as of 2024).
Imagine a world in which the average drone production rate for the global population matched Ukraine’s projected 2025 output of about 0.1 drones per person. That would be 800,000,000 drones manufactured in one year. And what if the trend continued? In the not-too-distant future, billions of attack drones and robots could be produced in a single year. What could go wrong?
Ukraine has become a leader in the ‘new tech’ and the ability to manufacture. They are building vast numbers of ‘Kamikaze drones’ – which as the name implies are one-way attack drones – to destroy tanks, vehicles, and personnel. These are very low-cost, high-volume machines with limited range but carry enough explosives to do the intended job. They are also developing fleets of reconnaissance copters, fixed-wing aircraft, and bombers. Most newsworthy was that they have also clearly developed long-range strike drones built for strategic attacks on Russian territory. With significant recent success, they are ramping up their manufacturing capability of these war machines, to allow much more offensive operations.
Elon Musk has been clear in his commentary about building Tesla; if you only do design and do not manufacture, you will not be able to keep up with innovation. A company or country needs to build, see what works and what needs improvement. The only way to continuously improve is by building.
I fully agree with this line of thinking, as I have seen it first-hand in my career in industrial automation. The U.S. government gets it, and I see many other countries starting to grasp the concept, including the UK with its recent agreement to build at home interceptor drones for Ukraine. They need to play catchup, and who better to learn from than a close ally.
As for advancements in technology, the U.S. has demonstrated formidable offensive capability. However, it is built on being the biggest, baddest, and strongest. Again, lessons from Ukraine come to pass, and they are about being nimble and innovating on the fly. Small drones, easy to build across a vast sector of manufacturers, are now supported by battlefield learning models to enable the smart or intelligent drone.
We often talk about “failing fast” in the technology world and the “innovation loop”. Nowhere is this more evident than on the front lines in Ukraine. Embedding intelligence in the drones allows real-time adjustments in tactics and enables “swarm” behaviour, where machines are behaving like a team and adapting to what is going on around them.
Perhaps more important, though, are the human masters behind the machines z– whether it is operators with point-of-view flying or driving to adjust in real-time operations, or software programmers taking the lessons of today, writing software adjustments into the drones tonight to allow a better fight tomorrow. The humans and the machines are learning, experimenting, and adapting right where the action is, at the level where the war is happening. There is an on-the-ground spontaneity that cannot happen with the big, complex war machines of the recent past. The innovation loop – see, decide, act, learn, improve, repeat – lives anew every day.
The world has entered a new era of warfare. To compete successfully, countries will need the best advanced intelligent technology and the best manufacturing. The U.S., Canada, and other allies will need to up their game, as it seems drones of all shapes, sizes, and capabilities are re-defining warfare, with the very real possibility that it is not the humans directly fighting wars of the near future, eye to eye, but the machines, sensor to sensor. James Cameron’s sci-fi flick The Terminator, released in 1984, seems prophetic about the significance of machines in warfare. Let’s hope the apocalyptic theme of that movie does not come to fruition, but that is an article for another day.
(Grant Wilde, BIG Media Ltd., 2025)
