Daniel Michaels is Brussels Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal. He was previously German Business Editor, also overseeing coverage of the European Central Bank. For 15 years before that, he was the Journal’s Aerospace & Aviation Editor for Europe. He writes: “

The fusion of inexpensive, high-tech weapons and low-tech brute force that Palestinian militant group Hamas used to attack Israel on Oct. 7 echoed tactics used on the battlefields of Ukraine that could transform the future of warfare.

Hamas blasted holes in border fencing using explosives and at least one commandeered construction vehicle. But before smashing its way into Israeli territory, Hamas used pinpoint drone attacks in an effort to blind sophisticated surveillance systems and cripple local military command- and-control capabilities.

Israel has spent years and billions of dollars building border barriers, monitored by guard towers bristling with electronic sensors and weaponry. These automated sentries can identify and shoot at land and air threats, including helicopters and large drones, people familiar with the systhe tems said.

Hamas boasted in videos posted on social media that it used small and relatively slow commercially available drones, modified to carry explosives, to knock out Israel’s security systems.

The strikes, using off-the-shelf equipment, are similar to those by Ukrainian forces who use improvised drone-bombers to hit Russian troops. The inexpensive makeshift weaponry has defeated advanced air-defense systems and destroyed costly tanks and other equipment.

Ukraine’s hybrid devices built on developments in other conflicts. Most of those fights involved what strategists call asymmetric warfare, where one side has much greater firepower than the other.

Islamic State is widely considered to have been the first group to drop explosives from commercial drones in a conflict, in Syria around 2016. The innovation, which evolved from improvised explosive devices used on the ground, was soon replicated by other non-state actors, from antigovernment rebels in Myanmar and the Philippines to Mexican drug cartels.

“With each conflict you see iterations of the technology,” said Mike Monnik, chief executive of DroneSec, an advisory firm specialized in drone-threat intelligence.

The war in Ukraine has also seen commercial and consumer technologies mix with traditional military explosives. Ukrainian troops, and more recently Russian forces, have used off-the-shelf drones to improve the targeting of decades-old artillery. Drones have dropped grenades and other weapons on trenches, depots and even individual soldiers. Hamas used drones to drop grenades on Israel’s observation towers and remotely operated machine guns.

The attack is an embarrassment for Israel, which has led world in developing sophisticated drones and anti-drone technologies. The ability of Hamas to hit towers that were designed to defend against airborne incursions is likely to be a focus of extensive analysis in Israel, the U.S. and among other allies.

The attack also drives home the difficulty of defending against such strikes. Most existing air-defense systems are designed to spot large, fast and higher-altitude threats approaching from far away. Small commercial drones like the quadcopters used by Hamas can hug the ground until near a target, have a radar signature too small for detection by most existing arrays, and can pop up at distances too short for sensors to spot them.

Responding to small, inexpensive drones is vexing for large militaries because defending against them requires expensive new equipment.

Today, drone production and modification is too widespread for militaries to effectively target. Knowledge of how to create lethal drones is shared in online tutorials, and components are easily smuggled because many have multiple uses or don’t resemble weapons parts.”

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Walter Russell Mead is an American academic. He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine. Mead is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs magazine. He writes:

“[Two years] into Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, two things seem clear.

• First, the war matters. After 15 years of failed Western responses to Russian aggression against Georgia and Ukraine, another failure to contain and deter Russia would have catastrophic consequences around the world.
• Second, current American strategy is not working well. Ukrainians are fighting bravely. We can and should hope for Ukrainian breakthroughs that transform the military situation and break Russian morale, but hope is not a plan.

Absent decisive military victories for Ukraine, the conflict is developing into a war of attrition, and given current American strategy that kind of war favors Russia. Moscow has more people, more resources and more territory than Ukraine. Worse, Ukrainian forces can make progress only by attacking prepared Russian defenses. If you are in a war of attrition but you have to keep hurling your forces at well-entrenched, well-defended enemy positions, you will burn through your reserves faster than your opponent.

Ukraine has another vulnerability. It depends on Western aid, and Western public opinion is fickle. The need to produce dramatic results to keep Western support from flagging may have forced Ukraine into launching the counteroffensive before its forces were ready.

Meanwhile, like LBJ agonizing over target selection in North Vietnam, President Biden frets over every weapons shipment to Ukraine, worried that sending too many arms of the wrong kind will trigger Russian escalation and risk a nuclear holocaust. He dribbles out enough support to keep Ukraine in the field but stops short of providing the kind of assistance that Kyiv really needs.

This may feel rational and even statesmanlike to the president, but it is a hard sell in American politics. If Russia is so evil and threatening that we must help Ukraine, why aren’t we doing enough to help Ukraine win? If Americans conclude that Mr. Biden’s Ukraine strategy will produce what political scientist Max Abrahms calls a forever war with a side order of nation building, support for Mr. Biden’s war policy is likely to collapse well before Russia throws in the towel.

The answer is not to walk away from Ukraine, but to fight Mr. Putin in smarter and politically more sustainable ways. Mr. Putin must pay, and be seen to pay, for his attack on Ukraine, and to do that the U.S. needs a whole-of-government campaign against Russian interests and assets around the world.

Fortunately, we operate in a target- rich environment, and there are lots of ways that Team Biden can bring the cost of war home to the Kremlin.

We could work with Turkey and neighboring states to make Mr. Putin’s presence in Syria ruinously expensive while bringing him diminishing returns. Forcing Mr. Putin to devote more resources to Syria while reducing its usefulness to him weakens him in Ukraine and at home.

The U.S. can apply pressure in other places, such as Russia’s illegal enclave in Moldova. Belarus is a de facto co-belligerent participating in Russia’s war. Our goal should be to force Mr. Putin to devote scarce resources to keeping his satellite afloat.

The U.S. can also target Mr. Putin’s Latin American allies. The Biden administration needs to move past the leftist shibboleths of the 20th century and develop a concerted approach toward pushing Russia out of the Western hemisphere.

Mr. Putin’s networks of cronies, allies and agents extend well beyond Russia. These people need to learn that collaboration with rogue states is a poor career choice. President Biden should instruct the intelligence community to work with the Treasury Department and prosecutors around the world to expose the shady deals, tax evasion, bribery and other bad behavior that holds Mr. Putin’s global network in place. Some prominent careers may collapse in disgrace. That would be a good thing. Working with allies, the full power of American intelligence should be devoted to the detection and systematic deconstruction of Mr. Putin’s international assets.

Despite the disappointing performance of our sanctions so far, the Russian economy remains an important vulnerability for the Kremlin. As analyst Edward Luttwak points out, we can accelerate the degradation of Russia’s economy by focusing on critical components that Russia badly needs but can’t easily make or source. The Russian gas industry, for instance, depends on a range of cold-weather equipment that is made in the West.

There are other things we can do. We can help Ukraine develop a powerful arms industry and defense establishment that pose a permanent obstacle to Russian ambitions in the region. We can go pedal-to-the-metal on energy production of all kinds to cut global prices and Mr. Putin’s revenues without alienating countries like India. We can advance a multinational effort to ensure that the world’s uranium market won’t depend on Russia. We can develop military technologies and weapons systems that Russia cannot hope to match, just as Ronald Reagan did with his missile defense program in the 1980s.

If this is a war of attrition, the U.S. and its partners are well-placed to win. We just need to make up our minds and roll up our sleeves.”

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Yaroslav Trofimov is a Ukrainian-born[1] Italian author and journalist who serves as chief foreign-affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. Previously he wrote a weekly column on the Greater Middle East, “Middle East Crossroads,”[2] in The Wall Street Journal. He has been a foreign correspondent for the publication since 1999, covering the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Prior to 2015 he was The Wall Street Journal‘s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“Wearing video goggles, a Ukrainian trooper crouched on the top floor of a gutted high-rise and piloted a small drone into the nearby Russian-occupied city of Bakhmut. With a swoosh, the first-person-view drone—which cost about $300 to assemble—sped after a target of opportunity, blowing up a pickup truck full of Russian troops.

“Before we started flying here, the Russians had so much movement that there were traffic jams in Bakhmut,” said the pilot, a member of the Special Operations Center “A” of the Security Service of Ukraine. “Now, all the roads in Bakhmut are empty.”

With thousands of Ukrainian and Russian drones in the air along the front line, from cheap Quadro-copters to long-range winged aircraft that can fly hundreds of miles and stay on target for hours, the very nature of war has transformed.

The drones are just one element of change. New integrated battle-management systems that provide imaging and locations in real time all the way down to the platoon and squad levels—in Ukraine’s case, via the Starlink satellite network— have made targeting near instantaneous.

“Today, a column of tanks or a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit in another three minutes. The survivability on the move is no more than 10 minutes,” said Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s HUR military-intelligence service. “Surprises have become very difficult to achieve.”

The technological revolution triggered by the Ukraine war is calling into question the feasibility of some of the basic concepts of American military doctrine.

Combined-arms maneuvers using large groups of armored vehicles and tanks to make rapid breakthroughs—something Washington and its allies had expected the Ukrainian offensive this summer to achieve—might no longer be possible in principle, some soldiers here said. The inevitable implication, according to Ukrainian commanders, is that the conflict won’t end soon.

“The days of massed armored assaults, taking many kilometers of ground at a time, like we did in 2003 in Iraq— that stuff is gone because the drones have become so effective now,” said retired U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Bradley Crawford, an Iraq war veteran who is now training Ukrainian forces near Bakhmut in a private capacity.

And, in a potential conflict with a lesser power, the U.S.’s overall military edge might also not be as decisive as previously thought. “It’s a question of cost,” said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “If you can destroy an expensive, heavy system for something that costs much, much less, then actually the power differential between the two countries doesn’t matter as much.”

For instance, each FPV drone, a type of weapon that entered widespread use this summer, costs a fraction of a regular 155mm artillery shell, which is worth some $3,000, let alone main battle tanks priced at millions of dollars.

Yet the drones now have the precision and speed to catch up with any moving armored vehicle and, if piloted expertly, can disable even the most modern tanks and howitzers. Their cheapness also means that they can be used against any target of opportunity, including cars and small groups of soldiers, emptying out the roads within several miles of the front line.

Center “A” is one of many Ukrainian forces operating FPV drones. Since June 1, the center’s FPV crews in eastern and southern Ukraine have hit 113 Russian tanks, 111 fighting vehicles and 68 artillery systems, causing nearly 700 Russian casualties, according to the unit.

During a few hours one recent morning in Chasiv Yar, Center “A” operators used FPV drones armed with World War II-vintage antitank bombs to destroy, in addition to the pickup truck, two parked Russian military vehicles. They also flew a drone into the window of a Bakhmut high-rise after spotting Russian soldiers— likely also drone operators— moving the curtains. A separate observation drone recorded the resulting explosions.

The Russians, too, have formidable— and fast-improving— drone capabilities. Minutes after the Center “A” team tried to establish a position in the Chasiv Yar high-rise, it was spotted by a Russian drone and the building was targeted by mortar fire. The Ukrainian troopers quickly ran from the building and then filtered back in groups of two, at long intervals.

While drones have played an outsize role in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, both the sheer number of unmanned aircraft and their effectiveness have increased significantly, with Moscow quickly catching up and sometimes surpassing Ukraine’s capabilities. New types of drones are reaching the battlefield—including naval drones Ukraine has used to damage Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Many drones that were effective months earlier have become outdated fast and need to be re-engineered to defeat enemy jamming, commanders said.

“Nothing stands firm,” said the commander of the Ukrainian Navy, Vice Adm. Oleksiy Neizhpapa, in an interview. “War is the time when technology develops. Every operation is different, and if you repeat it the same way, it would make no sense because the enemy already has an antidote.”

The latest time any side made a rapid breakthrough on the ground was the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions in September and October 2022. At the time, the Ukrainians took advantage of undermanned and under-fortified Russian positions.

The Ukrainian advance in Kherson last November was the result of Himars missile strikes disrupting Russian logistics to such a point that the Russians chose to withdraw. Since last fall, however, Russia has mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops, plugging gaps in defense and laying out extensive minefields and fortifications. Crucially, it has also saturated the front line with drones.

As Ukraine kicked off its counteroffensive, every time its forces gathered more than a few tanks and infantry fighting vehicles together, their columns were quickly spotted by ubiquitous Russian drones and then targeted by a combination of artillery, missiles fired from choppers and swarms of drones.

The Russian military faced the same fate when it gathered a large tank force of its own in an attempt to push into the city of Vuhledar in January, and in subsequent smaller attempts at armored offensives. Noticed by Ukrainians from the air, these columns were also swiftly destroyed.

After initial heavy losses of Western-supplied tanks and fighting vehicles, Ukrainian troops have switched to operating in small groups that are ferried toward the front line using armored personnel carriers, and then attempt to advance one tree line after another.

Continuing to move forward, the Ukrainians seized several villages on the southern front in the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions, and, in recent days, broke through Russian lines south of Bakhmut to take the villages of Andriivka and Klishchiivka. During the Russian offensive between November and May, Moscow scored no notable gains except for Bakhmut.

The bloody war fought by Ukraine is the kind of conflict the U.S. military hasn’t experienced since Korea in the 1950s. Modern Western military training and defense procurement have been shaped by decades of counterinsurgency operations against much weaker opponents in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. That has led to a focus on costly and sophisticated weapons systems that don’t survive long in a full-scale conflict with a comparable adversary.

“A lot of Western armor doesn’t work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity. If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn’t perform,” said Taras Chmut, director of Come Back Alive, a foundation that raises money to provide Ukrainian units with drones, vehicles and weapons.

The corollary, he said, is that the focus should be on providing front-line troops with a larger quantity of cheaper, simpler systems. That is a historical lesson that harks back to World War II, when the Soviet T-34 and American-built Sherman tanks were significantly inferior to German Tigers and Panthers but could be mass-produced, fielded in much greater numbers and more easily repaired in the field.

Western military planners are taking notice. “We have a lot of lessons to learn. One is that quantity is a quality of its own,” said Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding, the head of Ukraine operations at the German Ministry of Defense. “You need numbers, you need force numbers. In the West we have reduced our military, we have reduced our stocks. But quantity matters, mass matters.”

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Eric Schmidtwas CEO of Google, 2001-11, and executive chairman of Google and its successor, Alphabet Inc., 2011-17. He is the chairman of the Special Competitive Studies Project and a co-author of The Age of AI: And Our Human Future. He writes: “My most recent trip to Ukraine revealed a burgeoning military reality: The future of war will be dictated and waged by drones.

Amid a front line covering 600 miles, the Ukrainian counteroffensive faces a formidable Russian force, as it tries to break through to the Azov Sea and stop the Russian overland supply line to Crimea. Between the two armies, there are at least 3 miles of heavily mined territory followed by rows of concrete antitank obstacles, with artillery pieces hidden in nearby forests. The Russian military has amassed so much artillery and ammunition that it can afford to fire 50,000 rounds a day—an order of magnitude more than Ukraine.

Traditional military doctrine suggests that an advancing force should have air superiority and a 3-to-1 advantage in soldiers to make steady progress against a dug-in opponent. Ukrainians have neither. That they’ve succeeded anyway is owing to their ability to adopt and adapt new technologies such as drones.

Drones extend the Ukrainian infantry’s limited reach. Reconnaissance drones keep soldiers safe, constantly monitoring Russian attacks and providing feedback to correct artillery targeting. During the daytime, they fly over enemy lines to identify targets; at night, they return with payloads.

Unfortunately, Russia has picked up these tactics, too. Behind the initial minefields and trenches blocking Kyiv’s advance, there’s a more heavily defended line. If courageous Ukrainians make it there, Russian soldiers will send in drones and artillery. All the while Russia’s army— which excels at jamming and GPS spoofing—is working to take out Ukrainian drones. A May report from the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies estimated that Ukraine was losing as many as 10,000 a month even before the start of the counter-offensive.

Yet Ukraine has continually out-innovated the enemy. Its latest drone models can prevent jamming, operate without GPS guidance and drop guided bombs on moving targets. Ukrainian command centers use personal computers and open-source software to classify targets and execute operations.

Ukraine has also pioneered a more effective model of decentralized military operations that makes its tech use varied and quickly evolving. In the war’s early stages, Ukraine’s government put the new Digital Ministry in charge of drone procurement but left important decision making to smaller units. While the ministry sets standards and purchases drones, the brigades are empowered to choose and operate them. Ten programmers can change the way thousands of soldiers operate. One brigade I visited independently designed its own multilayered visual planning system, which coordinates units’ actions.

To win this war, Ukraine needs to rethink 100 years of traditional military tactics focused on trenches, mortars and artillery. But the innovations it and Russia make will carry on far beyond this particular conflict.

Perhaps the most important is the kamikaze drone. Deployed in volume, this first-person-view drone—invented for the sport of drone racing— is cheaper than a mortar round and more accurate than artillery fire. Kamikaze drones cost around $400 and can carry up to 3 pounds of explosives. In the hands of a skilled operator with several months of training, these drones fly so fast they are nearly impossible to shoot down.

Costly materiel, such as combat aircraft that are vulnerable to missile attacks, will be replaced by cheaper drones—operating on land, sea and air. In the future, like murmurations of starlings, ruthless swarms of AI-empowered kamikaze drones will track mobile targets and algorithmically collaborate to strike past an enemy’s electronic countermeasures. Naval drones will take the same concepts into the sea, converging like a shoal of small torpedoes at the waterline of targeted ships. Land-based drones will clear obstacles, demine fields and eventually act as remote machine guns and other weapons.

As I departed Ukraine, what stuck with me were the rolling fields along the Dnipro River, with cinnabar-colored flowers covering the gentle landscape. In the 1930s, Stalin enforced the Holodomor, the forced starvation of about four million Ukrainians in the middle of the breadbasket of Europe. The industry of the tractors cultivating fields only miles from the front line was a powerful reminder of how human civilization can withstand unbelievable hardship—and emerge stronger.

The war in Ukraine shows us the best and worst humanity can offer, from the ruthlessness of the invasion to the bravery of the defenders. It’s also a stark warning of the future wars to come. Just as drones can be deployed to protect soldiers, they can be used to hunt civilians.

The world needs to learn and innovate from the lessons of this emerging form of fighting to be ready to deter and prevent such conflict from ever happening again.”

Next time: The Era of Drone Swarms Begins