Both sides have fired millions of artillery shells, launched thousands of missiles, and deployed millions of drones in two and a half years of conflict. After initial challenges, Russia is now on a war footing and outpaces the West in the production of all those capabilities.

Equally importantly, both Russia and Ukraine — as well as China and Iran — have integrated expendable systems, such as consumer-grade reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions, making the use of expendable resources at scale part of their military strategies.

This trend is poised to increase, but the West is unprepared and has been slow in adapting. The US and its NATO allies are failing to build the mass needed to extend their military capabilities and make their conventional deterrence more credible.

Besides missiles and artillery ammunition, the lack of magazine depth and large-scale manufacturing capacity affects tactical unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and highly automated loitering munitions, both of which have become key assets in modern warfare.

Industrial challenges and bottlenecks, combined with cumbersome procurement processes and inadequate defense budgets, are among the causes. At the same time, political hesitancy, ethical concerns, and inconsistent approaches to key technologies have created additional challenges.

In Ukraine, it has become plain that both 20th and 21st-century means of warfare are critical to the fight. The mass use of artillery, trench warfare, and even frontal infantry assaults reminiscent of World War I, have combined with artificial intelligence applications, one-minute sensor-to-shooter cycles, and an extensive variety of drones.

Field artillery remains a major force shaping the tactical fight, but its primacy is threatened by the large-scale use of first-person view (FPV) attack drones, which are performing suppression and precision strike missions at an unprecedented scale.

Data suggests that in some areas of the front like Chasiv Yar, FPV kamikaze drones are responsible for 90% of the wounds treated close to the battlefront and, since September 2023, have put more than 800 Russian main battle tanks out of combat, inflicting damage worth more than $1.5bn at a fraction of the price. Open-source evidence also indicates a spike in the use of Russian Lancet-3 loitering munitions, with almost 1,500 strikes since January 2024.

The integration of automated features is already counterbalancing the defensive role of electronic warfare (EW.) A small yet growing number of FPV drones used by Ukraine have automated lock-on-target guidance enabled by computer vision.

This allows the operator to select the target and keep control of the system at all times, including aborting the attack if necessary. At the same time, it makes enemy EW techniques ineffective once the operator has confirmed the target with the onboard engagement system.

Commercially developed software applications powered by computer vision (e.g., Skynode S and YOLO) support automated terminal guidance as well as visual navigation in GPS-denied environments and run on low-cost yet powerful computing systems that typically come with contained energy.

While computer vision alone does not make the system autonomous (i.e. able to select among different courses of action without human intervention), it is among the critical enablers of full autonomy, which is likely not too far away.

Autonomy will come with significant challenges in terms of energy and logistics, human-machine teaming, the establishment of new tactics and concepts of operations, and — crucially — ethical implications.

Yet, peer adversaries like China and Russia consider AI technologies and autonomous systems as critical to closing the technological gap between the US and NATO and may have fewer qualms about employing fully autonomous systems. Russia’s daily war crimes and disdain for civilian lives in Ukraine and elsewhere should give us enough warning in this respect.

Western countries should therefore pursue a pragmatic approach to autonomous weapon systems, supporting international efforts to regulate and bind their use, but also demarcate areas and mission sets for their eventual use. Such kill boxes are already emerging as experimentation with automated weapons expands and more battlefield data becomes available for training AI algorithms.

In Ukraine, loitering munitions, including FPV drones, are cost-effective and available in great numbers, lowering the entry bar for tactical, beyond-line-of-sight precision strike capabilities to platoon-level units, with specialized UAS operators now embedded at all levels of the Ukrainian military. Similar adaptations are emerging in the Russian military, although at a slower pace. 

These developments have profound implications for force design, doctrine development, training, personnel, and other areas of the military.

Packs or swarms of loitering munitions with different ranges and warheads can be used to slow, fix, and destroy hostile forces, disrupting their logistics and inhibiting their ability to effectively maneuver, regroup, or react. FPV drones are often employed to suppress enemy forces, including during mechanized assaults, and provide accurate fire support for infantry units.

For decades, highly automated weapons requiring minimal (but essential) human control, including fire-and-forget and homing missiles like the Javelin and Spike, have seen widespread use in conflicts across the globe.

Ukrainian FPV drones work according to the same principle as the Javelin missile, using humans for target selection and terminal guidance for engagement. However, there is still reluctance across Western governments to fully embrace such systems, largely as a result of ethical concerns related to a poor understanding of the technology among decision-makers.

Innovation, dictated by frontline as well as commercial demands, moves at lightning speed, but the Western defense system has struggled to catch up and absorb novel technologies.

This lag is amplified by extremely bureaucratic acquisition processes, insufficient training and experimentation, indecisiveness among policymakers, lack of demand signals, and a defense industry that is structured for peace-time production. According to a US defense industry representative, “the West has forgotten what the word volume means.”

All of which may undermine Western conventional defense and deterrence.

Conversely, Ukraine has been able to adapt and upgrade its industrial base to integrate innovation at pace and produce expendable drones at scale. Russia is also outpacing the West in the production of key military equipment — from artillery shells and missiles to cheap reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions.

Bridging this gap requires greater political ambition and larger defense budgets across the Western alliance, but also a shift from the requirement-based procurement model to a threat-based model. This would allow for rapid acquisition and more flexible budget allocation to keep pace with technological evolution and battlefield needs.

As software applications redefine military capabilities and the conduct of operations, Western nations need to digitize their military enterprises and guarantee easy and rapid access to software — including commercial products — at all levels.

According to the CEO of one European drone and software company that this author consulted, this can happen only through a reform of defense production and procurement processes, so “the application-level software is decoupled from the hardware it runs on, tapping into commercial software solutions to build many more functionalities rather than having a few primes that produce everything.”

This would create greater price pressure and competition, generate a broader range of solutions, and facilitate cross-collaboration between the military and commercial sectors, unlocking the potential for speed, interoperability, and rapid iteration that software guarantees.

Federico Borsari is a Resident Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and a cohort of the NATO 2030 Global Fellowship. At CEPA he focuses on issues at the intersection between technology and international security, in particular unmanned systems and autonomy, and his portfolio also includes NATO and transatlantic defense and security. He has authored several analyses and publications on the use and security implications of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) by both state and non-state actors and recently co-authored the first-ever report on drone warfare and the implications for NATO with the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.