We arrived at the headquarters of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade’s NC-13 strike unit just after 11 p.m. The soldier escorting me tells me to turn off my phone to avoid giving away our location, and we walk in silence through the night, then enter a darkened building. Deep inside, the operations room is buzzing with activity. Double-decker computer screens line the black walls. Radios crackle, a commander is barking orders, and a knot of plainclothes drone operators huddles quietly in a corner, poring over daytime satellite images of nearby fields and forests. “They’re plotting tonight’s route,” my escort tells me. Three kamikaze ground drones—unmanned vehicles, each about as big as a medium-sized dog—will travel overland for five or six hours to blow up a Russian bunker.
The Ukrainian defense industry is so innovative and dynamic—evolving in just five years from a few old-fashioned, Soviet-era manufacturers to global vanguard and pacesetter—that it is difficult to track all the groundbreaking developments. Already this year, Kyiv has upended the war with a new generation of long-range drones and missiles that have knocked out over one-third of Russia’s oil refining capacity. Closer to the battlefield, new mid-range drones are disrupting enemy supply lines and support logistics, dramatically slowing Russia’s advance. Most impactful for the U.S. and its Middle East allies, Ukrainian drone interceptors—whose widespread use began just over a year ago—helped Gulf states survive the Iranian Shahed strikes that threatened their cities this spring.
Yet many strategists in Ukraine and the West are focused on a different cutting-edge development, with several predicting that 2026 will be “the year of the unmanned ground vehicle.”
