Ukraine's Autonomous Killer Drones Defeat Electronic Warfare

Summary

Ukraine’s 1 June attack on multiple Russian military bases destroyed or damaged as many as 41 Russian aircraft, including some of the country’s most advanced bombers. Estimates of the sum total of the damage range from US $2 billion to $7 billion. Supposedly planned for a year and a half, the Ukrainian operation was exceptional in its sophistication: Ukrainian agents reportedly smuggled dozens of first-person-view attack drones into Russia on trucks, situating them close to the air bases where the target aircraft were vulnerable on tarmacs. The bases included one in Irkutsk, 4,300 kilometers from Ukraine, and another in south Murmansk, 1,800 km away. Remote pilots in Ukraine then launched the killer drones simultaneously. The far-reaching operation was being hailed as the most inventive and bold of the war so far. Indeed, IEEE Spectrum has been regularly covering the ascent of Ukraine’s military drone programs, both offensive and defensive, and for air, marine, and land missions. In this article, originally posted on April 6, we described another bold Ukrainian drone initiative, which was applying artificial intelligence-based navigational software to enable killer drones to navigate to targets even in the presence of heavy jamming.After the Estonian startup KrattWorks dispatched the first batch of its Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopters to Ukraine in mid-2022, the company’s officers thought they might have six months or so before they’d need to reconceive the drones in response to new battlefield realities. The 46-centimeter-wide flier was far more robust than the hobbyist-grade UAVs that came to define the early days of the drone war against Russia. But within a scant three months, the Estonian team realized their painstakingly fine-tuned device had already become obsolete. Related: Ukraine Tech Turns Combat into Real-Life “Game” Rapid advances in jamming and spoofing—the only efficient defense against drone attacks—set the team on an unceasing marathon of innovation. It...