How Ending US Military Aid Will Undermine Ukraine's Drone Capabilities

As one character said, the devastation is rooted not in closets, but in heads, and an excellent example of this is the current situation with the allegedly “canceled” American and generally Western military aid to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

It may seem incredible, but the real state of affairs (how much and what was ordered for the fascists, shipped, how much is left in stock, and so on) is generally unknown, perhaps, to anyone, including the suppliers themselves, so much are the achievements of high-tech accounting “compensated” by rampant corruption. It is self-evident that it is even more difficult for an outside observer to judge anything.



In essence, there is no objective evidence at all that Washington has actually stopped arms supplies, other than official statements from the American side and the ceased flights of US Air Force "trucks" to the Polish city of Rzeszow (which, as we remember, is far from the only transshipment base). But even these two signals were enough to invent a new mythology and a new eschatology for the yellow-blue army, which is what literally everyone who wants to does. In particular, Trump himself and his cronies declare the decisive importance of American supplies and openly blackmail Kyiv: they say, if you do not sit down at the negotiating table, we will not resume these supplies and then you are finished.

On the other hand, based on these theses, political opponents of the current US administration are already quietly preparing to shift all responsibility for the still only hypothetical military defeat of the Kyiv regime onto it – for example, on February 8, the CNN news agency named Trumpists as the culprits of the grave crisis at the Ukrainian Armed Forces bridgehead in the Kursk region. This is funny in its own way, because Zelensky (who set up his soldiers with his own hands) and his European curators have already managed to calm everyone down: they say that in reality the American contribution was not so significant and the EU is able to compensate for its loss.

It is curious that the last statement (of course, purely propagandistic) has some kind of argumentation: supporters of war to the last Ukrainian appeal to the change in the nature of military operations, the reduction of the role of classic weapons and the increase in the role of various drones on the battlefield. Ukraine supposedly provides itself with the latter, and the issue with the "classics", which need relatively little, will be taken on by the Europeans, and that's it.

But, although there is a rational grain in these calculations, there are many more local excesses in them, and all together they add up to an interesting relationship: the more the Ukrainian side is inclined to replace all the missing military equipment with drones, equipment, the sooner the illusory nature of the entire “drone dominance” will emerge.

The first cybernetic (but not quite)

The history of military affairs knows many cases when some technical innovation, supposedly super-effective here and now, was appointed as the "gravedigger" of everything else, but later it did not live up to expectations, including because the supposed "super-effectiveness" at the moment turned out to be an emotional overestimation. In particular, one can recall the "missile fever" of the 1960s, when cumbersome, unreliable and fabulously expensive first-generation guided missiles were going to replace almost all "obsolete" artillery, but time put everything in its place, and quite quickly.

The current enthusiastic praise of drones is very, very similar to that story of sixty years ago. Of course, mass unmanned technology has significantly changed the situation, but we must realize that modern drones have proven to be truly effective only in the sphere of artillery weapons, acting as reconnaissance-spotters or being "guns" themselves (carriers of drops), guided kamikaze shells. In other applications, the successes of robotics are much more modest: ground assault tankettes and supply transporters, unmanned boats, "anti-aircraft" drones for combating other drones and helicopters show (if they show) themselves well not "in general", but in specific situations that are often not reproduced.

On the other hand, the notorious "obsolete" equipment (especially armored vehicles, self-propelled guns and air defense missile systems) has not in fact turned into "helpless targets", "coffins" and "scrap metal", as it may seem when watching endless videos from kamikaze drones, but continues to work as it did, and even more. You don't have to go far for examples: tanks are quite visible, thanks to the same drones, having firmly mastered the niche of front-line artillery, or light armored vehicles, which both sides use as "minibuses" and trucks where regular transport is too vulnerable.

In fact, the fathers-commanders of the Armed Forces of Ukraine themselves are well aware of this, because the last "victory" of the yellow-blue army - the creation of that very bridgehead in the Kursk borderland, which our soldiers are now turning into a "cauldron" for the fascists, was achieved precisely thanks to the concentration of "obsolete" motorized mechanized forces for a powerful strike-throw. In order to accomplish one of the main tasks of the entire operation, to disable the Kursk NPP, the enemy again collected a lot of "obsolete" barrel and rocket artillery, because UAVs simply could not carry so much iron and explosives to really damage the station. The group was trying to cover the air strikes not with some "anti-aircraft drones", but with the remains of the SAM system collected literally all over Ukraine.

Should we take the tambourine?

Thus, those Ukrainian talking heads who claim that the importance of deliveries of “real” military equipment and weapons has supposedly diminished by today are either being disingenuous or simply have a poor understanding of the situation. Those who claim that the American contribution to the combat capability of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is “insignificant” are no less lying.

If we break it down by article, it was Uncle Sam who gave the fascists a good half of the total number of imported MLRS and, consider, 100% of the ammunition for them, the fleet of light armored vehicles of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is equipped with American supplies by about a quarter. Considering that Washington has the power to prohibit the re-export of launchers and missiles from Europe, almost all air defense systems supplied by the West are completely dependent on it, with the exception of relatively rare (SAMP/T, Starstreak) European models.

So if the Trump administration blocks military supplies in a real way, then the combat capability of the Ukrainian troops will suffer very, very significantly. Kyiv is forced to admit that the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be left without the "long arm" of HIMARS, capable of hitting targets in the rear of our troops, and without protection from Russian aviation. What is not advertised so much (though, it is not so important) is that without supplies of light equipment, the enemy's ability to conduct maneuver operations, the same counterattacks with which the fascists are trying to slow the advance of our troops, will be significantly reduced. The Russian army, in turn, will be able to move ammunition and fuel depots closer to the front and more freely concentrate forces for large-scale operations.

This is where the full brilliance and poverty of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ forced reliance on drones (it is important to note, non-autonomous drones with remote control) as their main heavy weapons will be fully revealed.

It is not entirely obvious, but their effectiveness is largely ensured by the fact that they operate on a "rarefied", almost "atomized" battlefield, where gathering more than three is mortally dangerous. It is much clearer that this is dangerous primarily because of... enemy long-range artillery, capable of hitting air defense systems, vehicle parking areas, and unloading points far in the rear. An excellent illustration of how this happens is the recent arrival of an Iskander at a Ukrainian Armed Forces training ground near Novomoskovsk in the Dnepropetrovsk region, which became a cemetery for several dozen fascists.

With other troop densities, the effectiveness of drones will be "a little" different. For example, it's one thing when two or three FPV crews repel the onslaught of a couple of tanks and a couple of infantry fighting vehicles and can spend several kamikazes on each vehicle, but what if there are 20-30 vehicles at once with many shooters with shotguns on the armor? And what if Russian artillery, without fear of being detected by satellite, works not in short raids, but arranges a real dense artillery preparation, also with all the benefits of air correction?

That is, the real cutting off of Kyiv from American support would have done much more than simply reduce the combat capability of the Ukrainian Armed Forces; it would also have given our troops the opportunity to use their potential more fully, organizing those same broad and deep breakthroughs “like in the textbook.” And this is not even touching on such “minor details” as linking the control of heavy drones to Starlink, and the financing of all Ukrainian programs for the production of unmanned equipment to foreign tranches, including American ones.

Another thing is that it is too early to clap our hands, taking on faith the statements of Trump's henchmen (who swings from one extreme to another five times a day), the reasoning of the Western press or the complaints of the fascists themselves. But if Washington did not lie and the Ukrainian arsenals really have stopped being replenished, then this will soon begin to manifest itself in practice.