Drones are reshaping warfare faster than doctrine adapts

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that drones and autonomous systems are transforming warfare at a pace that risks outstripping traditional military thinking, defence experts warned MPs, cautioning that dismissing Ukraine’s experience as unique would be a serious strategic error.

Giving evidence to the Defence Committee during a session on the future of warfare, Air Marshal (Retd) Edward Stringer said the lessons of Ukraine extend far beyond individual technologies and point to a deeper failure to adapt national thinking to modern conflict.

“The lessons of Ukraine have to be evaluated by an independent commission,” he told MPs. “It can’t be left to the Ministry of Defence, because people are already cherry-picking lessons that support cherished programmes.”

Stringer argued that the conflict has exposed the central role of industry, logistics and national mobilisation, not just frontline systems. “This war is about the power of industry, it’s about railways,” he said. “We’ve drifted out of the habit of thinking about national mobilisation and resilience since 1989, and that intellectual rearmament is now overdue.”

When pressed specifically on drones, Stringer rejected claims that Ukraine’s experience could be discounted as an anomaly. “I am quite staggered that I still hear officers say, ‘we wouldn’t fight like the Ukrainians’,” he said. “That strikes me as complacent and rather arrogant.”

While acknowledging that future wars would not look exactly like Ukraine, he stressed that its core characteristics would carry forward. “The future of warfare certainly involves a lot of what you’re seeing in Ukraine, adapted for future theatres,” Stringer told the committee, pointing to Israel’s recent operations as evidence of how conventional capabilities are increasingly blended with drone, cyber and intelligence-led systems.

“At the moment, I don’t see that blend of thinking applied to the way we do force development,” he added.

Dr Keith Dear, CEO and founder of Cassi, warned that much of the current debate still underestimates the pace of technological change, particularly in autonomy and artificial intelligence. “We started with people saying drones didn’t really matter,” he said. “Then suddenly they mattered, but only as an adjunct to crewed systems. That fundamentally misunderstands the rate of progress.”

Dear said advances in AI were accelerating faster than most defence planning assumptions allow. “We’ve gone from agentic capabilities doubling every seven months to doubling every four months,” he told MPs. “In 2023, AI could do tasks taking humans 30 seconds. Last year, tasks that take humans an hour. On current trajectories, by 2029 it could complete tasks that take a human a full working year.”

He warned that betting on limits to autonomy was increasingly risky. “Any assumption that autonomous systems will only have a limited impact by 2030 is a large bet against AI progress,” Dear said. “So far, everyone who has bet against that progress has been wrong.”

Sir Hew Strachan, Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, cautioned against focusing too narrowly on drones at the expense of broader structural lessons from Ukraine.

“There’s a tendency to say, ‘this isn’t how we would fight’,” he said. “Of course we would try to avoid a protracted war of attrition. But the real question is whether we could.”

Strachan argued that Ukraine’s experience highlights unresolved challenges around manpower, mobilisation and economic endurance. “Ukraine still hasn’t got a fully effective system of conscription or a whole-of-society approach to mobilisation,” he said, adding that economic warfare and industrial sustainability were as decisive as battlefield tactics.

Despite these pressures, he pointed to one area where Ukraine had succeeded. “They fought a brilliant information and propaganda war,” Strachan said. “Internationally and domestically, they prevented the kind of internal collapse many expected.”