Reuters World News - Drone wars

Episode Date: June 14, 2025

An ominous buzzing in the sky. Swarms of killer AI drones. Fields of fiberoptic grass. The weird future of drone warfare is here. The conflict in Ukraine has proven to be a testing ground for the next generation of weaponry. How will the proliferation of these small, cheap devices change the way wars are fought in the future? Business of war correspondent Mike Stone and acting Ukraine bureau chief Christian Lowe join the podcast. Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter ⁠here⁠. Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast ⁠here⁠. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drones have been used in warfare for decades. In fact, radio-controlled aircraft without pilots were tested as far back as World War I. For the first time, the U.S. Army tested a new radio target plane fitted with remote control. You're ready for landing position? It's rather like a telephone. But the war in Ukraine has brought things to a whole new level. We are seeing the deployment of drones at an unprecedented scale. and they're changing how wars will be fought in the future.

So on this weekend episode of Reuters World News, our Ukraine Bureau Chief and Defense correspondent will lay out the current state and the somewhat terrifying future of drone wars. I'm your host, Jonah Green. I'm joined now by Christian Lowe, our acting Ukraine Bureau Chief and Mike Stone, who covers the business of war from Washington, D.C.,

Hello, both. Thanks for coming on today. Oh, I know. Thanks for having us. So, Mike, a lot of listeners, I'm guessing, first came to know drones as these large pilotless planes. You know, essentially they're flying over the Taliban on reconnaissance missions. They can launch missiles. But what are the drones that we're talking about today that Russia and Ukraine have become so dependent on? So there's a variety of different types of drones that are, you know, 36-foot-wide fixed-wing items.

And then there's quadcopters, stuff that fits in a suitcase or a backpack. And everything in between, there's really large octocopters and sort of helicopter ones that you could use for, say, for example, evacuating someone from the front lines without putting a helicopter down on a pad. So think of it from like human scale size, lift a few hundred pounds to lifting 15, 20 pounds of explosives and dropping them onto a tank. Those are what's being generated in China, Russia. Iran, things that are very, very inexpensive, dual-use technology, servos, transistors, things that go into a radio or can go into a drone, and that drone can be used to shoot a wedding, or its dual-use could be to drop, you know, a grenade on someone. Some of them are doing recon.

Some of them are, they'll attach a smallish munition to the underneath of the thing, and then they'll drop that on a target. and sometimes the drone itself will contain a charge and they'll fly it at the target and destroy the target and the drone and you can tell those you might have seen online videos of it. You can see the grainy pictures and then the target tank or armored vehicle

whatever is approaching and then the picture goes dead because the thing has blown up. And Christian you are in Ukraine. What is it like living under the constant threat of drone attacks? I can tell you my own experience. from Tuesday night. So around about midnight,

Kiev time, air raids are starting going off, and the waves of Russian drones start arriving. So these are the bigger ones that Mike was just talking about. So they're kind of, I guess they're sort of the size of a little Cessna or smaller. The motor on them is like a little moped,

whiny noise that it makes. So these start coming in, you start hearing the anti-aircraft which is the Ukrainian forces trying to shoot them down. And then you hear the whine of the motor, and you hear it getting louder and louder, and you hope you're waiting for the crescendo, where then it starts getting quieter.

Because if it starts getting quieter, then it's moving away from you. And you can hear the buzzing from the ground? Yeah, totally. If it starts getting quiet and it's going away from you, that's fantastic. If it doesn't, then you need to be worried. What you will hear after it starts getting quieter

Sometimes the wine gets higher pitched because it's diving towards the ground. And then you hear a big bang. So these are not enormous things, and they don't carry a massive payload, but they do make a big bang. And my windows were rattling from the force of the blast in a couple of cases on Tuesday night. Oh, wow. You know, these things hit people. They hit their apartments.

And sometimes people just get hit and they get killed. And why would Russia use drones and not just lob missiles from, I think, thousand miles away. Missiles are super expensive. So an Iskanda missile, which is kind of at the lower end of Russian ballistic missiles, it's about a million bucks, you think. And the materials that go in there are quite difficult to get hold of, and the parts are difficult to machine.

Drones are super cheap. And the other reason we would send them in addition to missiles is to overwhelm air defenses, so you time it so that everything lands at the same time. you send your one-way attack drones off first, takes them time to fly through the air, and then at the correct moment, you fire off your missiles, which are quite a bit faster. And imagine trying to hit 1,000 targets at the same time versus 100 targets here and four targets there, right? You can hit those four targets down pretty easily because that won't overwhelm your defenses. It's called a salvo, so you have everything hit at the same time.

And I think also it's important to add that this isn't a one-way street. Ukraine has developed its own long-distance drones that are pretty much every night. They're launching attacks on Russia. So the scale of the damage and the casualties we see is very different. It's way lower than on this side in Ukraine, but they are doing damage. They're regularly forcing airports in Moscow to close, on a recent run in the last 10 days or so of hitting targets in the Russian defense industry. so they're proving fairly effective.

And perhaps most famously were those recent so-called spiders web strikes, which were planned by Ukraine for 18 months. And they did some real damage to machinery, and it was a symbolic blow. How did Ukraine pull that off? Well, that was super interesting. So basically, most of the airfields that were hitting that attack are beyond the range of drones. There's one in particular that's way out towards China. and Mongolia in that direction.

The longest distance, deep strike Ukrainian drones are about 1,000 kilometers, 600 miles. And the further they go, the less payload they're able to carry. So they've got a problem. They can't strike a lot of stuff. And Russia is moving much of its military resources and assets beyond the range, because it's safe there.

So Ukraine had a quandary. How do you get at this stuff? And they came up with this plan to forget about the long range. drones and just put the little kind of consumer-type quadracopter small drones that Mike was talking about. They put them in the cargo on the back of trucks, hit it in the roof of these modular wooden buildings that were loaded on the back of trucks. They drove them to the side of the road near airfields. The roofs of these modular buildings flipped off and the quadrucopter drones fly out and then they go the last couple of kilometers to the target, and they hit the target.

I guess the big question is, does this, or has this already, changed the way countries fight wars? Is it as transformational as, you know, going from the trenches into tanks? I'll start with that, because Ukraine kind of leads the way, and they experience it first. And Russia. Yeah. So, yes, it is. So Ukraine had a problem that they didn't have enough artillery shells early in this war, and that's been a consistent problem. And you know what? It's less of a problem now, because the drones have taken up some of the roles that artillery fire used to occupy. So that's changed.

Ukraine was desperately trying to get hold of tanks at the start of the war. Russia was trying to find tanks at the start of this war and taking them out of storage and deploy them as quickly as possible. Not so much now, because tanks are actually... kind of liability. When a tank moves out into the open, then they know it will get targeted by drones. So the tank's sent to stay in the rear and they're rarely deployed and they stay under cover. So in Ukraine's case and in Russia's case, it's changing the war, it's changing how war is fought. War is often thought of as who can gain air superiority first, who can attack from the high ground,

if that's in the sky, that's the high ground. And the ubiquitousness of cheap drones make air superiority, gaining air superiority, I mean, more difficult, if not impossible. That's so interesting. It sounds like they are making these huge, a billion dollar investments from wealthy countries somewhat obsolete. Well, yeah, that's right. The matchup becomes a $400 million tank or a $200 million tank versus a $400,

dollar drone, if that's the matchup, like those are costs that are being imposed by your enemy, right? You lose, that's a lot of money you have to replace if you, if you believe in tank warfare. So will tank warfare go away? That's an interesting question. How does one defend against these attacks, especially of these like smaller drones? It's a great question. It's a terrible answer. Why? Ready? Yeah. So depends on how valuable the target is, right? Let's say, for example, it's Keefe, you're firing off a million, three million dollar Patriot Interceptor to knock down something that costs $40,000. So there's this imposing costs on your enemy is a term that's used.

If you fire lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of really cheap drones at them, they will run out of interceptors or the cost of making new interceptors will go up and then you will eventually defeat them. And then there are signal jammers, which are kind of like these handheld devices, right? Sure. It looks like a rifle or something like that. There's others that, you know, would defend something in size of a stadium. It takes towers in order to do that. Yeah. So it's like a semi-permanent thing. But yeah, there's a way to create an electronic warfare bubble. Meaning you screw with like the sensors on. You return them to safe mode or meaning they'll just sort of like land or they'll go off course and won't hit their intended target. But that wouldn't

work if you have a pre-programmed target in it. There's a big kind of technological competition going on, which is evolving all the time. So the first thing that happened was the drones appeared, and then people found out technological ways to try and defeat or interfere with drones. So you basically can, there are devices that send out interference, which send the drones off target or they can't be controlled anymore, kind of radio signals. So I think it was Russia that came up with this first. So you can't interfere with the radio signal.

You do without the radio signal entirely. And basically you attach the drone to a wire. Inside the drone is a big spool of super fine fiber optic wire that unspools as the thing flies. And the signal you use to control the thing. And the signal that sends back the pictures goes through that wire. You can't defeat it using electronic interference. So the drone is attached physically to a wire. It's attached physically to a wire.

And these have been known to stretch for over 10 kilometers. I think I've heard of some that are 15. Wow. And what you get in the battlefield now is that in some areas, the landscape is just strewn with wires. I've seen pictures of people walking in the fields, and it's as if it's thousands of blades of grass around their ankles as they cruise through. It's just, it's like a mud of fiber optic cable.

Sometimes in order to try and protect from drones, you're forced into exceedingly low-tech solutions. So what we've seen, for example, around the frontline zones, in order to protect logistics routes, both Russia and Ukraine have been building tunnels made out of fishing net, fine mesh, and rigging it up over roads so that the drones can't get in. What I've seen many times on the roads around frontline areas is they build kind of cages around the top of tanks or armed vehicles,

so that the point of impact is a little bit of the point of impact is a little bit removed from the actual hull of the vehicle. It hits the cage, and so the impact is dissipated. The United States is working on technology to mount lasers, actual high-power lasers onto vehicles that can track and burn a drone as it approaches a convoy. So there's a variety of ways to do it. Some of them are going to be pretty futuristic, and some of them are from here pretty low-tech. I've seen the demos of the lasers. I've not seen one actually do it in anything yet. So that's where the technology is now. Where is this all heading? So we are hearing now that the next frontier may be AI drones. So you don't need to actually talk to them and send a signal from the

ground to control them. But they will have a target pre-programmed. They might have pictures loaded up of what the target looks like, and it just uses AI to go out and find it. The other technological innovation that people are talking about is drones that talk to each other and operate as a kind of swarm or a new, a sort of systematized way of using drones, where across, let's say, part of the front line, you have integrated drone systems so that in multiple places they're talking to each other and can organize an attack or a defense in coordination with each other. The fighter jet competitions that the United States is running have been watching these developments on the battlefield in Ukraine.

And it's played a role in how purchasers of weapons in the United States like jets are reacting. They are running competitions for various fighter jets that could be crude, optionally crude or completely uncrewed. And what they don't know, the greatest uncertainty that they have is what the electronic warfare hurdles that these uncrewed jets could face if they're, were to say, for example, fly towards China, could China down a $200 million jet with high-powered microwaves? And the jets that are just purchased, the brandest newest schismos, would just go right down into the ocean. So the lessons being learned on the Ukrainian battlefield with AI swarms and hardwiring is very much having a role in what the United States is doing with its next generation of fighter jets.

Okay, so the AI drone thing, that sounds terrifying. How distant in the future is this? We are hearing that they are in beta mode and being used and flown on combat missions in small numbers in a sort of testing mode. Yeah, this is the same stuff that gives you a fireworks show with drones and, you know, one of the drones falls out and the swarm heals. The swarm technology, this stuff has been around for a while. It's just whether or not you want to operationalize it.

The United States, for its part, has said that a human being must be on the loop for any kinetic attack. That means in order to kill, you need to have a human being that's watching something happen. Okay. There's a ship that is being attacked by a cruise missile. The cruise missile defeat system on a U.S. ship will automatically launch. There's no human in that loop who's needing to press a button. It will go off and then a human will be able to. alerted and be like, oh, what's going on here? Do I need to destroy that missile that's just

been fired off the ship? Or do I let it go and hit that incoming cruise missile? That's a very real example that's happening today. That's what the United States promises in its philosophical doctrine of how it fights war. Other nations don't have that. Other nations don't have a human on or in the loop. And that's going to be where we see maybe a race to the bottom over the coming decades. What happens when non-state actors start using these at scale? I have companies that are working to track drones that bring fentanyl over the southern border of the United States of America. There's a lot of that kind of traffic. It makes bringing, you know, drugs or cell phones into a prison pretty easy.

But that's, I mean, just think of all the uses you could have. It's, it's, they're being used for that. For example, in Britain, there were a bunch of, you know, very large octocopters harassing British air bases that had U.S. equipment on them. It was extremely alarming. No one took responsibility for that. This was, what, a couple, three months ago? It was just someone showing the United States that they were vulnerable in Britain and that the aircraft that were on that field needed to be protected better. They didn't do anything that was made public, but they're a vulnerability. It's a big deal.

Thanks again to Christian and Mike for their time and they're reporting. Ruters World News is produced by Gail Issa, David Spencer, Christopher Wall Jasper, Sharon Reich Garson, Kim Vannell, and me, Jonah Green. Our senior producers are Tara Oaks and Carmel Crimmons. Our executive producer is Lila DeCretzer. Engineering on this episode is by Christopher Waljaspur and Josh Summer. Make sure to follow us on your favorite podcast player, and we'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show.