How DIY Drones are Destroying Million-Dollar Tanks
(electronic whirring) (mysterious music) – In the heart of Ukraine, a quiet revolution stirs. The creation of new tools of war. Built by volunteers and students and technicians, tinkerers who are repurposing their skills to resist invasion. We partnered with the Kyiv Independent to get a deeper understanding of what this actually looks like. This is their story. And the story of how set they are on keeping their country. (gentle music) Not by having bigger weapons, but by having smarter ones. (munition exploding) (tense music) – Can you hear me all right? – Yeah, I can hear you. How
you doing? This is Francis Farrell, a reporter from Ukraine’s largest English language news outlet, the Kyiv Independent. They’ve been covering this war in-depth and they worked with us to tell this story. How is Kyiv feeling these days? – It’s this kind of tense, waiting period, ’cause everyone’s ready for another kind of wave of Russian missile and drone attacks against the energy system. – I wanna hear about your time on the front lines and I wanna hear about drones and just walk me through that story. – 11 o’clock in the morning, we met our contact. We
jumped in his car and headed out straight towards the city of Bakhmut, which is now basically in ruins. (somber music) It was pretty quiet, but then we started to get hit
So it’s an FPV drone, so it’s a quadcopter, but it’s a very kind of crude designs, and on the bottom you have the actual munition strap. It’s actually made from a helicopter rocket. They cut the rocket part off and they just used the warhead. The pilot put on these crazy futuristic goggles and have the controller in his hand. (drone whirring) But at that point, you start to see this Russian electronic warfare jamming stuff starting to kick in. So it really is like, “Oh, the signal’s gone. Oh, now it’s back.” There’s a button somewhere that’s like,
okay, this is where we release the bomb. – So a lot of the drones that they’re using in Ukraine actually look a lot like the drones I use when I’m out reporting in the field, which I’m gonna get to in a little bit. I need to tell you about something, which is spam. Spam, spam, spam has taken over all of our lives. Our phones blow up, our email is a mess. Spammers will text you. It’s all gotten out of control. If you’ve ever wondered how spammers get your information, the answer is they probably bought it.
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journalism. So with that, let’s dive back into this video about drones in Ukraine. Francis’ reporting shows us how this war, the war in Ukraine, is becoming more and more, a war of drones. – That’s what this war is all about, really. It’s this mix of very old school brutal tactics of infantry and artillery, but with this high-tech edge, – Some of these drones are military weapons designed for warfare. But more and more we’re seeing drones being made in homes and classrooms and DIY workshops around the country by students and volunteers, overnight drone experts who bypass
the Ukrainian army and send their drones directly to soldiers on the front line. – This is where war becomes really almost scary and futuristic. – To understand how drones became a centerpiece of this war and why engineering students are the ones making them, we have to remember how the war started. – Putin has just launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine. – Since the beginning of this conflict, Ukraine’s biggest weakness has been the sky. Russia has a much stronger air force and they quickly developed air superiority. This allowed them to better gather intelligence, support their
ground troops, and precisely deploy missiles. This was Russia’s huge advantage. Ukraine needed a way to fight back, and so they started turning to military drones. – Bayraktar, the Turkish-made weapon Ukrainian officials are touting as one of the most effective in their arsenal, that’s played a part in slowing down the Russian advance. – But drones like this kind of resemble traditional airplanes. They’re easily spotted and shot down by Russia’s anti-aircraft weapons. They needed to find another way. – They needed eyes in the sky. That’s literally how they tell me every time. And so very quickly there
was a frenzy to buy DJI civilian drones for hobbyists, for photographers, YouTubers. – This is actually the type of drone that I’ve always used when I do my field shoots. And I gotta say, it’s a pretty useful tool for the use case of the Ukrainian army. It’s light, it’s portable, it’s cheap, and it’s small enough to not be detected by Russian radar. – And very quickly they figured out how to integrate them with their tactical maps, learned how to jailbreak the software to get around the geoblocking. – Soon you’ve got Ukrainian soldiers writing back to
their families, asking for supplies and bulletproof vests, and more and more, asking for drones. These DJI drones became really useful for helping Ukrainian soldiers have a reconnaissance view from above. They could see the lay of the land. It also helped them more accurately pinpoint their targets of these big artillery guns they were using. – Immediately became the bread and butter for any Ukrainian unit. And then from there, the innovation just really began to get going. (suspenseful music) – These DJI drones were useful, but they had limits. DJI, which is a Chinese company, is not thrilled
about their drones being used in war, especially by the Ukrainians. So they make big efforts to block software and hardware from getting into the country. These drones are also vulnerable to Russian jamming. Basically, you can jam the signal, and make these drones basically useless. Also, you can’t really customize a DJI drone that much. Ukrainian soldiers needed to be able to customize their drones more and more as the war progressed. And that led to the rise of the FPV drone. (tense music) These drones are usually used for racing, or for getting shots like this. The strength
of the FPV drone is that they’re easily put together with cheap parts and they can be highly customized with a little help from a 3D printer. On the battlefield, Ukrainian soldiers started taking these little FPV drones and strapping explosives to them, carrying it across the front line and then barreling right into a Russian target. These cheap drones became the edge that Ukraine needed to level the playing field in the sky. But there was one major problem. – They get destroyed constantly. And obviously, kamikaze drones are only meant to be used once. They’re also a kind
of expendable material on the front line. – Soldiers begin using a lot of these things. By one estimate, they’re using 10,000 of these drones per month. – And if a unit doesn’t get them replaced very, very quickly, they can be in big trouble on their little part of the front line. – And yet the flow of drones kept coming. Thanks in part to a widespread effort, a grassroots effort, all around the country from resourceful Ukrainians who saw an opportunity to apply their technical skills to supporting their country. (gentle music) (speaking foreign language) (drone whirring) –
The Kyiv Independent helped us connect with some of these drone makers. They are technicians, engineers, some of them are students, a lot of them are volunteers, and they are the ones keeping these drones flowing to the front lines. (speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) – This guy, Denis Lyubchenko, used the money and infrastructure from his existing business but redirected it to making drones. (speaking foreign language) – This informal drone economy has cropped up organically and it’s widespread. A lot of people are participating in it. But it’s outside of the authority of the
government or the military. (speaking foreign language) – It’s yet another expression of how Ukrainians are resourcefully fighting back in light of their country being invaded by a much stronger power. – So you have IT specialists, you have engineers, and you basically have this nation, which is just very experienced with tinkering and experimenting and coming up with solutions on the spot, or really tricky problems. They’ve got the technical background and now there’s motivation. (suspenseful music) (speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) (suspenseful music) – Very often you see fundraisers just scrolling through Instagram Stories organized by friends
of soldiers who know that there are people out there on the front line, they need a drone. – So you have started to see that the tactics of drones on the battlefield are evolving really quickly. They’re starting to settle into some main tactics that drones are now being used for all the time. A first major one is recon and intelligence gathering. Drones being undetectable eyes in the sky allow Ukrainian soldiers to get a lay of the land in a way that you can’t really get any other way, unless you have like a full-blown air force.
They’re able to track and view their adversary’s troop movement, and crucially, they’re able to investigate their targets before they try to hit them. When you’re shooting these big artillery guns, it’s kind of a game of guess and check. You shoot the gun, you hope it hits the target, and then if it doesn’t, you adjust it and try again. When you have a drone in the air to observe where that shot actually hits, you can more precisely calibrate your gun so that you’re hitting your target more accurately. But with the rise of FPV drones and all
of this customization, you’re starting to see drones become carriers of explosives, bigger and bigger explosives. Just like what Francis saw, a customized explosive that is attached to a drone with a 3D printed quick release, that with the press of a button, can release the explosive on the desired target. And then of course there’s the kamikaze tactic, which is just to strap an explosive to a drone and run it right into a target, like a tank. This effectively turns your cheap drone into a precision guided missile, something that would cost orders of magnitude more. But as
these techniques become more and more sophisticated, so do the counter attacks. Russia counters all of this, not only with drones of their own, they now have fleets of drones that they are using to attack Ukrainian cities, but also with electronic warfare, which basically means jamming signals. This whole tactic relies on radio signals that allow a pilot to see where they’re flying and to control the drone remotely. Russia is getting better and better at putting out signal jammers to stop pilots from seeing and controlling their drone. You can see some of this interference happening in some
of these drone feeds. And when your drone looks like that and you can’t control it, it basically renders it useless. So to counter this, Ukrainian soldiers now put up drones that are specifically meant to boost their signal to create kind of a bridge of a radio signal that will counteract this electronic warfare and secure a more solid signal between the pilot and the drone. The cat-and-mouse game here is kind of the Wild West for warfare, and it is pushing drone warfare into uncharted territory. And finally, these drones on the front lines are being used to
capture video, which is then edited together and usually set to some hardcore rock music and published to the Internet to boost morale in this war. (rock music) Morale is a key ingredient to winning a war. And war propaganda is as old as war itself. So when Ukrainians see this footage of a Ukrainian pilot cleverly taking out a Russian target, it has a real effect. – Yeah! Bombed them! – The rest of the world is watching this as it unfolds. This is unprecedented territory, strapping explosives to small consumer drones and using them in a real world
warfare experience. So this is going to change war forever. And in fact, we’re already seeing this. The Pentagon recently released this proposal for small businesses in America to pitch them on how to build a small explosive or munition that they can put on a small drone. This is a part of their innovation and research effort. They say here in this document that the ability to put explosives on small drones is vital for the future of army combat operations. And that their ability to do this would advance the US Army’s modernization priorities. They’re basically saying that
drones are a big part of the future of war, and they emphasize that whatever this product is, it needs to be attachable by a soldier in the field, meaning someone’s out there on the front lines and they can take this explosive, they can put it on a drone and they can send it away. Exactly what they’re doing in Ukraine. The Pentagon is watching what is happening and they’re responding. But for those caught in the middle of this deadly war, drones are about one thing right now, and that’s survival. Survival of their country. As this conflict
grinds on, Ukrainians continue to show us just how serious they are about enduring this long fight by coming together, by supporting their troops, and endlessly innovating. And in the process, ensuring that their country doesn’t get swallowed by their much larger enemy. (speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) (drone whirring) (drone whirring continues) (ambient music) Hey folks, thanks for watching. I loved working on this story because I got to talk to people on the ground. I got to interface with the experience of Ukrainians and tinkerers and defenders of their country. I mean, it was really compelling. I’m
really grateful for all of those who who spoke to us. I wanna tell you about a couple things. Number one, I don’t know if you all know this, but we have a second channel now. It’s called “Search Party.” It is a geopolitical and global sports explainer channel. Turns out geopolitics and sports are becoming more and more intertwined. And this channel really breaks it down. It is run by my old Vox colleague, Sam Ellis, who is the creator of “Vox Atlas,” and now he runs “Search Party.” So go over and subscribe. We have a lot of
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we made probably our last batch of the poster that I designed last year. It’s a poster called “All Maps Are Wrong,” and I’m very proud of it. It shows all the ways that you can take our Earth and project it onto a 2D plane, which always comes with some distortion. Anyway, it’s kind of a nerdy map lover thing, and if you’re into that, you should go over and check it out before they’re all gone. This is probably gonna be our last batch, so get ’em while they last, and the link’s in the description.
