Adapting to drone warfare: Easier said than done - analysis

Drone strikes killed over a dozen people in Russia’s republic of Tatarstan overnight, with the industrial city of Nizhnekamsk struck, despite being located 1,100 kilometres from Ukrainian territory. Kyiv’s military confirmed it conducted the attack, saying the Taneko oil refinery was targeted. While this incident stands out as one of the single deadliest attacks against Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, in many ways such incidents have become commonplace.

Ukraine has, over the course of the war, transformed itself arguably into the world’s leading drone power, fielding capabilities that few other nations are yet to match. Constrained by a lack of manpower, it is moving towards replacing infantry and logistics soldiers with unmanned ground vehicles. Lacking real traditional naval power, it has nonetheless taken on the Russian fleet in the Black Sea using unmanned surface vessels. Bombarded constantly with Iranian-supplied Shahed kamikaze drones, it is pioneering interception techniques including through the use of ultra-fast interceptor drones.

Russia is of course similarly innovating, and noticeably was ahead of Ukraine in pioneering the use of optical wire-guided First Person View (FPV) drones to overcome electronic warfare jamming. Militaries around the world are observing the rapid technological arms race and attempting to learn lessons from it. But over the course of the last six months, a number of examples have emerged showing that adapting to drone warfare is far easier said than done.

Hezbollah

In the round of combat that took place between Hezbollah and the Israeli military between October 2023 and November 2024, Hezbollah took a battering. The Lebanese Shi’ite group had no answer to Israel’s air power, especially after its command and control was disrupted by the pager attacks, leading to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah. But when full-scale hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel renewed in March 2026, Israel was caught unprepared for the lethality of the drones sent against its troops and armour. If the anti-tank missile was Hezbollah’s weapon of choice in 2023/2024, in 2026 it was cheap, wire-guided drones, imitating tactics pioneered by Russia.

Unable to jam Hezbollah’s new weapon, Israel scrambled to develop a technological solution while troops were left simply staring up at the sky to scan for threats. The perception of vulnerability that IDF troops and Israeli residents in northern Israel talked about was particularly noticeable due to the relatively weak position Hezbollah fought from. The IDF’s failure to predict the threat - despite YouTube and Telegram being full of FPV drone strike videos from Ukraine for several years - was also criticised.

Iran

At the same time, elsewhere in the Middle East, the United States was discovering how difficult it could be to prevent Iranian drones and missiles from slipping through its defensive nets. US bases in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar sustained hits with varying degrees of damage. Some strikes appeared superficial, but others, like Iran destroying an E-3 Sentry AWACS plane, were not. While it was clear that US and Israeli air power was inflicting far more damage on Iran than the Islamic Republic could do in return, this appears not to have mattered. War is not a symmetrical equation.

Indeed, one of the main factors cited for why the US did not escalate its attack on Iran with a ground invasion - even on a limited scale such as a landing at Kharg Island - was the danger such a mission would pose to US troops within drone range of the Iranian mainland. Again, such a threat was feasibly predictable: the war began at a time of the US’ choosing, and the danger Iranian drones were causing in Ukraine, via Russian middlemen, was clear for some time.

Europe Rearming

Throughout the history of modern warfare, there are numerous examples showing how difficult militaries can find it to adapt to technological revolutions. French soldiers marching against machine gun fire wearing bright blue uniforms at the start of World War One, or the British army’s skepticism about the introduction of the first armoured fighting vehicles - tanks - show that this is not a new phenomenon. Militaries tend to be conservative by nature.

Expensive and lengthy procurement pipelines can also influence the direction a military moves in. If it takes 20 years and billions of dollars to upgrade your army’s armoury, it can be a tough call to cancel the development of a new tank halfway through. Which is the problem Europe finds itself in as it rearms - in part due to pressure from US President Donald Trump, and in part due to fear of Russian aggression. But it’s noticeable that as European states announce new spending commitments, many of the expenditures are for traditional tanks and armoured fighting vehicles. Prestige items in the 20th-century arsenal that now litter the Ukrainian battlefield, killed by inexpensive drones.

Where next?

As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention; something that is triply true during war. Militaries will inevitably have to adapt to the changing nature of war brought about by drones. The question is whether they do so before or after they find themselves under fire. And whether they can adapt and integrate new technologies into their doctrine before the next technological lurch forward arrives. Be that AI, advanced robotics, or something as yet unseen.