Back in 2022, Ukrainian field regulations still said artillery fire correction from the air should be carried out by helicopter.

Listen to this article

Read that now and it feels like something from another age. On today’s front line, drones watch, spot, correct fire, hunt armour, strike positions, map routes and shape movement every hour of the day.

They are not a supporting feature of modern war. They are one of its defining conditions.

Spend any real time looking at how this war is being fought and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. The defining change is the size of the kill zone. In earlier phases of war, danger was often shaped by artillery range and direct contact over a far shorter distance.

Now, on some parts of the front, that zone can extend to nearly 30 kilometres because drones are constantly searching, identifying movement and feeding strikes into the system. Once you enter that space, survival drops sharply. That is why Russian forces can lose thousands of men in a day.

Troops, vehicles and resupply are exposed long before they reach what used to feel like the actual battle. The front is no longer just a line of trenches or guns. It is a deep belt of observation, targeting and destruction.

Electronic warfare sits right in the middle of that fight. Signals are jammed. Navigation is thrown off. Video feeds disappear. Most drones fall from the sky before they reach their target.

That has not slowed the drone age down. It has forced both sides to build cheaper, more adaptable systems, accept losses and keep iterating. Ukraine learned to fight like this because it had no choice.

Britain now has far fewer excuses for not learning the same lesson. The Strategic Defence Review accepted last year that the future force has to be shaped by drones, data and digital warfare, and that innovation now has to move in months, not years.

UK Defence Innovation said in December that it would inject over £142 million into drone and counter-drone technology in its first year. The UK and Ukraine have gone further still in recent times, committing to deepen cooperation on unmanned systems, counter-drone technologies, electronic warfare and the protection of critical infrastructure.

All of that is real progress. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise. The problem is that progress is not yet the same thing as structure.

In a........

© LBC