Ukraine’s Drones Could Launch a Military Tech Revolution
by Aidan Stretch - August 18, 2026
The Iran war is providing the world with the latest demonstration of how quickly drones have transformed modern battle. The Islamic Republic’s regime has gained leverage over the Strait of Hormuz in part through a fleet of cheap, long-range drones, which continue to threaten oil tankers and terrorize cities across the region. Analysts say that the U.S. did not appropriately prepare for this drone threat. That is only partly true.
The Donald Trump administration, and those around it, have spent years looking for lessons in Ukraine, which has developed some of the world’s most sophisticated drone expertise in its war with Russia. The administration saw an opportunity to learn from Ukraine’s lessons, but missed acting on it. Now the U.S. is racing to catch up to the frontier of drone warfare.
Perhaps the most convincing demonstration of Ukraine’s drone expertise came in a Ukrainian assault behind the Russian line last summer. In June, four trucks hiding more than 100 Ukrainian drones in wooden cabins hurtled down Russian highways toward four of the country’s most protected airfields. Hours later, pilots located thousands of miles away in Kyiv sprang the drones from the trucks and began flying them into some of Russia’s most expensive aircraft. By the end of the operation, Ukraine’s small first-person-view drones, which cost no more than a few hundred dollars a unit, had dealt more than $7 billion in damage to Russia’s air fleet. Military experts across the globe lauded the mission, code-named Operation Spider’s Web by Ukraine’s security services, as one of the most daring and successful in modern warfare.
The operation earned particularly enthusiastic praise from one American admirer. “Trump absolutely loved it,” one American official told me. Ukrainian officials were invited to present on what they had learned about drone warfare to the administration. They even prepared a slide deck with information on how Ukrainian drone technology could be used to defend U.S. bases in the Middle East. The offer became one part of a proposed $35 billion to $50 billion “drone deal” that would allow Ukraine and the U.S. to co-produce the lower-cost first-person-view drones that Ukraine has mastered.
Pairing Ukraine’s drone know-how and building capacity with American capital seemed an obvious partnership: Ukraine produced more than 4 million drones last year, while the U.S. manufactured 300,000. In November, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, often referred to as the Pentagon’s “drone guy,” visited Kyiv in an apparent step toward finalizing a partnership.
But when he arrived, things fizzled. During Driscoll’s visit, the Trump administration launched a pressure campaign on the Ukrainians to accept a peace proposal that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff had drawn up with his Russian counterparts. The drone discussion was shelved, and though ultimately Moscow refused to negotiate and a peace agreement didn’t materialize, the deal lost momentum.
Now with war roiling the Middle East, prospects for a major drone partnership have been revived—this time, not by the White House but by America’s private sector. Ukraine’s drone expertise has been on display in the Middle East over the past month as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dispatched drone interceptors and pilots to help defend against the same Iranian Shahed drones that Russia uses to attack Ukraine.
American investors and defense companies, including some with close ties to the Trump administration, have taken notice. Two companies lead the charge: Powerus and Swarmer. Powerus was founded by Brett Velicovich, a former U.S. Army Special Operations officer. Velicovich, an expert in drone warfare since its early days in the 2010s, spent three years in Ukraine during the current war before starting Powerus to commercialize the technology, which he said is “years ahead of the U.S.” His company is now backed by both of President Trump’s eldest sons and his former Ukraine envoy Lieutenant General (ret.) Keith Kellogg. Swarmer, started by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, focuses on software that lets drones act together in autonomous, connected “swarms.”
Both companies are trying to address one of the most pressing problems of modern warfare: how to make drones that are immune to electronic jamming. Along Ukraine’s frontlines, the most effective drone defenses are electronic warfare systems that jam signals between drone operators and their aircraft. The frontlines are saturated with such systems that constrain how far drones can be piloted into enemy territory, and send thousands crashing into the battlefield each day. Iran is now turning to GPS jamming in the Persian Gulf, too.
This is where Ukrainian drone tech comes in. Former CIA director David Petraeus told me in an interview last week that the key is to guide drones with algorithms that let drones navigate using maps and ground features without a connection to a pilot or satellite. “Within a year or two, they are going to be algorithmically piloted much more and more and more until you actually have truly autonomous systems,” Petraeus said. ”You can’t jam that. You can cause problems perhaps with its GPS or whatever, its navigation system, but even those can be worked through now, and that’s what’s coming in the future.”
At one frontline military research lab I visited in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, engineers watched squares of Russian fields fade into the distance on a television screen as Ukrainian reconnaissance drones gained altitude. Pieces of heavy bomber drones cluttered the tables next to them, and 3D printers shifted back and forth on shelves along the walls.
The purpose of the R & D center, which I visited in March along with American investors traveling with the U.S.-based Renew Democracy Initiative, is to monitor the feeds of drones being piloted at bases nearby and look for opportunities to enhance their capabilities. The engineers there say that their top priority right now is to increase the range their drones can fly as Russians try to sever their connections.
The unit has long sought ways to get around Russian jamming. In 2024, as electronic jamming became pervasive over the battlefield, both Russia and Ukraine turned to fiber-optic drones. These drones spool miles of cable out of their tails, connecting the drones to their operators so that the only way to sever the connection is by cutting the cord itself.
Now, though, the engineers say that demand for the fiber-optic cables, which are primarily produced in China, far exceeds supply. Ukrainian units are struggling to keep up with their Russian counterparts that have more resources to expend. “Fiber-optic prices are like gas prices,” one of the engineers told me. “Russia can spend way more on them.”
With heightened attention on alternatives to fiber-optic drones, one Ukrainian firm is offering promising solutions. Sine Engineering, a defense start-up based in western Ukraine, combines old-school techniques used to navigate planes before the advent of GPS with new technology to allow drones to know where they are without satellites.
At the end of March, the company received the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation’s (DFC) first major investment of Trump’s second term. The DFC, originally formed during Trump’s first term as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road initiative, serves as the administration’s development tool, picking investment projects that both serve America’s strategic interests and will return a profit.
The real test of Ukraine’s drone technology
is not in the stock market but on battlefields
outside Ukraine.
As a drone using Sine technology flies, it exchanges short-range signals with a nearby ground station. By synchronizing these signals and measuring how long they take to travel, the system can calculate the drone’s location without relying on GPS. Because the signals are brief and local, they are far harder to jam than the continuous links used in traditional drone control. Algorithms then refine the process, filtering out interference and more precisely estimating the drone’s position in flight.
One engineer who goes by the call sign Mathematician told me that algorithmic piloting is being introduced gradually. “You can think of it like cruise control,” he said, tinkering with a machine that looked like a cross between a green wheelbarrow and a tank. The vehicles still begin their journeys remote-controlled by a pilot, but algorithms can kick in to help finish the mission if the connection is jammed.
Soon, though, the technology will let drones operate with complete autonomy, from the moment of takeoff. “I think that will be possible within a couple of years,” Petraeus told me after visiting a different frontline unit last week. “There will still be a commander, or someone who is determining what the mission of that drone is,” he clarified, but soon computers onboard “will have an algorithm that will capture all of the intentions. . .and it will carry out the mission on its own.”
Development and enhancement on this timeline, drone builders say, can happen only in Ukraine. Kateryna Bondar, a drone expert at the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that algorithmic technology is only as good as the battlefield data it is trained on. In Ukraine, where Russian and Ukrainian forces prolifically deploy jamming systems, the electronic warfare environment is more intense than anywhere else in the world.
For potential American investors, the unique value of technology honed on Ukraine’s battlefields is clear. In a letter to potential Swarmer investors, Prince wrote that the cycle of deploying, observing, adapting, and improving drone software that his company has followed on Ukraine’s battlefields simply “cannot be replicated in laboratories or simulations.” For Velicovich, too, the experience of an actual war can’t be replaced. “We are looking for technology that is battle-tested and trusted by humans,” Velicovich told me. “The rapid testing and constant innovation. We don’t have that in the U.S., but Ukraine does.”
In late March, as the war in Iran raged on, Ukraine signed defense agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The countries have leaned on Ukrainian drone interceptors and air defense expertise to fend off Iranian attacks. Zelenskyy says that the Pentagon has asked for similar help.
What’s missing is a signal from the White House that it is currently interested in signing its own agreement with the Ukrainian government. On the contrary, Trump’s zeal for Ukrainian drones seems to have cooled. “We don’t need their help in drone defense,” Trump told Fox News in an interview. “We know more about drones than anybody. We have the best drones in the world, actually.”
Ukrainian officials told me that this dismissiveness of Ukraine’s drone expertise extends beyond President Trump to other senior members of the administration. Even after Ukrainian drone operators deployed to the Middle East to help defend against Iranian drones, the Pentagon has not invited the Ukrainians onto U.S. military bases or shared drone interception data with them, according to two Ukrainian officials.
These snubs have frustrated Ukrainians. But even as formal deals between the two governments remain slow moving, American private sector interest in Ukrainian technology is growing. One sign that we may be at a key turning point: While the company’s technology is still at an early state, Swarmer went public on the NASDAQ exchange in March, with its shares surging on its debut.
The real test of Ukraine’s drone technology is not in the stock market but on battlefields outside Ukraine. Some of the technology being commercialized now is already proving its worth in the Middle East. At least 10,000 Ukrainian interceptor drones have been dispatched to the Gulf States to defend against Iranian attacks, and Sine’s technology is being used to enhance their effectiveness, a senior DFC official told me: “As we’re seeing in the Middle East, the need for protecting civilian and commercial infrastructure and populations is immense.”
Whether the White House will draw the same conclusions remains unclear. But as drones strike U.S. bases and infrastructure across the Middle East, including killing six U.S. service members in Kuwait, the lessons from Ukraine are becoming harder to ignore. “We need to learn a lot more, much more rapidly than we are,” Petraeus told me. “This is not science fiction anymore. It’s not fantasy. This is coming soon to a theater near you.”
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