"Ukraine Is Losing The Drone War" - Former Ukrainian Commander

DAILY DEEP DIVE

Is Ukraine Losing The Drone War?

Former Chosen Company commander Ryan O’Leary made a rather long X thread suggesting that Ukraine is losing the drone war. I will link the unrolled thread above (but you will have to translate it). Below I’ve done a summary of his main points.

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Context

Former Chosen Company commander Ryan O’Leary argues that Ukraine is not losing the drone war where it is most visible, but where it matters most.

At the tactical level, Ukrainian units remain effective. Russian infantry is destroyed daily by FPV drones, producing steady attrition and constant battlefield pressure. But O’Leary’s warning is that this focus masks a deeper failure. The drone war, he argues, is not about how many soldiers are killed today, but about who controls space, movement, and decision-making tomorrow.

Russia grasped this earlier. Instead of using drones primarily as precision infantry killers, it reoriented them into a system designed to deny movement and logistics across operational depth. Roads, fuel routes, communications, ISR nodes, repair facilities, and drone crews themselves — particularly 10 to 40 kilometres behind the front — became priority targets. Systems like Rubicon were built for this purpose.

Ukraine, by contrast, still treats depth as unassigned terrain. Brigades hold trenches, but the rear remains structurally unmanaged. No unit formally “owns” the space behind the front. As a result, logistics slow, drone crews are attrited, and tempo collapses quietly — even as tactical engagements appear successful. So O'Leary's critique is not technological, Ukraine has drones and innovation. Yet the failure is doctrinal. Success is measured in kills because kills are visible, countable, and politically safe. But infantry is replaceable. Fuel, communications, logistics, repair capacity, and operational tempo are not.

The outcome is paradoxical: Ukraine wins tactically and loses ground. Russia loses manpower and gains freedom of movement. Until operational depth is formally defined, owned, and denied to the enemy, the drone war — regardless of scale — will remain strategically misaligned.

A few extra comments. These points mainly apply to Ukraine’s own territory behind the front lines. However, Ukraine has also been conducting a highly successful campaign around and inside Crimea, primarily targeting Russian air defence assets. Largely carried out by the SBU, these strikes have destroyed S-400 systems, radar complexes, and associated infrastructure. Building on O’Leary’s argument, it feels as though Ukraine’s drone war reflects a broader level of decentralisation across the system as a whole.

Ukraine’s drone manufacturing ecosystem is far more decentralised than Russia’s, which brings both advantages and limitations. On the positive side, this structure enables targeted, high-impact operations like the campaign against Russian air defences in Crimea, where expensive and scarce systems are being systematically degraded. In this sense, decentralisation has allowed specialist actors like the SBU to punch far above their weight. On the other hand, this same decentralisation struggles to scale at the wider operational level O’Leary is describing, particularly when it comes to controlling depth and denying movement across entire sectors.

Russia, by contrast, has adopted a far more centralised drone doctrine. This is precisely why it has been more effective at “big picture” objectives such as controlling operational depth and rear areas. Drone production is also centralised, though this has generated its own problems. Longstanding issues of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency have reportedly complicated delivery timelines and reduced the effectiveness of FPV systems, according to Russian sources.

The creation of Rubikon is the clearest example of Russia’s centralised approach. It has been a genuine game-changer: a drone formation designed to surveil, track, and systematically hunt Ukrainian drone teams, now increasingly expanding its focus to rear-area targets and logistics — exactly the kind of depth control O’Leary warns Ukraine is still struggling to institutionalise.

Sources

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