Lessons from the drone war
RUSI land warfare research fellow Bob Tollast examines how lessons from Ukraine could accelerate the UK's uncrewed systems industry and strengthen sovereign capability.
U
kraine is once again causing global shockwaves with its deep-strike drone campaigns against Russian energy, shipping and overland
logistics. While much is novel, such as drones launched from high-altitude balloons, it is worth remembering that this story has been 12 years in the making.
It carries lessons for the UK’s drone
industry, which has been watching closely and has seen several false starts. While the 2022 full-scale invasion generated a global surge in drone development, Ukraine was hardly a world leader in the technology beforehand. Today, Kyiv hopes to build 10 million drones
this year and fields new systems every month. Since 2014, it has built a defence technology ecosystem in which industrial capacity, investment and frontline feedback reinforce one another, allowing new capabilities to move from development to deployment at remarkable speed. Against that experience, four factors provide a useful way to assess the UK's progress.
Building the industry Firstly, early adoption. Ukraine experimented with drones after the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, a critical and under-studied period. Almost everything uncrewed in Ukraine since then has originated as civilian technology, from 3D printers and CNC machines used to build frames and munition holders to brushless motor magnets, day and night cameras, flight controllers and open-source software. Ukraine’s innovation approach might be called “look around you”: adapting readily available technology to new battlefield roles. That has meant refining software such as ArduPilot, used in the 2025 Operation Spiderweb attack on Russian aviation, and reconfiguring Chinese agricultural drones to carry heavy payloads. In some cases, multiple drones can even be flown by a single pilot over mobile networks. This pre-2022 period could be called early
experimentation; building a knowledge base. After scaling production, Ukraine is now at the cutting edge of software-defined warfare.
Autumn 2026 | Advance 11
OPINION
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