NATO Should Not Replace Traditional Firepower with ‘Drones’

Since 2023, first-person view (FPV) uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and one-way attack (OWA) drones have played an increasingly critical role in Ukraine’s successful defensive efforts against Russia’s grinding offensives. Russian forces have also scaled up their UAS and OWA manufacturing and development capabilities by many orders of magnitude since the start of the full-scale invasion. As a result, the war in Ukraine in 2025 is overwhelmingly characterised by the use of millions of FPV UAS on the battlefield and thousands of OWA drones supplementing conventional cruise and ballistic missiles for long range strike campaigns.

This has led many in Western military, political and journalistic circles to proclaim that what we are witnessing in Ukraine is a revolution in military affairs that renders previously core Western equipment and doctrinal notions such as air superiority and armoured manoeuvre warfare irrelevant or obsolete. Increasingly, for many in Defence, things that involve ‘drones’ in large numbers are tacitly or explicitly assumed to be a gateway to greater combat mass, lethality and efficiency compared to ‘legacy’ platforms such as artillery, tanks, fighter aircraft and submarines.

It is certainly essential for European NATO members to prioritise rapid expansion of their own counter-UAS capabilities, as Russian forces would certainly use UAS on a vast scale and fire large salvos of Geran-2/3 OWA drones in any future direct clash. However, there are several reasons why it would be a mistake for NATO forces to rely heavily on massed small UAS and long range OWA drones to replace traditional weapons systems in pursuit of improved lethality and thus deterrence against future Russian aggression.

The first reason is that Russian forces currently field the most formidable counter-UAS (C-UAS) or ‘counter-drone’ capabilities on earth. They have a wide range of dedicated C-UAS electronic warfare systems, modified infantry weapons and short-range air defence (SHORAD) systems integrated at all levels of their ground forces. These have already been refined over three years of high-intensity combat experience against a steadily increasing and evolving Ukrainian UAS and OWA drone threat.

Russian vehicles and fighting positions today benefit from now ubiquitous netting, spaced bar armour, padding and short-range jammers to reduce vulnerability to FPV drones. Russian infantry receive instruction on how to engage drones as a central part of their limited training before being sent to the frontlines, and Russian airbases and other military infrastructure are being rapidly hardened to reduce the damage caused by frequent Ukrainian long range OWA drone strikes. In most cases, only a small fraction of the huge volumes of drones launched by Ukrainian forces reach their targets, and a still smaller proportion achieve decisive damage when they do.

None of these Russian efforts render small UAS or OWA drones useless. On the contrary, they are now the primary source of attrition against Russian personnel and vehicles in Ukraine. However, it is important to understand that this attrition from UAS has been occurring in the context of a Russian force that is still constrained by minefields and forced to disperse by Ukrainian artillery, GMLRS and ATACMS, Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles and glide bombs. If NATO forces were to pursue massed UAS at the expense of rebuilding stocks of these traditional fires, Russian forces would find it significantly easier to mitigate UAS lethality than they have up to now in Ukraine. Russian C-UAS countermeasures are also gaining ground and already significantly constrain Ukrainian capacity to concentrate FPV and OWA effects in a given time and place when needed.

The second reason is that as Ukrainian forces have been forced to depend ever more heavily on UAS and OWA systems due to personnel, ammunition and traditional equipment shortages after years of brutal attritional fighting, Russian forces have been able to focus steadily greater attention on refining their C-UAS capabilities. This trend has been especially obvious since the establishment of the Rubicon Center of Advanced Unmanned Technologies in Summer 2024. One area of particular concern is the rapid rate at which Ukrainian drone operator casualties have been increasing throughout the spring and summer of 2025, as Russian forces have focused their efforts on triangulating operator hides and rapidly bringing artillery, glide bombs and other UAS to bear on them.

If NATO nations have to fight Russian forces directly in the coming years, they will face a force that has had even more time to further improve its already formidable C-UAS capabilities compared to the already very challenging operational picture facing Ukrainian forces today. Conversely, the greater Russian forces tactical, operational and technical focus on countering Ukrainian UAS, the less they are able to focus on training and equipping their forces to counter NATO’s traditional areas of military strength.

The third reason why betting heavily on massed UAS for lethality is a dangerous strategy for NATO nations is that Ukraine is still taking heavy casualties and slowly losing ground to Russian assaults despite being a world leader in developing, using and innovating with military UAS.

Ukrainian industry alone has a target for UAS production of 4.5 million in 2025, having produced over 2 million FPVs and 100,000 long range OWA drones in 2024 according to President Zelenskyy. Partner nations and industrial partners have also contributed tens of thousands of additional drones off all types, from FPVs to loitering munitions and OWA strike systems. Thanks in large part to these UAS and the highly innovative way that Ukrainian forces and industry continuously improve and modify both equipment and tactics, they have managed to prevent large scale Russian breakthroughs and inflict huge casualties throughout 2024 and the first half of 2025. However, the fact remains that Russian forces committed against Ukraine are significantly larger today than they have been at any point since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, and they continue to slowly grind forward.

During the first two years of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces inflicted devastating defeats on Russian forces using massed artillery, anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and well-motivated infantry. The switch to ever-greater reliance on UAS has been driven as much by necessity as by any desire to directly replace such conventional capabilities. When available, high-end ATGMs, anti-tank BONUS artillery rounds and regular artillery are still prized by many Ukrainian commanders for countering Russian attempts to break through the frontlines, because they are far more responsive and more reliably able to knock out vehicles and suppress massing infantry than FPV drones. However, the FPVs are far more widely available inside Ukraine, and are better suited for inflicting a steady level of attrition against personnel and vehicles over time. When the frontlines are largely static, the slower response time and lower reliability of FPVs against hardened targets compared to BONUS rounds and ATGMs doesn’t matter nearly so much, and their far greater availability allows them to be expended more sustainably.

Western forces aiming to transform their lethality using similar UAS-dependent tactics are starting from a far lower base than Ukrainian forces today, from a wide range of tactical, industrial and regulatory perspectives. Western procurement and ability to rapidly scale up UAS production will undoubtedly be slower than Ukrainian industry has achieved under the immense pressures of total war. Equally, the approach to regulation and certification of UAS taken in most Western militaries in peacetime is likely to ensure even the best-intentioned efforts lag well behind the AFU’s hard-won capacity to constantly innovate and adapt.

Ukraine has achieved very impressive defensive results against larger Russian forces, but has not managed to retain the strategic initiative or operational momentum despite deploying millions of UAS that are constantly iteratively developed by a system honed by multiple years of desperate fighting. Western forces are highly unlikely to achieve transformative lethality and thus deterrent credibility against Russian forces by procuring several tens or even hundreds of thousands of similar drones more slowly and with less practical experience.

A fourth reason is that there is far greater potential to deter Russia by investing to fill in the gaps and enable NATO’s areas of existing military strength – specifically the capability to gain and exploit air superiority through high-end airpower, and thus greatly multiply the power of professional armies optimised for manoeuvre warfare. A recent demonstration of how potent conventional airpower is when applied well is what the Israeli Air Force was able to achieve against Iran - a nation with thousands of advanced long range ballistic and cruise missiles and hundreds of thousands of drones of all kinds. Small UAS deployed by Special Operations Forces and loitering munitions played an important role in enabling access for far more potent traditional fast jets and armed medium-altitude long endurance (MALE) UAVs.

There are many ways that UAS can and already do contribute to NATO’s force structure and capabilities, but generally they are most potent as a means to enable artillery and aircraft to strike targets responsively and/or through active defences. One obvious example is the use of relatively affordable stand-in jammers and cheap kinetic and decoy OWA drones to support SEAD/DEAD operations. They can be launched by ground forces to saturate Russian air defence radars and interceptor ammunition, and thus enable air forces or long range artillery to successfully get high-end munitions such as AGM-88G AARGM-ER and GMLRS through to key targets without interception. Ukrainian forces have had significant success using similar tactics to enable ATACMS to strike Russian S-400 (NATO code name SA-21) systems since 2023. The RAF is already actively procuring UAS for such roles through its Autonomous Collaborative Platform (ACP) programme.

There are good reasons to optimise around enabling a NATO air-led Joint SEAD/DEAD campaign. Nothing in either the NATO or Ukrainian inventory can compete with the efficiency and scalability of direct-attack munitions such as the GBU-38 JDAM or Paveway IV bombs in a scenario where air superiority or at least access has been achieved. For unit costs in the region of $20-30,000, such bombs can destroy armoured vehicles, fighting positions, supply dumps, warehouses, factories and command posts. They are easy to manufacture at scale with existing factories and multiple bombs can be delivered by a single jet with a targeting pod on each sortie. For a credible deterrence by denial posture, NATO forces in Europe fundamentally need to convince Russian leaders that they can rapidly degrade and start to roll back Russian ground-based air defences in the event of a direct clash.

There is a viable route to such a deterrent capability for European air forces, with support from the land component in the shape of long range artillery and OWA drones for suppression purposes. It will still require urgent investment but poses far lower risks than betting heavily on FPV and loitering munition development in Europe in an effort to transform land forces lethality against Russian forces that are already highly proficient at C-UAS. Fundamentally, it is far technically and tactically easier to counter a force that primarily relies on massed, cheap FPV and OWA drones for its primary lethality than it is to counter well-employed airpower, long range fires, armour, artillery and mortars within a professional joint force.

Nevertheless, developing NATO forces’ own C-UAS capabilities remains essential and should be seen as a theatre-entry standard for NATO armies in any Article V context. This is because Russian forces already deploy even more UAS than Ukrainian forces, and are also rapidly innovating how they combine them with loitering munitions, UAV-based battlefield ISR, electronic warfare, and the ever-present artillery.