Frontline areas in Ukraine resemble the Battle of the Somme, if it were a deadly laser-tag game from hell. All the accoutrements of twentieth-century war are there, just with a modern twist. The tanks wear wire cages like hats and resemble something out of Mad Max. The roads are encased in nets. Tracer fire hunts the drones buzzing semiautonomously in the night sky. People are dying in droves, but the culprit is often a machine being flown by someone miles away.
Back in fall 2023, I was holed up by a Ukrainian brigade in a decrepit dacha deep in the Izium Raion, clicks from an advancing Russian unit. There was a half-working toilet and no internet, courtesy of the electronic jammers killing drone frequencies. One morning, I was awakened by a soldier arguing with someone. When I went outside, he was all alone, yelling at a tree.
After I returned to Kyiv, colleagues texted me to meet them for a drink at Saint Bar. Thinking it was a dive, I showed up in muddied boots and jeans that didn’t match the vibe. Gold stanchion ropes were gatekeeping the posh club. Inside, I saw what has long been a familiar scene in Kyiv: a confident American man, dancing offbeat in a crowded club with much prettier and younger people next to him.
Except this was no ordinary man: It was the billionaire and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Money and war are no strange bedfellows, but it was a mystery to me what Schmidt was doing risking life and limb in a war zone. Was it for the thrill of ordering a martini during a missile strike? Was it for the borscht? Nope. Like the many businessmen, Silicon Valley sharks, and technologists who had been pouring into the Ukrainian capital in recent years, Schmidt was in town for the drones.
The day before I saw Schmidt dancing, Time published his op-ed about the wonders of unmanned aerial vehicles. “Observing life and death on Ukraine’s battlefield, it’s evident to us that modern warfare now transforms at startup speeds...,” Schmidt wrote. “Conventional wisdom might posit the widespread use of drones would sanitize warfare, but the in-the-mud reality we witnessed debunks this.”
He had that part right. Drones are the killing machine of the twenty-first century, combining the remorseless brutality of medieval weaponry and the sadism of video games. Now responsible for 70 to 80 percent of all combat casualties on both sides in the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine, drones are single-handedly transforming modern conflict as we know it. The war in Ukraine isn’t just about the return of Russian imperialism or the future of Europe and NATO—it has also remade war itself. The Top Gun era is over. Today, battles are being fought not only by fighter jets but by thousands of small, often very cheap drones flying alone or in swarms and synchronized to hit targets—sometimes even without the finely calibrated finger controls of a pilot.
Strategic equalizers, cheap drones are a perfect fit for the outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian forces, who have held off an invasion from a much richer and more populous nation. Thousands of quadcopters strapped with explosives dive into tanks and pester Russian troops; wooden drones that are built to evade sophisticated radar systems have struck oil plants near the Urals, hundreds of miles into Russian territory. They can be snipers, mobile artillery rounds, and psychological banshees, terrorizing enemy troops with deadly strikes that seemingly come out of nowhere.
“Adapt or die” is quite literally the motto of startups in a Ukrainian technology sector that is now the envy of the world’s military industrial complex. As secret factories churn out tens of thousands of drones, local brogrammers analyze coveted battlefield data with help from allied militaries. The Ukrainians know they have developed a technology that will define the future of war—if they survive this one.
The battlefield data they collect covers everything from the timing of drone strikes to how enemy troops react—and how to maximize their destructive impact on the front lines and inside Russia. “It’s very valuable data, because it’s like fucking full-scale war that’s going on,” said Ian Laffey, a tall, redheaded, 25-year-old coder from St. Louis whose startup, Theseus, first began working with U.S. Army Special Ops on drone warfare in 2024. When we sat down for an interview at a café in Kyiv, he was wearing dollar-store sunglasses and was on his second Americano. The data, Laffey told me, “tells you very quickly if what you’re doing is working or not working” in the drone war.
While most infamous weapons manufacturers still focus on multibillion-dollar fighter jet platforms—think Lockheed Martin and its F-35s—combat in the skies and on the ground is poised for a makeover that Laffey is helping to innovate. “If you want to train a machine-learning model to be good, it needs lots and lots of data,” he said, with a mix of idealism and genuine excitement. He compared the present moment in weapons-making to recent advances in AI. “How did ChatGPT get really good?” he asked. “They scraped the entire internet.” Every drone flight in Ukraine, in other words, offers data that will help to make drone warfare in general more sophisticated.
“At the highest level, it is data to fight wars,” explained Laffey. “If you want to direct a [first-person view] drone to fly into something, you just need thousands and thousands of hours of FPV drones flying into something.” Similarly, if you want a drone to recognize the enemy’s artillery, you need to collect thousands of images of that artillery “from every angle,” he said.
Other countries are alert to the lessons of Ukraine’s drone war. As the two armies clash hourly with modern weapons, Ukrainian battlefields have come to parallel those from Spain’s Civil War, which previewed Allied and Axis armaments seen in World War II and featured fighters from dozens of nations outside the Iberian Peninsula. Even if the war doesn’t spread outside of Ukraine’s borders to Poland, the Baltic states, or beyond, as some predict it will, armies everywhere are rapidly preparing to fight wars where unmanned drones are central to nearly every battle. Whoever figures out what weapons those militaries will need and how to make them stands to be paid handsomely.
The opportunity isn’t lost on the billionaire class. A self-described “arms dealer,” Eric Schmidt recently founded a secretive military technology company, White Stork, which poached talent from SpaceX and Google to produce drones loaded with artificial intelligence software. In Kyiv, he is already working with the Ukrainian military to counter Russian drones and is building a variant of the quadcopter—a common drone with four propellers—actively using the conflict as a laboratory for his own systems.
The Kremlin, staking most of Russia’s economy to the military, can, for now, afford to mass-produce and waste its drones, particularly its variants of Iranian Shaheds, at scale. Shaheds, which are essentially slower, smarter, and cheaper missiles, are launched without fear of waste. Frequent swarms of Russian projectiles have turned all of Ukraine into a front line: Hundreds of Shaheds, often acting in concert with ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, are sent everywhere from Kyiv to Dnipro.
Even the Pentagon under the Trump administration—publicly and privately hostile to most things Ukraine—has been forced to admit it was paying close attention to the advances made there in drone technology. “Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a July memorandum, in which he implied the United States was falling behind in drone warfare and he set lofty goals for a course correction. “Our adversaries collectively produce millions of cheap drones each year.”
Hegseth delivered these promises 10 days before the chief drone commander of Ukraine, Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, publicly warned NATO commanders that, with just four crews of his drone operators, he could turn an alliance base “into another Pearl Harbor in just 15 minutes.” Brovdi knows what he’s talking about: He knows how to fight the war of the present, not the ancient clash the alliance planned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Following the incursion of 19 Russian drones into Polish airspace in September, Ukraine agreed to receive a contingent of Polish soldiers eager to train under the auspices of seasoned drone warfare units stationed across the country. Europe is preparing for war with Russia once again, and it knows that if that war comes, it will be fought with drones.
American interlopers and public figures from the global war on terrorism era are also circling. Erik Prince, the disgraced founder of mercenary firm Blackwater and a MAGA disciple, has been seen in Kyiv in recent months looking to worm his way into the drone business. David Petraeus, the former head of the CIA and one of the Pentagon’s most brilliant (and scandal-prone) war fighters of the last decades, was spotted in Kyiv earlier this year taking meetings. He is an adviser to Vector, a U.S.-founded military firm producing drones. (Petraeus has recently pushed unmanned submarines—explosive underwater drones—as a potential game-changer in the conflict.)
Figures like Prince and Petraeus “are trying to cash in,” said a veteran of the U.S. Special Forces who has knowledge of the Ukrainian military contracting world and experience operating in the country. “Buy or invest in a Ukrainian company or get them to share their tech,” he said, under the cover of anonymity to protect against Russian reprisals. “Funny, when it all started, you couldn’t get a selfie-stick company to invest in Ukraine.”
According to him, some Americans and other Westerners entering Ukraine to profit from the drone war are “vultures” who see the Russian invasion as the successor to the Pentagon’s multibillion-dollar contracting boom during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—a time of imperial plunder and excess across the Middle East and Central Asia.
“I kind of look at some of those folks with disdain. Opportunists. But that is in every war,” he said. “I cannot tell you how many military tech companies contacted me wanting to sell unproven stuff to the Ukrainians…. These companies would say, ‘just pay us $50,000 for a prototype.’ I would laugh and say, ‘You realize that the Ukrainian government has no money?’”
For Brian Streem, the founder and CEO of Vermeer, an American drone optics and navigation company based in Brooklyn that now works with the Ukrainian military, the war wasn’t about exploiting lucrative government contracts. He came to the country at the dawn of the invasion and now lives in Kyiv full-time. His goal has been to find takers to test out and workshop his platforms.
“I just took a train into Ukraine,” Streem said. “I was just reaching out to people on LinkedIn.”
Eventually, he ended up in a Ukrainian government building, in the office of an important military and political figure (whom he didn’t name), “huffing on a vape,” with a big map of Russia and Ukraine behind him. “Immediately, he starts to talk to me about targets inside of Russia we’re going to hit together.”
Regardless of what happens in Ukraine, Streem told me, geopolitical forecasts look like a future with more wars. “The industry seems to be frothing at the mouth knowing that [President Donald] Trump will not allow someone else to be the drone king of the universe,” he said plainly. “Even if there is a ceasefire here, the rest of Europe is going on an increased defense budget tear.”
Thankfully, the drone war has not come stateside. U.S. companies can test their gear thousands of miles away from the homeland while collecting immensely valuable data, and with little fear that anyone in New York or Los Angeles could wake up to the ominous wailing of nighttime air sirens anytime soon.
In Kyiv, however, drones are now inescapable.
On September 6, my penultimate day in the city, I passed a hipster coffee shop near Maidan Square, where a sketch of Ukraine’s new national symbol was hanging proudly on the wall: not a mustachioed, saber-brandishing Cossack, charging across the plains on horseback, but a Cossack in virtual reality goggles, clasping a gaming controller, his trusty quadcopter flying above him.
Later that night, in bed at my hotel, I was awakened by the sound of something exploding. Tracer fire tracked dancing targets high in the sky. A plume of red fire blipped quietly from afar.
Then I heard it: the buzzing Shaheds crisscrossing one another in the skies above me. Around six in the morning, as I finally boarded a train out of the country, I learned that it was the largest aerial attack on the country since the war began. More than 800 Russian drones had struck the country, mainly targeting Kyiv. A government building behind Maidan got hit.
“That,” I thought to myself, “was worse than Izium.”
