The Start of the Drone War
I remember when I saw my first hobbyist drone in Ukraine. I hadn’t seen one in real life before. A bearded, Caucasian-looking man by the call sign “Chechen,” who was with our parent unit–the Ukrainian Volunteer Army (UDA)—showed me the controller. The screen displayed a crisp live feed, and the joystick setup spoke fluently to my video game instincts. Suddenly, I felt above the mud-soaked infantry world I’d come from. With the drone, we could float above the tree line and look into enemy positions with a safety that felt both artificial and thrilling. The buzz of the rotors became synonymous with power.
Then came the footage.
In May 2022, near the village of Bilohorivka in Luhansk Oblast, a Russian battalion attempted a textbook pontoon river crossing over the Siverskyi Donets. Tanks. Engineers. Bridging units. But the textbook had been rewritten. Ukrainian drones watched them from the tree line. They didn’t just spot the crossing—they recorded it, streamed it, waited.
Artillery followed. The first barrage shattered the pontoon bridge. The next salvo struck the banks, where armored vehicles clustered like fish in a drying pond. The barrage didn’t stop for hours. When it did, what was left resembled Verdun by way of Silicon Valley—charred vehicles, bodies half-submerged, twisted steel choking the river. Over 70 vehicles destroyed. An entire battalion tactical group likely rendered combat-ineffective. The videos hit Telegram before the official communiqués did. War wasn’t just evolving. It was being shared, clipped, and passed around faster than anyone could make sense of it.
Still, there were moments of restraint. A volunteer whom I met on Instagram had mailed me a drone rigged to drop grenades; a social media-powered supply chain. I asked our platoon commander if we could use it on a quiet Russian OP across the Siverskyi Donets in Kharkiv Oblast. He shook his head: “If we start killing men at their OPs, they will retaliate. I prefer to walk away from this ordeal alive, as do they.” A rare flash of pragmatism—or perhaps humanity—in a war growing more savage by the day. Even with technology, humans can show humanity; a word created by a species ashamed of its history.
There’s a certain dopamine reward system that’s unique to drone warfare. I still remember the high from my first firefight in Iraq. It was sharp, chaotic, and addictive—and I chased it for years. Watching another human through a drone’s camera gave me a similar rush, only with less immediate danger. At that point, war started to feel like a game. And this was just the beginning. The further the war progressed, the more it became centered around technology.
I once spoke with our medic, Caspar Grosse, who told me about an encounter during the battle for Bakhmut. A shadowy figure approached him, handed him a crate, and asked him to deliver it to the front. When the box was opened by a Ukrainian commander, it revealed a machine gun turret, apparently equipped with some form of AI-assisted targeting. Separately, there were reports that Russian forces attempting to breach a defensive position near Avdiivka encountered an entrenched machine gun emplacement that absorbed artillery, RPGs, and small arms fire without faltering. When they finally overran it, they found it unmanned—remote-operated, mechanical, unflinching. Whether these incidents were connected or not, they illustrated something deeply unsettling: the rise of unrelenting automated defenses amid the chaos of trench warfare.
Ukraine had become the crucible where past and future smashed together. Trenches, tanks, aircraft, and and even, with increasing frequency, chemical weapons—no longer the distant taboo of past wars, but a present threat cloaked in deniability. Both sides have accused each other of deploying gas—an echo from the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Even Adolf Hitler, with all his genocidal fury, balked at using chemical weapons against Soviet forces. That’s how far we’ve fallen.
War is Evolving
I didn’t witness the marriage of AI and combat firsthand until I enrolled in an NGO-run FPV drone school. One student stood out: a Ukrainian man in his thirties, not a soldier but a developer. He wasn’t there to learn how to fight. He wanted to observe how we trained, so he could write code—build smarter drones, lethal with less human input. It was then I remembered Iraq in 2009. Back then, we thought we were on the technological frontier: GPS mapping, the CROWS (Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station) that allowed us to shoot from behind armor, and the DUKE (AN/VLQ-12 CREW Duke) system.
The Duke was our invisible shield, designed to jam radio frequencies used to trigger IEDs. It worked by emitting a barrage of signals, drowning out remote detonation attempts—essentially poisoning the electromagnetic spectrum around us. In Baghdad, that meant safety. But in Ukraine, it would be useless. FPV drones are not triggered remotely; they are flown manually in real time. There’s no button to jam when the threat is watching you through first-person goggles, adapting mid-flight. While electronic warfare countermeasures have evolved, so too have the drones. Common control frequencies are being abandoned in favor of obscure, nonstandard bands—sub-400 MHz, or unconventional ranges like 5.9 to 6.1 GHz and 2.9 to 3.4 GHz—designed to elude detection and disruption. Every time a jammer is built, a workaround is engineered. It’s an arms race between signal and silence, and right now, the drones are winning.
Operation Spiderweb marked another turning point. Ukrainian forces developed a sprawling, distributed drone strike network—dozens of mobile teams, each with live ISR and strike capabilities, operating like neural nodes in a digital nervous system. The strikes weren’t just coordinated—they were edited mid-conflict, tagged, and disseminated with the urgency of a breaking news cycle. This wasn’t just the integration of technology into warfare—it was the fusion of combat and content creation. And it suggested something darker still: the birth of drone war as spectacle, and perhaps, as a new form of psychological warfare that transcends traditional doctrine on all fronts.
I recently came across a clip highlighted by Preston Stewart—a YouTuber respected in military circles for his precise breakdowns of modern combat—showing a group of Russian soldiers surrendering to a Ukrainian drone. They held their hands up to a flying camera, following its movement like it was a squad leader. It was a haunting image: technology not as executioner, but as witness and intermediary. For a moment, it felt like a sliver of humanity had survived inside the digital fog of war.
But scroll deeper into Telegram, and the picture curdles. You see wounded men crawling, unarmed, struck by drone-dropped grenades. Some are clearly hors de combat. Others are being medevaced. The clip Preston shared feels like an outlier, a flicker of moral clarity in a war defined by its absence. Perhaps that surrender wasn’t a sign of progress. Perhaps it was just a glitch in the algorithm.
But war is not only more technological; it is more accessible. Social media and mass communication have collapsed the distance between trench and timeline. Soldiers often carry their smartphones to the zero line, texting family through Starlink relays or conventional cell towers. They record battlefield footage, document poor decisions by commanders, or capture suicide assaults gone wrong—then upload the clips to Telegram or Signal within minutes. Rumors, disinformation, chain-of-command breakdowns—these ripple across the front in real time. Gone is the era of men going off to war, sending sanitized letters home, and returning in silence. Now, mutilated soldiers whisper voice notes into cracked phones, messages trembling across Starlink relays as they bleed out alone in no man’s land. The horrors are no longer hidden. They’re live-streamed—and we are growing calloused to them.
One of the more surreal and regrettable episodes of my time in Ukraine unfolded during the first year of the war. In Iraq or Afghanistan, you couldn’t message the enemy directly on a smartphone—even the thought would’ve been absurd. But Ukraine is different. The front isn’t just physical; it’s digital. And the enemy knows how to find you.
Hybrid Warfare
Not long after I appeared in a Fox News segment under the pseudonym “Ernest Fletcher,” a supposed friend from Thailand took a screenshot of the post I’d shared privately with friends and handed it off to Rybar, one of Russia’s most prominent military Telegram channels. From there, my identity was outed. My Facebook was combed through. My real name, location, and background were broadcast to hundreds of thousands.
The death threats came almost immediately—dozens a day, some clearly from Russian soldiers. It reached a peak when someone sent me a video of a Ukrainian prisoner being tortured and castrated—one of several grotesque clips weaponized as psychological warfare during those early months.
I lost it. I was off duty, holed up in a hotel, drunk and furious. I recorded a voice message—raw, unfiltered, threatening. Within hours, it had been clipped, stripped of context, and rebranded by Rybar as anti-Ukrainian propaganda.
That was the moment I realized I had become the first foreign casualty of a new kind of hybrid war: fought not just with drones and artillery, but with screenshots, disinformation, and Telegram feeds. There’s no training for this in the U.S. Army. War isn’t just changing fast—it already has.
Warfare has never evolved this quickly within the span of a single war. When Europeans first fielded the arquebus in the late 15th century, it didn’t immediately end the age of battlefield formations. For nearly four centuries, soldiers marched in tight ranks, firing volleys—from matchlocks to flintlocks to bolt-action rifles. The tactics clung to old forms long after the weapons changed. It wasn’t until the machine gun collided with industrial warfare that the world realized: old tactics plus new technology equals mass death. The lesson was learned in blood between Port Arthur and the Marne.
Today, we are accelerating toward a similar reckoning. We will soon witness human infantry charging AI-driven defenses—or worse, AI-directed swarms assaulting human lines. The balance is broken. The rules have not caught up. And we will have to ask: with this new technology, should we say a final farewell to arms?
I’d like to think that out of this carnage, we could finally take a lesson from the Battle of Solferino. In 1859, Henri Dunant—a Swiss civilian—saw wounded soldiers left to die on the battlefield, crying out for the peasant lives they’d once lived, torn apart by a war that was becoming industrial before the world was ready for it. That horror led to the founding of the Red Cross and, eventually, the Geneva Conventions.
War is Hell
Maybe it’s time we meet again—not in Geneva, with all its European baggage, but in a new setting. Abu Dhabi makes sense. It isn’t tied to the colonial legacy of Europe, and it sits at the crossroads of many of today’s conflicts. It’s a place that understands what war does to people.
I’d like to think that out of this carnage, we could finally take a lesson from the Battle of Solferino. In 1859, Henri Dunant—a Swiss civilian—saw wounded soldiers left to die on the battlefield, crying out for the peasant lives they’d once lived, torn apart by a war that was becoming industrial before the world was ready for it. That horror led to the founding of the Red Cross and, eventually, the Geneva Conventions.
As for me, I’ve seen enough. I don’t believe we will evolve a new set of rules fast enough to meet this moment. If anything, we are abandoning what little restraint we had. Maybe one day it will be drone vs. drone, code vs. code. But before that, just like in 1914, there will be cavalry charging into machine guns. Ahead lies a brutal lesson we seem unwilling to learn.
Humanity is a word invented by a species ashamed of its history. And history itself is an algorithm written in blood—innovation by annihilation, always a generation ahead of the ethics meant to restrain it.