There’s a great line from the “Fallout” games, repeated over and over in the series: “War. War never changes.” That, of course, is true in some ways, in that war is always brutal and damaging and terrible. But it’s also an absolute bull in other ways. War can change a lot in just 10 years. For instance, early in the war in Iraq, Kuwait was actually a dangerous spot for truck units to be deployed because it meant they would run frequent missions into Iraq on some of the most dangerous roads. But by the time I went to Kuwait on my last deployment, you would get mocked for even calling it a “deployment.”
Similarly, on my Afghanistan deployment, drone operator was a pretty choice gig. The folks driving smaller drones were sitting in outposts with an entire platoon pulling duty on the walls. The pilots of the large ones, like Reapers, were usually in Nevada, often within walking distance of the Vegas Strip.
But now? For Ukrainian and Russian drone operators, constantly evolving tech means they can never rest on their laurels. And, since it’s become a frontline job, physical fitness is key. And tactics have gone crazy. There are now elite units that hunt one another, operators conduct drone ambushes and drone dogfighting, and even Russians even target drone units for war crimes.
Hard work, long hours, and a ton of danger. But that’s because drones are making a difference in the war.
The evolving drone tech
The initial drone operations right after the invasion were often done with off-the-shelf drones with either a kamikaze charge or a grenade.
Then first-person view drones came along. Operators switched from digital to analog signals to improve performance in jammed environments. Drones got customized with antennas, payloads, and batteries specific to each mission and flight. The Ukrainians now field homemade Shaheds and they modified light aircraft to be unpiloted bombers. Both sides have fiber-optic cables to fly their drones through jamming environments, a modification that makes it trickier to fly without getting tangled up and requires tactical forethought because that fiber-optic cable now points back to the operator.
And remember, the wider war is only three years old. That’s a lot of change for a unit to keep up with.
Drone operator is a frontline job
The short range of those commercial drones necessitated operators getting close to the forward line of troops. The analog antennas did the same, so did rampant jamming. Now, with fiber-optic cables coming to the forefront, well, that glass doesn’t draw itself and it has a range measured in hundreds of meters.
So operators aren’t sitting back in Vegas anymore. They’re right in the thick of it, trying to hide their drones’ movements and their own. They have to move between positions often to survive and to find new targets.
Oh, and on the subject of targets, the New York Times says that drones are causing 70% of the casualties in the war.
But drone operators are taking the risk of being casualties themselves. Some drone units look for enemy drones and try to follow them back to base, (Which is why neither side brings smaller drones back to base. If an operator can’t find a target within the battery life, it’s better to detonate the drone in a random hole and hope it finds a well-hidden bunker rather than recover the drone and risk discovery.)
The Russians target drone operators for attacks and even for war crimes. (Warning: The link has an image of the war crime, so don’t click if you don’t want to bear that weight.)
The constant evolution of drone tactics
I’ve written about military history for a while and gave drones a lot of thought early in the war, so I wasn’t too surprised when drone swarms emerged, or jamming, or first-person-view attacks. But some of the changes blew me away.
The first time I saw trucks dropping old fishing nets, I thought they were for ghillie suits, not to use as shields against drones. And I was more surprised to learn that elite pilots could fly through tiny gaps in the nets and attack anyway. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that drones would stage full-on ambushes of convoys, parking in the grass to save batteries and hide until a convoy comes into range. Seeing drones sneak into barns to take out hidden self-propelled guns came out of left field for me as well.
But the most shocking was probably drones accepting surrenders. And that wasn’t a once or twice thing. Ukraine started actively soliciting surrenders via drone as early as 2022. And now, legal scholars focused on the Law of Armed Conflict are debating the exact limits of “technologically enabled surrender” and the legal obligations of drone operators accepting a surrender.
Drone operators even dogfight one another with weapons like recoilless shotguns or nets.
Taken all together, it’s clear that drone operator is a whole other position from what it was even five years ago. And I have an increasing suspicion that this is like World War I for fighter pilots. A technology has matured that will change how warfare is done from now on.
Because war — as much as I love “Fallout” — war always changes.