In the early hours of 1 June, a fleet of unmarked trucks rolled into Siberia, each carrying what looked like an ordinary wooden trailer. Inside were 117 Ukrainian drones — quadcopters the size of a pizza box, armed with 3.2 kilogram warheads and vision-based autonomy systems.
Once in range of Russian air bases, the trailers opened and the drones launched. Guided by remote operators — and, when jammed, by AI trained to identify long-range bombers — the swarm struck with precision.
Ukraine’s security service claims 41 aircraft were hit; independent counts confirm at least a dozen destroyed, including several nuclear-capable strategic bombers. Operation Spider’s Web marked a leap in autonomous warfare — one where human oversight blends with machine initiative, and drone swarms are more than just auxiliary frontline systems.
From Ukraine to the Middle East, unmanned systems are now a feature of air and naval power, reshaping battlefield strategy. Drones have become central to modern warfare: affordable, potent and increasingly autonomous.
European countries, most of which are planning to ramp up their defence spending after decades of underinvestment, have a chance in theory to leapfrog their rivals, tapping into new funding that isn’t tangled up in long-term procurement contracts.
But to seize this opportunity will require a cultural change favouring industrial innovation and more creative procurement by military hierarchies that are as fragmented as they are traditionalist.
Ukraine: a drone war at scale
“There was once a debate about the value of drones in warfare, especially large conventional-style conflicts between nations,” said Peter Singer, a strategist at Washington-based think tank New America. “The conflict in Ukraine has ended that. The technology has been fundamental to the ways of fighting there.”
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022, Ukrainian volunteers rigged commercial drones to drop grenades, maiming and slowing the advancing Russian troops. What started as a low-cost tactic quickly matured. Ukrainian drones began carrying heavier warheads and kamikaze payloads, becoming a lethal threat to infantry and armour alike.
A recent report from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) estimated that unmanned platforms are responsible for around two-thirds of Russian materiel losses. Drones costing just €300 have destroyed multimillion-euro tanks, while maritime units have pushed Russian ships from strategic Black Sea waters.
Drones now play multiple roles — surveillance, targeting, and strike — and account for roughly 70% of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties.
Production has surged. Ukraine went from manufacturing 800,000 drones in 2022 to an expected 5 million this year. Russia counters with 2,700 Iranian-designed Shahed drones per month and aims to be producing 32,000 annually by 2030.
And because drones are relatively small and simple, manufacturers have been able to quickly adapt designs and produce them in dispersed small facilities, sometimes even residential garages, protecting their production lines from Russian air strikes.
“In Ukraine, there has been this innovation from the garage to the battlefield and back,” Raluca Csernatoni, a research professor at Carnegie Europe, told The Parliament.
The technological contest is intensifying. Ukraine’s fleet includes first-person view (FPV) drones carrying 2 kilogram to 5 kilogram explosives, jet-powered loitering munitions, and tethered fibre-optic platforms designed to resist jamming. Russia deploys its own kamikaze drones, reconnaissance UAVs, and jamming systems.
Electronic jammers, net-launchers, interceptor drones and even shotguns have turned the skies into a chaotic theatre of attack and counterattack.
“We are seeing an arms race in drones at an incredibly rapid pace,” Wannes Verstraete, a fellow at the Egmont Institute, told The Parliament. “It’s an innovation cycle moving much faster than what we would see in peacetime.”
EU struggles to keep pace
But EU countries are lagging behind. A fragmented industrial ecosystem and a risk-averse procurement culture are slowing Europe’s military drone capacity. In 2023, just 18% of defence spending in the EU was dedicated to joint programmes, EU data show, with the remaining 82% spent nationally, often shielding domestic industries from European-wide competition.
This siloed system makes it hard for small, innovative tech firms to break in, a study backed by the European Commission has found. These start-ups face slow, bureaucratic tender processes and must meet exacting requirements before they gain a shot at government contracts.
“In Ukraine, it was the startup community that pushed towards new ways to innovate,” said Csernatoni. "Decentralised production and the constant experimentation with new technologies introduce challenges to the older ways of doing things. The European military industry will perhaps need to adapt their tactics to incorporate all of these lessons learned.”
Across the EU, defence budgets are rising but procurement is still often geared towards legacy assets such as tanks, jets and warships. Yet Ukraine’s experience shows that tomorrow’s conflicts will depend at least as much on unmanned systems, AI platforms and electronic warfare.
“In future warfare, you will still need advanced platforms like the F‑35 jet,” said Ivan Zaccagnini, a researcher at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy in Brussels. “But you also want smaller drones to operate in a layered system with other hardware," he added.
For the EU, that means a major rethink in procurement and innovation strategy. France’s Thales, long focused on aerospace and conventional weapons, has shifted its attention to drones. The company is seeing increased demand for drone-launched precision rockets and for ground-based systems to shoot down enemy UAVs.
At a Thales production facility in Herstal, in southern Belgium, 70 millimetre rockets once made for European helicopters are now being adapted for drones — as both a launch platform and a target.
“Before 2022, it wasn’t obvious for a lot of European countries that you need to be agile,” said Thomas Colinet, Thales’ country manager for Belgium. “Since then, everyone’s aware that you have to act quickly and react to what’s happening on the battlefield and what the opponent is doing.”
That realisation hasn’t yet, however, created a cultural change in Europe’s military-industrial complex, which is still dominated by legacy companies building kit for Cold War formations.
“Europe needs to develop an industry where innovation takes centre stage,” said the Egmont Institute’s Verstraete. That means more support for start-ups and a willingness to make speculative investments on technologies that may or may not provide a breakthrough in capabilities — rather than refining platforms that may become obsolete, or that can at least be countered by much cheaper systems.
ReArm Europe, the EU’s flagship defence initiative, aims to unlock up to €800 billion through fiscal flexibility, joint loans, and redirected EU funds. At its core is the €150 billion Security Action for Europe (SAFE) instrument, offering low-interest loans for joint procurement of critical systems — drones, missile defence and AI.
“The European level is and has always been linked to bureaucracy, documents and timing,” said Colinet. “With ReArm Europe, we are moving in the right direction. But you still need manpower, mostly at the national level to manage those initiatives.”
AI reshapes combat
Another concern for Europe is the growing prevalence of autonomous weapons systems. With AI becoming a dual-use technology, the EU's lack of innovation in this sector is a military as well as an economic weakness, with the potential to leave the continent reliant on American or Chinese systems for future generations of weaponry.
The AI component of Ukrainian drones was crucial to the success of Operation Spider’s Web. By offering a failsafe route to target, it effectively nullifies short-range jamming defences and forces the defender to extend their countermeasures to beyond the visual range to the target.
“AI is used in target recognition, sensors, or to support flying operations,” said Zaccagnini. “It’s almost impossible to tell if a system is automated or truly autonomous just by observation.”
Ukraine is deploying around 10,000 AI-enabled drones this year. From open-source DIY models to advanced platforms, the battlefield is becoming increasingly autonomous.
Russia, too, is advancing fast. Its V2U strike drone uses Chinese technology to hunt targets autonomously. New iterations of Shahed drones are equipped with AI cameras that can independently locate and disable tanks, weapons systems or energy infrastructure.
But the most striking leap comes in swarm technology, which also featured in Operation Spider’s Web. Coordinated drone swarms can overwhelm even advanced air defences.
“Instead of multimillion-euro missiles, we’re seeing coordinated attacks by dozens of €300 drones carrying out precision strikes,” said Carnegie's Csernatoni, evoking the hive intelligence found in nature: “It mirrors the biological behaviour of birds or bees — complex collective action, enabled by artificial intelligence.”
As major powers — especially China — pour investment into swarms and autonomy, Europe’s airpower model is under pressure.
There is a push in the international community to limit the use of AI, for example by requiring a human to be in the loop when making lethal targeting decisions. At the 2023 REAIM summit in The Hague, 60 countries — including the US and China — endorsed a non-binding call to action on responsible military AI.
But as tensions rise between major powers, it’s difficult to imagine strict limits being enforced on a potentially transformative battlefield technology. Without a domestic capability to manufacture autonomous weapons systems, the EU risks being out of the arms race.
“If Europe falls behind in the military drone race,” warns Csernatoni, “it risks losing strategic autonomy in a critical emerging capability.”
Sign up to The Parliament's weekly newsletter
Every Friday our editorial team goes behind the headlines to offer insight and analysis on the key stories driving the EU agenda. Subscribe for free here.