Coalition Sends 30,000 Kamikaze Drones To Ukraine

Yesterday on 9^th January the U.K. government announced 30,000 ‘state-of-the-art, first-person view drones’ were being sent to help the fight against Russian aggression and to ‘target enemy positions and armoured vehicles.’

The announcement is part of the Drone Capability Coalition effort to support Ukraine with surveillance and attack drones. Funding for the 30,000 drones comes from UK, Denmark, Netherlands, Latvia and Sweden under a £45m ($55m) contract.

This is a significant shift. In addition to traditional, big-ticket weapon systems which Ukraine cannot produce – F-16s, Challenger and Abrams tanks, HiMARS rocket launchers – allies are now providing the sort of high-tech, low-cost systems that the Ukraine has been making itself and using so successfully. The Coalition could make a big difference, not just for Ukraine but for the U.K. and others to build up their own modern drone industries.

The Rise Of The FPV

The First Person View (FPV) drone has become the signature weapon of this conflict, putting long-range precision fire into the hands of footsoldiers on a massive scale for the first time. Adapted from racing quadcopters, FPVs armed with a warhead weighing four pounds or more knock out tanks, armored vehicles and artillery at ranges of up to 12 miles. Fast and agile, they can chase down speeding trucks or motorcycles, or dive into foxholes and trenches.

This is enabled by Ukraine’s advanced situational awareness software which fuses date from satellites, sensors, drones and other sources and provides a view of the battlefield down to the lowest levels.

Ukraine built more than a million FPVs last year, and according to official quoted by the Wall Street Journal this week, they are responsible for the majority of frontline strikes. But there is always a demand for more, and the new Drone Coalition Capability delivery will help. No details have been released of the drones' specifcations.

Critics argue that Ukraine has been forced to rely heavily on FPVs because of the shortfall in traditional weapon systems like artillery and guided missiles, and that it would be better to bolster their conventional forces. However, the Russians – who have vast quantities of artillery and guided missiles as well as tanks and aircraft – have also been scrambling to build FPVs as fast as possible. Putin recently claimed that production had been ramped up tenfold in 2024 to 1.4 million, though there are doubts about the quality and effectiveness of Russian drones.

FPVs are a major component of Russian firepower too. It is notable that Russian FPVs rather than missiles or tanks are credited with knocking out Abrams and Challenger tanks supplied to Ukraine.

Building To Cost

Perhaps the most significant difference between FPVs and other military hardware is the cost. A U.S.-made Javelin missile, the pinnacle of excellence in anti-tank missiles, costs $202,000, so it can only be supplied in limited numbers. FPVs costing $500 each may be less effective (though the actual effectiveness of the Javelin is seldom discussed) , but can be acquired easily in vast numbers and used against individual enemy soldiers.

Even if the money was available for more Javelins, America does not have the capacity to turn them out in volume; it has taken a major effort to increase production to 4,000 a year.

The effectiveness of small attack drones has not been lost on U.S. analysts, and there have been several efforts to build comparable systems for U.S. forces. However, the Pentagon’s procurement system has a long tradition of building to the highest possible quality without compromise, rather than affordable, ‘good enough’ systems.

This procurement process has resulted in products like Anduril’s Bolt-M, a highly sophisticated FPV quadcopter with automated guidance requiring no operator skill , but priced in the “in the low tens of thousands of dollars.”

And the Rogue-1 attack quadcopter from Teledyne FLIR which comes in at over $90,000 a shot.

And the U.S. Army’s Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (LASSO), a portable anti-tank attack drone. According to Army budget documents LASSO costs a staggering $200,747 per drone....as much as a Javelin.

The Drone Capability Coalition seems to have largely avoided these issues. The $55m cost of the 30,000 drones translates to a unit cost of $1,800 per drone. This is high by Ukrainian standards but astonishingly low for Western suppliers.

Price Versus Sovereign Capability

As Dr Jack Watling of UK defense thinktank RUSI points out in X/Twitter, some of the difference compared to Ukrainian drones is because those are largely assembled from components from the lowest-cost provider in the world—China.

“If you want to reduce the number of Chinese components you increase the price,” says Watling. “But if you pay that price then you invest in more capacity to produce the sub-components.

This parallels the experience in Ukraine, where drone makers have been striving to establish local production, increasingly been making batteries and other components themselves. They have found Chinese suppliers can be erratic, suddenly raising prices or, worse, selling their entire stock to Russia instead.

The contract should boost European capability to supply key drone elements. This will help build a sovereign capability as well as an industrial base for future production.

In addition, the Coalition drones are described as ‘state of the art’ which suggests advanced capability. In Ukraine we have seen FPVs with jam-proof fiber-optic links, AI targeting, and thermal imaging, all of which come at a premium of hundreds of dollars above the base cost). It will be interesting to see what innovations are incorporated into the Coalition drones. Secure communications are likely to be a high priority, and they may feature more advanced warheads and Ukrainian FPVs, which often rely on repurposed RPG rounds and other improvised solutions.

Not everyone is happy about the announcement.

“The United Kingdom will transfer 30,000 FPV drones worth $55 million to Ukraine as part of the drone coalition. And if we bought it, we would have 150 thousand FPV for the same money,” commented Ukrainian fundraiser Serhii Sternenko on Twitter/X.

Sternenko knows what he has talking about, having supplied more than 100,000 FPVs himself, recently quoting prices of $350-460 for basic FPVs and $700-$800 for night versions with thermal imaging.

On the other hand, the new batch of FPVs still represent win-win. Ukraine gets a free army of (presumably) high-grade attack drones, and the Coalition members get useful experience and build their capacity to make more and better drones in future. And it will increase their ability to provide more cost-effective support. The Coalition has pledged to supply Ukraine with a million drones, so there should be much more to come.

The Pentagon’s Replicator program, started in August 2023, also aims to produce large numbers of drones rapidly at low cost. The results of that effort though are still awaited.