A single Ukrainian drone manufacturer told former CIA director David Petraeus during his visit last week that it plans to produce three million drones this year alone. The United States, by comparison, produced roughly 300,000 last year - a tenfold gap that illustrates how far ahead Ukraine has moved in scaling low-cost unmanned systems.
Petraeus, who shared the figures during a CBS News interview in Kyiv, said production is only part of the picture, "Hvylya" reports. The bigger shift lies in artificial intelligence, which he believes will reshape how drones operate in combat.
Currently, drone warfare near the frontline is constrained by electronic warfare. Within roughly 20 miles of the front, both sides jam the connections between remotely piloted first-person-view drones and their operators, degrading their effectiveness. One workaround has been fiber-optic drones that connect to operators through long cables spooling out of their tails, but those cables limit range.
Petraeus predicted the next leap: "What's coming is going to be algorithmically piloted drones that you can't jam." These systems will navigate using algorithms rather than GPS, allowing them to operate in heavily contested electronic warfare environments. The technology will also allow a single operator to control multiple drones at once.
Petraeus said fully autonomous systems - where humans define missions but machines execute them - may emerge within a couple of years. "I think that will be possible within a couple of years, and we may well see it first here," he said, noting that advances in object identification and facial recognition are already enabling greater autonomy.
Also read: why cheap drone swarms already pose a threat that America's most expensive weapons cannot counter.