Ukraine's combat drones are coming from all over the place. It's a good and bad thing.

• Ukraine's drone operators use many different types of drones from many different companies.

• That makes it harder for Russia to stop Ukraine's drones or to destroy where they are made.

• But it also makes the operations of each drone pilot more difficult.

Ukraine's got hundreds of drone makers all over the place building all kinds of drones, giving Ukraine a chaotic arsenal resembling a spilled toolbox.

Though this can create challenges for Ukraine's drone pilots, it also has some real advantages as the country fights back against Russia's invasion.

Ukraine makes most of its drones itself, something of critical importance considering the dominant role drones play in the conflict and the unpredictability of Western aid, particularly US security assistance.

Ukraine said more than 96% of the 1.5 million drones it bought last year were of Ukrainian origin, coming from countless outfits, some from workshops, garages, and basements.

Ukraine has facilitated the easy transfer of technology from these drone makers to soldiers at the front, bypassing the more traditional military procurement structures seen elsewhere. Many units also get drones through crowdfunding efforts, acquiring off-the-shelf civilian-grade drones.

The result is that Ukrainian operators are using a whole host of different drones with different technology and characteristics.

Dimko Zhluktenko, a drone operator with Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, told Business Insider that they think "it's best to have it more distributed — the way we in Ukraine have."

He said that he has used multiple drone types, and the first-person-view drones that he has used have come from a host of manufacturers. The drones are "99% Ukrainian-made and a rare mix of Chinese manufactured," Zhluktenko said. Another Ukrainian drone operator, who spoke to BI on the condition of anonymity, said he uses three different types of drones for reconnaissance alone.

The upsides

Zhluktenko said that, by contrast, Russia has fewer types, and that makes it easier to identify and learn how to defeat them. The result for Ukraine, he said, is "it's very easy for us to surprise them."

He added that because Russia is often slower to innovate, it makes it easier for Ukraine to learn how to disrupt Russia's drones with electronic warfare.

James Patton Rogers, a drone expert at the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute, told BI that it would work in Russia's favor for the Ukrainians to use only a few drone types.

With fewer drones to worry about, it could "fix onto one type of drone, find out what its signal is, what its counter electronic warfare measures are, what it does to protect itself," and jam it, he said.

"If you have all of these different drones and they're built by different manufacturers and they're super high-tech, well, you have an advantage," he said, explaining that is "because it becomes harder for your enemy to then identify" a way to take the drone down.

The dispersed operations also keep Ukraine's manufacturing capabilities safer. Russia targets Ukraine's defense industry, but the drone production outfits aren't centralized. It makes it a lot "harder to identify where the drones are being made and to take out, say, one big factory all at once," Rogers said.

Zhluktenko also said the competition between Ukrainian manufacturers — there are now numerous drone-making operations — "increases innovation." Ukrainian drone makers are always announcing new upgrades and drone types, like ones using artificial intelligence, ones that don't use GPS, fiber-optic drones, uncrewed ground vehicles, and naval drones that hit Russian warships.

The amount of drones being produced is massive, in part because many may never reach their targets.

Samuel Bendett, an expert on drone technologies and Russian defense issues with the Center for Naval Analyses, told BI that before the war, "no one could anticipate the rate at which these technologies would be spent, and it was impossible to estimate the rate at which countermeasures to those technologies would be developed and implemented just as quickly."

This space has exploded in the past couple of years.

Because so many of the drone production companies are small, front-line troops can more easily make requests and share feedback on what the war demands and what operators need.

Zhluktenko described having a "direct chat with the manufacturers of the drone" that he was using. "They're very open to feedback."

The downsides

It isn't all upside, though. Alexander Pyslar, platoon commander for a strike drone unit with Ukraine's 33rd Separate Assault Regiment, told Business Insider that there is a "significant problem" with "the diversity of manufacturers" in Ukraine.

"This creates the issue of constantly fine-tuning and upgrading various drones," he said.

Bendett said the result is soldiers get a lot of stuff that is less proven and battle-tested than what they'd get from a more centralized system with the military buying more of far fewer drone types.

Rogers, likewise, said that relying on such diverse production "will have different quality of results when these drones are finally deployed on the battlefield."

He added that operators "are going to have to be a bit of a jack of all trades when it comes to mastering different types of drones and how they operate in order to use them effectively on the battlefield."

Quantity over quality

Ukraine is going all in on drones, planning to buy 4.5 million this year. The goal is cheap mass, not necessarily high quality.

What is happening in Ukraine is allowing it to "reduce the cost and time it takes to generate combat power," Benjamin Jensen, a war-strategy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told BI.

He described the situation as "almost a Lego set approach to tactics and war," with work from different companies and experts being combined with input from drone operators and people all around the world contributing.

Ukraine's need for drones appears to be only growing.

Pyslar said drones have "significantly altered every aspect of combat" in Ukraine and are constantly being used for new warfighting tasks, like laying mines, evacuating the wounded, and fighting on the ground.

The drone operator who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Ukraine is trying to keep as many of its soldiers alive as possible and said that one of the best ways to do that is to have "as many drones as possible."

Read the original article on Business Insider