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Air battles with drones in Ukraine are sometimes compared to the air battles of the First World War.
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In just two years, drone operators have become much more sophisticated.
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BI reviewed more than 40 drone dogfights to see some of the key tactics that emerged.
The sheer scale of drone use in Ukraine has given rise to increasing competition for airspace and the rise of drone-on-drone dogfights.
Thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles are taking to the skies over Ukraine, performing a wide range of tasks, such as directing artillery fire, conducting surveillance and acting as loitering munitions.
It’s a set of tasks so essential to the fighting that the Ukrainian military earlier this month launched the world’s first standalone branch dedicated exclusively to drone warfare.
Before Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine, the world had seen only a handful of drone-on-drone incidents.
But now Russia and Ukraine are “embroiled in a ‘drone arms race,’ investing enormous amounts of money, time and expertise in developing and countering each other’s systems,” said James Patton Rogers, a drone expert and director of Cornell Brooks Tech. Policy Institute, v. BI.
Today, drones that once used their explosive payloads on multimillion-dollar armored vehicles are choosing to target other drones because of the threat they pose, Mike Monnik, CEO of drone intelligence platform DroneSec, told BI.
BI reviewed more than forty videos of drone-on-drone skirmishes over Ukraine, collected and annotated by DroneSec, to identify some of the different – and often overlapping – tactics that have rapidly evolved in this short period.
(BI was unable to independently verify some videos, which are often shared by partisan groups.)
Falling down from above
The cheap and plentiful DJI Mavic drone has limited visibility directly above your head, meaning a drone hovering above is a definite threat.
The above clip, posted in early April by a pro-Russian channel, shows a Russian drone colliding directly with a Ukrainian DJI Mavic-3 drone, causing it to tumble out of the sky.
In early 2022, “this was largely accidental,” Monnik said, describing how a small commercial drone on reconnaissance missions could spot an enemy drone in the sky, fly above it and drop down to clamp down on its rotors.
“At this stage, in many cases, both drones would actually be disabled,” Monnik said.
In 2024, DroneSec said it saw first-person drones equipped with remote or remote detonation capabilities.
Crashing your cheap copy into an expensive drone
One of the simplest attacks involves using an FPV drone to crash into an enemy drone, with or without an explosive attached.
Since the attacking drone is often also a write-off, the biggest gain is when a cheap device takes out something expensive.
The above footage, shared on June 1, shows a Russian Orlan-10 drone being chased by a Ukrainian FPV. The video then stops.
The footage then shows an Orlan on the ground, seemingly destroyed by the encounter.
Orlan drones, which cost between $87,000 and $120,000, have emerged as one of the “most critical systems contributing to the lethality” of the Russian armed forces, according to the Royal United Services Institute.
Meanwhile, the most commonly used FPV drones cost only a few thousand dollars.
Dropping explosives on a drone in the sky
Another type of attack from above, but this time by firing an explosive directly at the drone below, as seen in this footage of Ukrainian Mavic-3 drones being taken out by Russian drones from above.
Ukrainian soldiers told BI last year how they began adapting COTS drones to carry munitions that could be dropped from above.
Throwing a net at an enemy drone
In February 2023, the Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security said it had received six American-made DroneHunter F700s, an AI-enabled drone that can shoot a net over airborne targets.
Footage shared by the CSCIS shows the technology being used to neutralize Orlan drones and Shaheds, the large loitering munitions used by Russia to bomb Ukrainian infrastructure.
According to Scientific American, DroneHunter F700s have been in use in Ukraine since May 2022.
It appears that Russia has acquired similar technology. In the video below, posted in April by a pro-Russian account, a small drone – identified as Ukrainian – is caught in a net fired from above.
Harassing a drone before it can release its payload
In the footage below, shared in May, a Ukrainian drone hits an explosive payload carried by a Russian DJI Mavic-3 drone before it can be released, according to DroneSec’s analysis.
Skip the drone and take out the pilot
There are plenty of other ways to counter enemy drones, including hitting them at the source, Patton Rogers told BI.
Drones can be sent to look for antennas peeking out of windows – “a telltale sign of an enemy drone pilot operating stealthily,” he said.
“Once identified, single or multiple drones will be sent to eliminate the human drone pilot,” he added.
In the future, drones could shoot down helicopters
According to Scientific American, the market for counter-drone technology could be worth $12.6 billion by 2030, and given developments in drone warfare, it could be necessary.
Monnik said DroneSec has already seen several attempts to use small, armed drones to target helicopters and small aircraft.
Planes appear to be fighting back – in April, footage shared by multiple accounts showed what was described as a Ukrainian Yak-52 trainer plane taking on an Orlan. Further reporting from The War Zone suggests that this is not an isolated phenomenon.
Monnik also predicted that we will soon see drones equipped with weapons platforms, and that drones will be deployed more often in swarm-like formations.
It is tempting to compare the phenomenon to the dogfights of the First World War more than a century ago, when pilots attacked each other as they flew with front-mounted machine guns or even pistols.
“There is still a deep, real connection between the warring sides – perhaps more so than the air crews of World War I – as pilots try to outsmart each other,” Patton Rogers said.
The last thing many drone pilots will see through the viewfinders of their doomed drones is the enemy drone — knowing that somewhere, on the other side, an enemy pilot is watching everything on their own headset, he said.
“That is the morbid intimacy of modern war,” he said.
Read the original article on Business Insider