In early 2021, an American-made Bradley armored vehicle was hit by a Russian mortar round in a Ukrainian field, but the Ukrainian soldiers inside, unworried but scarred by three years of artillery warfare, expected worse. That’s when the swarm of small drones began. These others targeted the vehicle’s weak points with precision that mortars could not achieve. One explosive drone struck the hatch right above where the commander sat, tearing his arm off. The team’s driver, his eye blasted from its socket, was also hit.

These soldiers survived, but the attack showed how a quickly evolving array of drones, using mainly off-the-shelf technology transformed into killing machines at unprecedented speed, made the third year of war in Ukraine deadlier than the first two combined, according to Western estimates.

On the battlefield, the dominance of drones has altered the nature of warfare. Military forces now adapt to and adopt new technologies at breakneck speed, changing the vie w of conflict.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-drones-deaths.html