Autonomous Ukraine: We Are in a New Era of Warfare

Michael HOROWITZ: Ukraine revealed that we have entered the era of mass in warfare where millions of drones fly across the battlefield for one-way strike purposes, for sensing purposes, and it is fundamentally transforming the way that countries fight...mass is back.

Erin DUMBACHER: There’s a lot of lessons to be learned from what the Ukrainians have been able to accomplish on the battlefield for U.S. defense policy, U.S. defense planning, and the defense contracting world. Like what actually the industrial base of the United States might need to look like if we were to ever fight as modern a war as the Ukrainians are fighting right now. 

The war in Ukraine has set a new precedent for modern conflicts. 

Four years in, it’s become a testing ground for the next era of warfare, in which low-cost drones can neutralize multimillion-dollar military assets and where the traditional front line has been blurred. 

The war in Ukraine has also shown us that autonomous weapons will play a starring role in future conflicts, and that states must now reinvent their response to national security threats. 

The particularly brutal winter approaching the four year anniversary has been marked by swarms of Russian drone strikes and missile barrages, with authorities issuing repeated air-raid warnings. Cities across Ukraine have endured waves of attacks targeting energy networks and homes, underscoring how drone warfare has brought the frontlines into everyday civilian life.

In this four-episode miniseries, we’re going to examine the war in Ukraine as a blueprint for modern warfare - exploring how technology, innovation on the battlefield, and new alliances are redefining the nature of conflict.

I’m Gabrielle Sierra and this is Why It Matters. Today, how the conflict in Ukraine has launched the world into the next era of warfare. 

HOROWITZ: We’ve entered the era of precise mass in war, and Ukraine is the best illustration of that trend. What it means is you can now manufacture low cost precision weapons and sensors. 

My name’s Mike Horowitz. I’m a Senior Fellow for Technology and Innovation at the Council. I am a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Director of Perry World House there, which is our global affairs think tank, essentially, at the university. And I’ve spent my career working on issues surrounding defense innovation and technology. 

I think that the thing it’s really easy to forget now as the war grinds toward its four-year anniversary, is the way that everybody thought this war would be over in two weeks or a month. You know, people thought the Russian military is one of the best militaries in the world, they’re really advanced, they have incredible capabilities, they’re well-trained. They’re just going to roll over the Ukrainians. That was the conventional wisdom at the time, and that was fundamentally wrong. And it was pretty clear that that conventional wisdom was wrong from the drop, when you saw Ukrainians valiantly defending themselves against a Russian onslaught. And even early on, it was clear the way the Ukrainians were using pretty ingenious applications of new military technologies or emerging military technologies to try to make it happen. And don’t forget that Russia had been at it against Ukraine in a more limited fashion since 2014. So, Ukraine had had almost a decade of preparation or at least thinking about, how is it that we defend ourselves against Russia? So if you combine the fact that the country had been at least at some state of conflict since 2014, with a more technologically advanced, highly educated society, that in some ways made them a good candidate, I guess in retrospect, to be able to adapt emerging technologies for the military environment. 

DUMBACHER: Ukraine’s combining what has worked in prior all-out ground wars with modern technology that is networked, information driven, and frankly, they’re just being really innovative on the battlefield.

My name is Erin Dumbacher, I am the Stanton Nuclear Security Senior Fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Ukrainians have shown that you can innovate quickly. That you can have an idea and you can get it on the battlefield in a matter of days not weeks, months, or years. We’ve heard a lot about all of the drone activity on the front lines in Ukraine. They waged something called Operation Spider Web...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTAQ4O2M0U4

WSJ News: The attack known as Operation Spider’s Web hit 34 percent of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers, causing an estimated $7 billion worth of damage.

DUMBACHER: …with some incredible intelligence capabilities, they snuck the drones into the Russian mainland, and the Ukrainians report that they incapacitated around 40 strategic Russian bombers. Big, really big planes that are really important to Russia’s strategic forces and Russia’s capacity to wage war. So any of the superpowers in the world, be they the United States or China, have to be thinking a little bit more about what it means that smaller states with fewer resources can actually have some sort of strategic impact in this way.

This operation is just one of many that have been conducted throughout the war that strategically surprised the Russians and the rest of the world. It’s remarkable that Ukraine has been able to prevent a full Russian takeover, in large part because of autonomous weapons. But that shift has also created an entirely new dynamic on the battlefield and proven that investing more in cheaper weapons technology does give you a leg to stand on.

This new model for war begs the question - how much does perfection matter over cost and scale?

HOROWITZ: What Ukraine and Russia, frankly, have demonstrated, that we’ve seen this on both sides, is that we are in a new era of conflict. That the era we were in before was a world where what we thought about was in the context of something like the war on terrorism. All right, there are a limited number of targets, and you want to use really expensive, really exquisite weapons to try to destroy those targets. We fire one Tomahawk cruise missile, we destroy the target. Ukraine didn’t have access to Tomahawk cruise missiles, and Russia had a relatively limited inventory at the beginning of the war. So they started thinking about, how do we manufacture new technologies using what we do have access to and using what some of the things we’re seeing out there in the world when it comes to warfare?

SIERRA: Tell me a little bit more about the weapons technology we’re talking about here, what should I be picturing? 

HOROWITZ: What you now have essentially are several different types of things that we used to call drones that are now regular features of warfare. The first are things like the TB2 that Ukraine uses, these sort of drones that hover around at 30,000 feet and have lots of sensors on them and can launch missiles at targets, like that kind of thing that most Americans are familiar with. And then you have little quadcopter sensor drones everywhere, which means that there’s no place to hide, essentially. The bigger trend though, in the context of the Ukraine war, is what’s called one-way attack systems. These are systems that instead of the $2 million that an American cruise missile might cost, cost maybe $10,000 or up to $100,000, that can go maybe 20 kilometers, 50 kilometers, or up to 2,000 kilometers actually in some cases, often using first person viewer guidance systems that look more like a video game, frankly, than anything else. And those are deployed not by the tens or hundreds, but by the thousands and tens of thousands. Ukraine is going to produce almost four million drones in the coming year, and that’s not a misprint. They produced almost two million drones last year. So, we’re now in a situation where 70 percent of the casualties on the front lines in Ukraine, according to one estimate, are driven by these first person viewer, one-way attack drones. So, drones in that way are substituting for artillery, which used to generate a lot of those casualties, or machine guns, frankly, in some cases at shorter ranges. But it doesn’t mean you don’t need machine guns, it doesn’t mean you don’t need artillery. In some ways, what drones are doing is adding another layer of systems that you have to have on the battlefield to be able to compete.

One-way attack drones aren’t just supplementing artillery,

they’re reshaping how strikes are carried out. Many are designed 

for single use, detonating on impact, and some can even rely on onboard AI to navigate, identify targets, and complete missions with little to no human engagement. While most still involve humans in the decision chain, there’s a broad range of autonomy in Ukraine’s capabilities.

SIERRA: So, I don’t know guns enough to make this analogy, but is it like the jump of coming in with a musket when someone has invented a gun that shoots multiple rounds?

HOROWITZ: Yeah. I mean, frankly, that’s a great way to think about it.

SIERRA: Hey, all right.

HOROWITZ: If you imagine the comparison between a musket versus a rifle, in terms of the reliability and time to fire. And frankly, if you are a huge nerd in the defense world like me, one of the canonical cases of a rising power succeeding in warfare is actually the Prussian military dominating France in 1870 and 1871, and reshaping the balance of power in Europe. And it’s because they had figured out how to use rifles, and the French had the technology but had not actually figured out really well how to integrate it yet. In some ways it’s a little bit of a throwback. I mean, we are used to, especially in the United States, a world in which two things are true. One, the United States is the most powerful military in the world and has essentially little to fear from other militaries being as good as the United States. And that is no longer true, but not our point in this context. The second is that warfare is defined by qualitative technological edges. We have better cruise missiles, we have better tanks, and we have troops that are better at operating them. And so, that qualitative technological edge is what gives a military like the United States an advantage. And again, if you’re looking at firing one cruise missile to hit one target, or you need one bomber to evade enemy radar and get through and drop a bomb, then there’s a good argument for that and there are still lots of situations in which you need that. What’s different is that every country in the world, and militant groups, now have access to precision strike. Everybody now can have thousands of one-way attack systems and drone-based sensing to help guide those systems. And that’s just a different universe in some ways. It’s democratizing precision strike in a way that was very different than the world of essentially an American monopoly or an American and Russian or Chinese kind of monopoly that the first couple of decades of the precision strike era saw. This is a scarier world in which more countries and more actors can do damage. And do damage not with guns and knives and sort of like the tools that we have traditionally associated even with small combat, but now even small military units in small countries have access to drones.

Ukraine has and will continue to benefit from this new world, alongside other smaller militaries looking to build their defense force. But this also points to something easy to miss in day-to-day coverage of the war. Russia is also learning, in real time, about this new era of warfare.

Despite its vulnerabilities to Ukraine’s own drone innovation, Moscow has been able to scale up its defense technology in great volume. On the ground, Russia is actively operating large quantities of precision-strike drones and learning how to integrate them into sustained campaigns. 

This presents a serious strategic turn for Washington. Not only have smaller militaries entered the conversation, but one of the United States’ biggest adversaries is vigorously preparing for the conflicts it may face in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead.

In order for us to keep up, the United States will have to change the way it fights wars, building on its longstanding partnership with the private sector in ways that introduce new strategic risks and advantages. 

DUMBACHER: That is the big question in defense planning in the future. To what extent do we need to be focused again, like we were in World War II, on quantity rather than on technological advancement and innovation? We made a big bet in the 1940s, ‘50s, ’60s, and beyond that the U.S. would prevail in competition through innovation. And the big question now is whether or not the U.S. can prevail in competition with only innovation, or if it also has to be innovation and production. As we look at the U.S. military today, I think it’s very helpful to start with a quick note on what the U.S. military looked like when we were last operating a full scale war, which was the Second World War, World War II, in the 1940s. Before World War II there was not an expansive defense industrial base across the United States. But then out of necessity, we saw born something incredibly robust and expensive for the time. We saw The Manhattan Project come out of that. It cost in dollars of the time around $2 billion which was extraordinary. But most of that money was not actually for the scientists that you see featured in films like Oppenheimer or the storied science investments that happened at Los Alamos. It was a lot of industrial capacity in places like Tennessee and Washington State. Billions spent to build the facilities to get the materials that would be needed for The Manhattan Project be successful in the end. 

https://youtu.be/teZm4cPoh-U?si=l2S80obMpHxL2aD4&t=66

Oppenheimer: What’s the nature of the device they detonated?

Data indicates it may have been a plutonium implosion device.

Like the one you built at Los Alamos. 

DUMACHER: And then there were all sorts of other ‘Rosie the Riveter’ style factories across the United States. I think a lot of us are very familiar with what that looked like when the auto plants transitioned to make airplanes and all of that. So that was sort of like phase one of how we got to where we are today. That of course then quickly had to transition into a Cold War period where we were not fighting a live war but we did have to invest in research and development. So the Russians launched Sputnik Satellite in October of 1957.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWd0fX-qbBs

DARPAtv: Today a new moon is in the sky. The world’s first artificial satellite called the Sputnik 1.

DUMBACHER: The very next year, the federal government stood up something called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, now we call it DARPA. It was stood up in 1958 with the principal goal, the only goal of DARPA, was to avoid strategic surprise. We didn’t want to be surprised by an adversary’s technology ever again.

SIERRA: What do you mean be surprised?

DUMBACHER: Well, the Soviet Union launched a satellite to orbit the globe, before the Americans had, and that was a surprise. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWd0fX-qbBs

DARPAtv: We must see to it that whatever advantages they have are temporary only.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSQpBUkwyPo

The Sputnik Moment: People were shocked that Russia had a technology that could do this, and we didn’t.

DUMBACHER: Everyone in the United States could go outside at night and see the little dot sort of crossing the sky. It was frightening to think for the first time that your principal adversary was hovering above you in orbit. And so from the late 40s and through the 50s up until Sputnik, we started to convert what had been the large scale quantity-oriented production of defense and military capabilities into something that was more about thinking about the next technology. And a lot of it, a huge percentage of it, was because the federal government writ large, the Defense Department in particular, supported all kinds of research and development funds. They built partnerships with commercial firms where the commercial side was doing it better. And in fact in the sort of post Cold War environment, what we saw was a shift from let’s say around in the range of let’s say 70 to 80 different firms across the United States that were supporting the Defense Department. That was whittled down in an era of consolidation in the 1990s, to five to ten.

You’ve probably heard of the firms that have dominated the U.S. defense contracting market for the past three decades - Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, otherwise referred to collectively as the “Big Five.” As of 2025, Lockheed Martin remains the largest U.S. government defense contractor with over $61 billion in contracts, largely driven by the F-35 fighter jet program.

And four out of five of these firms have been involved in providing Ukraine defense capabilities since week one of the war - right alongside new school Silicon Valley companies who saw an opportunity for their technology to make an impact in the war.

DUMBACHER: I think there was a formal effort of course in the Defense Department to make sure that the United States, without putting U.S. troops actually in Ukraine, was really doing as much as it could to support the Ukrainians in their effort. And so in addition to the formal ways, where you got a company on contract and then the capabilities sort of goes through conventional systems to be able to be delivered in Europe at the battlefront. There’s also a lot of informal assistance that Americans and Silicon Valley folks were providing.

HOROWITZ: I think people underestimate the importance of the private sector in the American military today. Think about all the military technology that the United States uses from the long range bombers to the fighter jets, to the cruise missiles, to the tanks. Those aren’t built at American military facilities, those are built by companies like Lockheed and Raytheon and Boeing. And so, it’s not that surprising in some ways to see Silicon Valley companies increasingly working with the Pentagon, given the unique importance of their technologies. And I would not underestimate the impact of the invasion of Ukraine in shifting attitudes in Silicon Valley. Again, we’re coming on the fourth anniversary of the war and feelings about the war have changed, but at the outset of the war, this was a very clear good guys versus bad guys situation, where you have Russian invaders and the valiant Ukrainian defenders. And I think Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and companies, which for years had wondered, should we work on military technology? Should we work with the Pentagon? They were already trending in the direction of yes, but Ukraine was an extremely clear example, especially with something like Starlink early in the war, where they could see their technologies making a difference to help defend, essentially the good guys, against attack. And I think that that was a real mindset shift moment where a bunch of Silicon Valley companies saw how their technology could be used for good, even in a military context. 

Not surprisingly, patriotism and good business are not mutually exclusive. In 2024, the Pentagon revealed its $24 million contract to deploy Starlink terminals to Ukraine. Then again in 2025, Palantir secured a massive $10 billion U.S. army contract to support AI capabilities on the Ukrainian battlefield.

And even legacy software companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle are getting in on the action. In 2022, they were awarded a $9 billion Pentagon Cloud Contract to modernize military cloud and AI systems that later supported Ukraine’s defense.

HOROWITZ: Silicon Valley is a thing in some ways because of U.S. military funding during the Cold War. And in that context, it’s not surprising that the leading companies working on the most important technologies in the world, that there will be defense applications for those technologies, and that those companies might then see business opportunities as for-profit companies in working with Uncle Sam. 

HOROWITZ: You know, I will say this, back in around 2018, Google decided not to participate in a Pentagon contract for a program called Project Maven, which was the first big artificial intelligence program that the Pentagon had funded under what was then the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. And a lot of people fretted that, oh, does this mean Silicon Valley’s abandoning the Pentagon? How’s the Pentagon to get access to this technology? You know what? A bunch of other companies stepped in. And frankly, when you look at the magnitude of a company like Palantir today, whose biggest product is Maven Smart System, companies picked up the slack when Google dropped out, and that in some ways is what I think you’d be likely to see. In a free market world, if a couple of Silicon Valley companies decide that they don’t want to work with the Pentagon, then that will just create units for those that will.

The growing importance of major tech raises questions about private company control over key military technology. Let’s say a private entity decides it isn’t in their - or their investors’ - best interest to keep providing a service to the U.S. government and they just take it away. Then what?

DUMBACHER: If a private company controls tools that the U.S. military buys and uses, sort of from a, let’s say that they’re offering a service. We could use an example of the low earth orbit satellites that Starlink has for example. Starlink, today, is a privately held company. Only one person, the owner of that company, and their board is really relevant when you’re asking, “Can we use your services for our particular purpose?” Publicly held companies would be held to different standards because of the way we do Securities and Exchange Regulation in the United States. But privately held companies, it’s one or two people that that would ultimately make the decision. We did actually see, and I think this is a warning for defense planners thinking about the right ways to engage with the private sector in future wars, we saw an instance where Starlink services that were provided to the Ukrainians at some point in time right before an offensive, actually were cut off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2PIxvnACyg

Amanpour and Company/ Walter ISAACSON: The larger question is, how come he got to decide? Why is a private citizen deciding whether or not the Ukrainians can do it? 

Well that was my question, how is that even possible? Does that trouble you about someone like Musk?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyC7e2VnyWU

BREMMER: Now, the Ukrainian government is being quite critical of some of the decisions Elon Musk has made in restricting the use for Starlink, for the Ukrainians. I don’t think that’s a fair criticism by itself. I think we need to recognize that Starlink’s availability to the Ukrainians was absolutely essential in helping the government and the military leaders actually communicate with their soldiers on the front lines. And if it wasn’t for Starlink, if it wasn’t for the role of many other technology companies...certainly the Ukrainians would have lost a lot more territory. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2roi8DhJGlU

Jake TAPPER: Last year Musk blocked access to his Starlink satellite network in Crimea, in order to disrupt a major Ukrainian attack on the Russian navy there. In other words, Musk effectively sabotaged a military operation by Ukraine, a U.S. ally, against Russia, an aggressor country that in that invaded a U.S. ally. 

DUMBACHER: Now it had real battlefield impacts for the Ukrainians that day. What should the United States be preparing for and considering to make sure that if one day we are reliant on some of these services that are frankly either too expensive for the U.S. military to create themselves, or there’s not a good enough reason to go ahead and build something that’s government owned for that particular purpose? I think there’s important questions about what does that ownership structure look like? And when do we hit the Rubicon of where the U.S. government and the Defense Department does say, “Okay, we’re invoking something like the Defense Production Act and now you need to convert all of your commercial enterprises to this war effort.” 

But Ukraine isn’t the only party to suffer from Musk’s decisions to curb access to Starlink terminals. Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Aleksei Krivoruchko announced this February that the Russian military has not been able to access Starlink internet terminals for weeks following Musk’s decision to contain what he called Russia’s “illicit use” of its service. 

Russia relies on Starlink access for battlefield communication. Without it, reports say Russian soldiers have faced significant command and control issues along Ukraine’s 750 mile front line. In the wake of Elon Musk’s decision, Russian defense companies have scrambled to come up with other satellite options, but their technologies cannot compare to Starlink’s speed and coverage. And this really matters - analysts say that Ukraine leveraged the Russian block on access to Starlink to make its fastest battlefield gain in over two and a half years.

SIERRA: I keep thinking of the, you know the little green plastic Army men? That you used to see when you were a kid or maybe you had or someone had. I mean do you think that the U.S. is thinking in modern terms? Or do you think we’re still prioritizing strategy and weapons for a previous war?

HOROWITZ: The American military is fundamentally going too slowly when it comes to learning the lessons from Ukraine and integrating emerging technologies. This is not that surprising in some ways. If you’re the most powerful in the military in the world, which the United States is, and it is, to be clear, not just because of its technology, but especially because of its soldiers and the way that it puts those together to use force effectively. But if you’re the most powerful, every day you look in the mirror and you’re like, “I’m the best. I’m the best. I’m the best.” Until you aren’t. And history is littered with examples of leading militaries that essentially were the best until they weren’t. For example, the French, the era of the armored night ends when French mounted nights are defeated by the English longbow. The era of British naval supremacy ends at the outset of World War II when Japanese airplanes sank British battleships and British battle cruisers, signaling that the age of the battleship had fundamentally ended and the age of the aircraft carrier was beginning. This happens in war, and it’s really challenging if you’re the best then to transform, because what if you end up relatively disadvantaged? The issue is that stopping the technologies that we’re talking about today from influencing the military is like stopping a hurricane. It’s not going to happen. And so, the American military would be much better off trying to get ahead of it.

And other countries have already started to outpace the U.S.

Take Turkey for example. The country’s largest drone manufacturer, Baykar, now exports roughly three times as many combat drones as its nearest American competitor and commands close to 60 percent of the global export market. Not to mention Ukraine, who over the course of four years went from having a handful of domestic drone production companies to over 500.

HOROWITZ: Frankly, one of the most interesting things we’ve seen come out of the Ukraine context, is the most prominent precise mass system in the world is built by Iran. It’s the Shahed 136 that can go over 1,000 kilometers, carry between a 50 and 150 kilogram warhead. And the Russians have used tens of thousands of them against Ukraine. This is a world where Iran can invent some of the world’s most important military technology, where those kinds of breakthroughs are not simply limited to the United States or Russia or China or maybe Israel. 

And many of the big players aren’t ignoring the trend towards quantity either. Up until now, Russian defense tech has largely developed as a response to U.S. systems, which prioritizes state-of-the-art weapons backed by multi-million dollar defense contractors. But where Russia outpaces the U.S. now is by volume of military assets, even though the U.S. retains superiority in terms of innovation. 

As we enter the 5th year of the war, and anticipate what future conflicts between great powers will look like, what lessons will the U.S. and other Western allies need to learn as they continue to pave the way forward? 

HOROWITZ: Very early in the war, Ukraine used a Turkish drone called the TB2 to fire away against Russian tanks that were heading towards Kyiv and destroy columns of tanks, basically, and protect Ukraine’s capital from a Russian invasion. When we think about drones in the United States, we’ve tended to think about them in the context of things like the Reaper or the Predator, these drones that were used in the war on terrorism for strikes against militant groups or terrorists in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. We hadn’t really thought about them that much in this context for conventional war. And it’s the kind of thing that people thought was possible in theory. People like me, other people had been writing, “In theory, this is possible. We see trends like this could happen,” but it’s not what people expected in practice. And all credit, frankly, to the Ukrainians, with their backs against the wall, figuring out how to take the technologies they had access to, including some new whiz-bang stuff from Silicon Valley and using it to defend themselves against a brutal Russian invasion.

For resources used in this episode and more information, visit CFR.org/whyitmatters and take a look at the show notes. Also CFR has a new series of policy briefs on Ukraine and the ongoing war, so head to cfr.org/topics/war-in-ukraine to check those out.

This episode was produced by Molly McAnany, and me, Gabrielle Sierra. Our sound designer is Markus Zakaria. Our intern this semester is Isabel McDermott. Robert McMahon is our Managing Editor. Our theme music is composed by Ceiri Torjussen.

If you ever have any questions or suggestions or just want to chat with us, email at [email protected] or you can hit us up on X at @CFR_org.

You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your audio. For Why It Matters, this is Gabrielle Sierra signing off. See you soon!