Are We Watching the Wrong Hand?
Have you ever watched a good magician closely? Did you notice that he doesn’t need to hide what he is doing? He only needs to distract you from noticing. Perhaps it’s a flourish of the hand, a silk scarf in the air, a snap of the fingers. Meanwhile, it is the other hand that is doing the work.
The lesson is that we can fail to see something even when it is in plain sight. The important thing is visible; we simply aren’t looking at it. Our attention has been directed somewhere else.
This, I fear, is what is going on in the war between Ukraine and Russia.
The simple narrative of the war is this. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia and the West believed Russia would prevail quickly and easily. When Ukraine showed an unexpected ability to stop their advance, the West started providing aid in the form of conventional weaponry. In the early days, all the debate was over things like tanks and missiles. Russia looked like a paper tiger as its advances were stopped and casualties mounted.
Over the next few years, Ukraine pivoted from a conventional defense to one based on drone technology. The world watched and applauded as their innovation and tenacity made them the world leader in the field. When the Iranians demonstrated their own drone capability after the U.S. invasion, Ukraine began to export its capabilities, advising several Middle Eastern nations and NATO.
Ukraine built over four million attack drones in 2025 and is on track to build six million in 2026. Significant progress has also been made in machine vision and AI-directed drones, but actual production numbers are not yet known.
This narrative contains a distraction not unlike the magician’s hand with the scarf. The other hand, entirely visible but not focused on, is the simultaneous Russian advance in drone technology.
While the world watches Ukraine, Russia is building
In response to its early stalemate on the battlefield, Russia purchased and deployed the Iranian Shahed-class one-way attack drone. The Shahed is in some respects the mother of all drones. It was first deployed by the Houthi insurgents against Saudi Arabia in 2019. Russia also purchased a license to manufacture them, which they did originally under the name “Geran.”
On September 4, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a brief tracing the evolution of the Geran. Perhaps the most important takeaway from their analysis is contained in the introduction. Quoting directly:
“The defining challenge posed by Russia’s Geran program is the speed at which Russia can learn and adapt. Since acquiring the original Shahed design, Russia has treated the Geran as a continuously evolving platform, rapidly modifying its navigation, communications, payloads, propulsion, and tactics in response to changing Ukrainian defenses. Improvised modifications are tested in combat, successful solutions are standardized and scaled, and unsuccessful experiments are quickly discarded. This creates a continuous adaptation cycle in which battlefield feedback drives production decisions at a cadence measured in weeks rather than years. The Geran therefore illustrates a broader shift in modern weapons development: Advantage increasingly depends not on building the most advanced system at the outset, but on maintaining the organizational and industrial capacity to continuously iterate a system after it has entered combat. The central question is whether the United States is structured to compete with this model of rapid wartime adaptation.”
Several noteworthy and rapid technical modifications have emerged from this process. The engines have been improved by substituting Chinese products. The communication receivers have been replaced with larger Russian versions. The warhead was replaced with a Russian high-explosive design.
Production was split into two sites with unique specialties evolving. Sometimes the sites appear to collaborate; other times they appear to compete.
As drone technology has evolved, defensive systems have increasingly depended on the ability to interfere with their communications. As a result, much of the development over the past couple of years has been in communication systems designed to stay one step ahead of Ukraine’s evolving capacity to interfere.
Iterations between the front line and design and manufacturing are in real time with no delay. As an example, a Geran shot down over Ukraine on October 15, 2025, carried a satellite receiver installed on October 8: seven days from the production line to the target.
A more recent and highly significant development has been the conversion from the original piston engine design to a jet engine. When Ukraine learned to defend against the propeller-driven Geran with machine gun teams, jamming, and cheap interceptor drones, Russia responded with a faster, jet solution. In its early evolution, a Chinese jet engine was substituted for the original Iranian engine. The Geran-4 maneuvers at 186 to 249 miles per hour and tops out at 311, roughly twice the speed of the model it replaced. Ukrainian military intelligence reported in August that Russia now builds about 3,000 of the jet models a month, more than it builds of the older piston version.
Why this is important
The war in Iran has provided a brutal lesson in asymmetric warfare as Iran, with its minuscule defense budget, appears to have managed to fight the U.S. to a draw. Had we had Ukraine’s or Russia’s drone capability, we would not have wasted multi-million-dollar defense missiles when inexpensive drones and jamming devices would have sufficed. Similarly, the Saudis’ conventional military seems incapable of defending itself against the Houthis, who rely on Iranian drones.
What is the state of our drone capability?
The Pentagon's Drone Dominance Program is a $1.1 billion effort. Reuters reports it expects to have ordered just under 200,000 drones in total by February, 2027. Ukraine builds that many in 12 days.
When asked, Travis Metz, who is in charge of the Drone Dominance Program, observed that getting from zero to 200,000 “is harder than everything that follows,” and he believes the U.S. can eventually compete. That is not a very inspiring comment, to say the least. I might add that Metz’s biography on the Department of War website does not include any military experience. His background is in private equity and venture capital.
Nothing about the organization and operating traditions of the Department of War prepares it to compete in a world of low-cost, rapidly evolving weaponry. U.S. weapons programs are based on a few large prime contractors used to cost-plus contracts and no competition once a contract is won. Made-in-America requirements slow development and limit our capabilities. Changes to finished products require lengthy engineering change proposals. The combined effect is that American manufacturers cannot iterate on a deployed strike drone in days or weeks, which will be required by the terms of modern warfare. By the time the first 200,000 drones are delivered, they will be obsolete.
These practices explain why so many weapons programs are years late and billions over budget. They also explain how Elon Musk at SpaceX was able to dominate traditional players like Boeing and Lockheed with rapid innovation and a willingness to fail.
They also provide the answer to question the posed by the CSIS paper. Today, the U.S. is entirely unequipped to competewith the Russian and Ukrainian model of “rapid wartime adaptation.”
Europe is also far behind. Its drone defense effort is the European Drone Defense Initiative, a flagship of the Defense Readiness Roadmap 2030. The Commission's own milestones give it initial capacity by the end of 2026 and full function by the end of 2027.
Meanwhile Russia is probing
On the night of August 4, a drone carrying explosives was found beside a Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany. A detonator was removed and flights were suspended. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt called an explosives-armed drone on airport grounds a new kind of threat. On September 1, the German government formally blamed Russia, closed a Russian consulate, and summoned Moscow's ambassador. Russia denies involvement.
What makes the choice of Leipzig/Halle particularly worrisome is that it is the operating base for NATO's Strategic Airlift International Solution, a nine-nation arrangement giving the alliance assured access to five Antonov An-124 heavy transports. That is how NATO moves outsized cargo, and it sits on a commercial field in Saxony.
This behavior is rapidly becoming a pattern. Around 20 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace on September 10, 2025. Poland invoked Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, and NATO launched Operation Eastern Sentry within 48 hours. Drones have since been reported over Denmark, Norway, Romania, and Estonia. The European Parliament's research service reported in January that at least 10 European countries have detected drones near airports and military sites.
My conclusion
The Russia that invaded Ukraine looked at the time like a paper tiger. Today, in the area of warfare that is becoming the most critical, Russia is now ahead of every NATO country. We all need to hope that Putin does not decide that Europe is now an easier target for a drone power than is Ukraine. In the meantime, however, we need to press our elected leaders for a plan to transform our military for the war of the future, not of the past.