One warrior in the sky
How technology is rewriting military textbooks
"The UAV today is simultaneously a reconnaissance vehicle, a coordinator, and a strike unit. Whereas previously army commanders looked at a map and saw 'regiments' and 'divisions,' now they see a network of dots, each of which could be a kamikaze drone or a relay station. Let's just recall Remarque's phrase about the 'smell of war.' Today, there's almost no smell, but there's an endless screen and numbers," notes a platoon commander in the combat testing training company of the Bars
- Sarmat Special Operations Center, call sign "Kipchak" (he asked not to be named).
Today's frontline UAVs are mass-produced vehicles costing 100,000 rubles, produced in hundreds of thousands, with a small warhead capable of damaging expensive weapons systems, tanks, artillery rocket launchers, and infrastructure like cell towers or power substations. Furthermore, they are typically "one-time use" devices, single-use munitions that never need to return to base.
There's a need to create a whole class of military educational institutions that will specialize exclusively in drones. "This isn't just about developing and assembling these drones. It's about creating a whole class of drone-collected data analysts. This is a huge number of fundamentally new military professions," he notes.
New training courses on UAV use are already being implemented at departmental educational institutions. A significant influx of UAV operators is being trained by non-governmental training centers, which, after the military training, can be converted to civilian operations, while retaining a potential mobilization mission.
According to an officer at the Bars-Sarmat Special Purpose Center, advanced military universities are already introducing disciplines that simply didn't exist five years ago: drone data analysis, the fundamentals of autonomous systems programming, and AI. "New categories are emerging in the Russian army—strike, reconnaissance, swarm, and logistics UAVs. They don't fit neatly into either the Air Force or the Ground Forces. In practice, this is leading to the creation of separate structures, temporary tactical groups that combine pilots, infantry, and programmers," he notes.
Post-war reality
The development of unmanned technologies in military conflicts is stimulating their adaptation for peaceful purposes, enabling them to solve problems in agriculture, logistics, infrastructure monitoring, rescue operations, and other areas.
According to Vitaly Arlyapov, CEO of Solnyshko Group, Russia's accumulated experience in countering UAV attacks and software development creates the foundation for the peaceful use of these technologies, while government programs provide systemic support for their implementation in civilian life: "For example, protective systems originally designed to counter attacks are finding application in industrial security. Our company is implementing the 'Spiderweb' protective enclosing structures (ZOK), which have already received recognition and are included in the standard solutions of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation. We are also introducing new solutions that enable oncoming drones to track and intercept UAVs at a safe distance from the target."
Particular attention is being paid to the feedback system between manufacturers and users of unmanned systems. Vyacheslav Barbasov, CEO of Drone Solutions LLC,
emphasized that effective feedback allows for a 25–35% reduction in product development cycles, a 40% increase in equipment reliability in real-world conditions, improved service quality, and a reduction in recurring complaints.
According to Barbasov, the Russian civilian UAS market will shift toward adapting products to weather conditions in 2026. "Manufacturers are developing systems for the Arctic, the Far East, and desert regions—for example, the Aist UAS (used for ice navigation, delivering medicine and cargo to hard-to-reach areas, monitoring pipelines and platforms, detecting forest fires, etc.) is successfully operating on Sakhalin after testing. According to AeroNext, the share of UAS with a feedback collection system has increased from
65% in 2024 to 80% in 2026, the average response time to an operator's request has decreased from two days to one, and UAS reliability in extreme conditions has increased from 70% to 90%," he said.
