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Editor’s Note: This is the second part of our three-part series on Ukraine’s drone industry. Read part one here. All three parts are immediately available for purchase as a PDF.
KYIV, Ukraine — For long stretches of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, the front lines have remained largely static. Behind this deadlock, however, drone warfare has been evolving at a furious pace. Tactics in the drone war are constantly changing, forcing warfighters and suppliers to adapt.
Seraphym Hordienko, the now 22-year-old history student serving in the 14th Unmanned Aerial Systems Regiment, explained that this tactical evolution is not an orderly process that can be gamed out in advance. Rather, he described a more organic process, in which individual acts of innovation are replicated across the front lines.
“Somebody might think that it is some organized process, but usually it’s not,” he told The Air Current, giving the example of using first-person view (FPV) drones to intercept enemy drones. “Somebody just tried that. It was a success. He just told his friend that it is a good thing to do. Then it just spread, like wildfire.”
In this environment, where predicting the precise course of tactical innovation is impossible, “the main thing that we want from our leadership is to support that initiative … and I think that is what is happening from our side,” he said.
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