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from https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/i-fought-in-ukraine-and-heres-why-fpv-drones-kind-of-suck/

I Fought in Ukraine and Here’s Why FPV Drones Kind of Suck
Jakub Jajcay
June 26, 2025
I Fought in Ukraine and Here’s Why FPV Drones Kind of Suck
In 2024 and 2025, I served for six months as an international volunteer
on a first-person view attack drone team in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
My team was deployed in the Donbas region, in one of the hottest sectors
of the front. When I joined the team, I was excited to work with a
cutting-edge tool. By the end of my deployment, I was a bit
disillusioned. Let me tell you why.

First-person view drones are unmanned aerial vehicles with four
propellers located at the four corners of the craft, roughly in the
shape of a square of seven to 12 inches in length on each side. They are controlled by an operator wearing virtual-reality goggles that receive
the image from the drone’s forward-facing camera (hence the name
first-person view). The most common types of first-person view drones
are single-use: They fly directly into their target, where they detonate
an explosive charge of up to 1.5 kilograms. These drones are touted as a
cheap and accessible solution that can give troops on the tactical level
their own organic precision-strike capability. They can supposedly react quickly and strike moving targets or targets in difficult-to-reach
locations, such as bunkers, basements, or inside buildings. Proponents
of first-person view drones often repeat the claim that as much as 60 to
70 percent of all battlefield casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian War are
now caused by drones. This statistic is probably broadly accurate,
though it does not differentiate between casualties caused by
first-person view drones and other types of uncrewed aerial systems.

Some authors, including experienced military officers writing in these
pages, go even further and claim that first-person view drones will
precipitate a revolution in how wars are fought, akin to the
introduction of muskets. Among other things, they will make concealment
and the massing of troops and equipment in the combat zone nearly
impossible. Any concentration of troops or vehicles will supposedly be
observed immediately and butchered by swarms of cheap, fast drones.
Proponents of drones, especially in Silicon Valley, have claimed that
drones might completely replace artillery.

Whether or not we believe these far-reaching claims, we’ve certainly all
seen the videos on social media of these drones performing impressive,
highly precise attacks. We’ve seen them striking a Russian tank on the
move, flying through the open back hatch of an infantry fighting
vehicle, or entering a building to surprise the enemy, sometimes
literally, with their pants down. But those impressive strikes are rare exceptions. The cases when first-person view drones actually do that are
few and far between.

During my time in Ukraine, I collected statistics on the success of our
drone operations. I found that 43 percent of our sorties resulted in a
hit on the intended target in the sense that the drone was able to
successfully fly all the way to the target, identify it correctly, hit
it, and the drone’s explosive charge detonated as it was supposed to.
This number does not include instances when our higher command requested
a sortie but we had to decline because we knew that we could not strike
the target for reasons such as weather, technical problems, or
electronic interference. If this type of pre-aborted mission is included
in the total, the success rate drops to between 20 and 30 percent. On
the face of it, this success rate is not bad, but that is not the whole
story.

I began to notice that the vast majority of our sorties were against
targets that had already been struck successfully by a different weapons system, most commonly by a mortar or by a munition dropped by a reusable
drone (in other words, not a first-person view drone). Put differently,
the goal of the majority of our missions was to deliver the second tap
in a double-tap strike against a target that had already been
successfully prosecuted by a different weapons system. The proportion of missions when we successfully carried out a task that only a
first-person view drone can fulfill — delivering a precision strike on a target that could not be hit by other means — was in the single-digit percent.

There are two reasons why these drones rarely successfully do what they
were designed to do. The first has to do with how commanders choose to
employ first-person view drones. Presumably, our commanders decided that
they had first-person view drones as a capability, so they might as well
use them, even if there were other weapons systems that could also do
the job. There is a certain logic to this, and the commanders were not
paying for the expended drones out of their own pockets. They were more
focused on the immediate mission. While first-person view drones are
cheap, they are usually not the cheapest option available to commanders.
This is the problem with using them in double-tap strikes or for
missions that can be achieved by other systems. One of these drone
sorties costs about $500 in materiel. A mortar shell costs less than
$100. A munition dropped from a reusable drone, usually also something
like a modified mortar shell or 40-millimeter grenade, also costs less
than $100.

The second reason why these drones rarely do what they were designed to
do is technical. They are finicky, unreliable, hard to use, and
susceptible to electronic interference. Few first-person view drones
have night-vision capability. Those that do are in short supply and cost
twice as much as the base model. In Ukraine, in the winter, it’s dark
for 14 hours a day. Wind, rain, snow, and fog all mean a drone cannot fly.

A solid quarter of all these drones have some sort of technical fault
that prevents them from taking off. This is usually discovered only when
they are being prepped for launch. The most common is a fault in the
radio receiver that receives inputs from the control panel, or in the
video transmitter that transmits the signal to the operator’s
virtual-reality goggles. Sometimes this fault can be fixed through a
software update in the field. Often, it cannot. Many faulty drones are
simply cannibalized for spare parts, because there is no better use for
them. Even once a drone is airborne, batteries often die mid-flight. In
about 10 percent of sorties, the drone hits the target, but its warhead
does not detonate.

Once airborne, operating a first-person view drone successfully is not
easy. These drones were originally designed to be toys for rich people.
Before they were press-ganged into service as tools of war, they were
used either in aerobatic displays or in races where a group of operators
would compete in flying through an obstacle course. In either case, the
drones were not meant to be easy to fly. They were meant to be highly maneuverable, but also unstable. First-person view drones cannot really
hover, fly slowly, or linger above a target. The assumption among
hobbyists is that enthusiasts will invest the time and money to become proficient at flying. As a result, training a highly proficient operator
can take months. A standard, base-level course for Ukrainian drone
pilots takes about five weeks. The quality of operators it prepares is questionable, and graduates of the course need extra on-the-job
experience to become truly proficient. Most drone pilots I encountered
did not go through this course. Instead, they learned to fly drones on
the job. Even experienced operators routinely miss their targets and
crash into trees, power lines, or other obstacles.

To keep costs down, the first-person view drones used by Ukrainian
forces have no navigational aids, such as a compass, a GPS receiver
(though it should be noted that using GPS often would not be possible
anyway due to widespread GPS signal jamming), or an inertial navigation
system. The operator relies on their knowledge of the local terrain and
on verbal instructions from a navigator, who usually has access to the
video from the first-person view drone itself and from other
reconnaissance assets that are tracking the target.

But the greatest obstacle to the successful use of these drones by far
is the unreliability of the radio link between the operator and the
drone. One of the reasons why hitting a target at ground level with
precision is difficult is that when first-person view drones get close
to the ground, due to obstacles, they start to lose their radio
connection to the operator, often located up to 10 kilometers away. In
some cases, drones cannot attack a target if it is simply on the wrong
side of a tall building or hill because the building or hill blocks the
line of sight between the drone and the operator. Sometimes, the
operator can work around the loss of signal close to the ground by
climbing, pointing the drone at the target, and hoping inertia will take
it to its target once they have lost control. When striking a small
target like a doorway, a window, or the entrance to a basement, this
degrades precision significantly.

Drones also operate in a cluttered segment of the electromagnetic
spectrum. First-person view drones use unencrypted analog radio signals,
and in hot parts of the front, as many as a dozen drone teams may be
competing for use of a handful of frequencies (a consequence of using
cheaper components). This results in the need for sophisticated
de-confliction procedures that, quite simply, do not always work. Even
when de-confliction works, sometimes a team must wait as long as half an
hour for a frequency to become available before takeoff. If it does not
work and two drones find themselves in the air on the same channel at
the same time, they will interfere with each other’s signals, usually resulting in a crash. On top of that, the enemy’s drones also fly on the
same frequencies, which can also result in interference and a crash. Interference from another drone, whether friendly or hostile, resulted
in the failure of at least three percent of our missions.

In addition to interference and the physical limitations of radio communication, first-person view drones are also highly susceptible to electronic-warfare jamming. Both sides of the Russo-Ukrainian War make extensive use of jamming. When our side turned on its jammers, they
usually informed us in advance. That meant our drones simply could not
take off, sometimes for a period of several hours. About three percent
of our sorties failed because we did not get advanced warning that our
own jamming systems would be operational, causing our drones to fall out
of the sky. On top of that, sometimes, even the best efforts at
de-confliction were not enough, simply because Ukrainian infantry or
individual vehicles are often equipped with small portable jammers. When
they heard a drone, they simply activated the jammer without waiting to
find out whether the drone was friendly or not.

Of course, when the other side activated its jammers, we got no advance
warning whatsoever. Enemy electronic warfare downed a full 31 percent of
our sorties. This number could have been lower, but for our command’s occasional stubborn insistence that we fly even though it was almost
certain that enemy jammers were operating in the target area. When enemy jammers were operating, the enemy’s own drones also could not fly,
putting them in the same dilemma that our side also suffered.
Nevertheless, when jammers were available and switched on, first-person
view operations became effectively impossible.

Some of the problems with first-person view drones will eventually be
resolved as technology matures. Better production standards will ensure
that a larger percentage of drones actually take off. In Ukraine, there
are countless assembly lines that build drones from cheap, off-the-shelf components sourced from dubious suppliers. A single unit often sources
its drones from numerous organizations, each with its own production
processes. More standardization, better quality control, and less
reliance on cheap components could improve reliability. Better
transmitters and receivers that are more resistant to interference will
improve the connection between drone and operator. Digital signal
transmission and frequency hopping are starting to appear in some
first-person view drones, though these are still rare. Putting
re-translators that amplify the drone’s signal on a second drone that
hovers somewhere between the operator and the first-person view drone
can also improve the quality of the connection. Improved and
standardized procedures for training operators would cut down the time
needed to become proficient.

To be sure, the technology has already evolved since I left the
battlefield. Today, some Ukrainian and Russian units are also using
drones controlled by fiber-optic cable, rather than radio, though I had
no personal experience with this type of drone in my unit. This
technology is often touted as the next step in the evolution of drone
warfare. It would seem to address some of the major problems with radio-controlled drones I experienced, and compared to radio-controlled
drones, fiber-optic drones may indeed have a number of advantages. Fiber
optics make jamming impossible and deconflicting frequencies
unnecessary. The absence of an energy-guzzling radio transmitter can
extend battery life and even allow for some innovative tactics, such as
landing the drone next to a road and waiting for several hours until a
vehicle passes by.

Fiber optic drones do, however, have a number of drawbacks that mean
they might not fully replace radio-controlled drones. The wire that
connects the drone to the operator limits the maneuverability of the
drone. Snagging it on any kind of obstacle can result in a loss of
control. Fiber-optic drones cannot really double back over their route
or circle a target, as this could tangle their control wire and also
result in a loss of control. As a result, fiber-optic drones are said to
be even more difficult to fly than radio-controlled drones. Because of
these limitations, several drone operators I spoke to actively resist
using fiber-optic drones. Furthermore, though cost will probably come
down, at present the cost of the cable means that a fiber-optic drone
with 10 kilometers of cable costs about twice as much as a
radio-controlled model of similar range. Finally, production capacities available to Ukraine for fiber-optic cables are, at present, fairly
limited compared to radio-controlled drones, meaning they are
chronically in short supply.

All that said, if a member of a NATO military were hypothetically to ask
me whether NATO countries should acquire first-person view drone
capabilities, based on my experience and given the current state of the technology, I would probably say no, whether they are radio-controlled
or fiber-optic. The vast majority of first-person view drone missions
can be completed more cheaply, effectively, or reliably by other assets. Furthermore, other authors have noted that drones still do not come
close to matching the effects that can be achieved by massed artillery
fires. Additionally, experts on artillery systems consistently note the
greater reliability and range of artillery.

Scaling up drone use would also involve scaling up the drones’
logistical tail. This means more complicated and expensive logistics for
drones that would compete for resources with other types of weapons. For
the time being, first-person view drones are unlikely to fully replace
other weapons systems. No military leader is yet seriously advocating
doing away with artillery completely in favor of first-person view
drones. This means that the military will have two competing logistical
tails: one for first-person view drones and one for artillery.

For sophisticated NATO militaries, instead of investing heavily in the development of first-person view drone capabilities, I would, first of
all, recommend ensuring that troops in the field have well-trained
organic mortar support with an ample supply of ammunition. Mortars, like artillery, can’t be stopped by bad weather, jamming, or crowded
frequencies. Nor can they be impeded by the dark. A well-trained mortar
crew can reliably put rounds on a target in less than five minutes. Our first-person view sorties took about 15 minutes from the initial request
to the moment the drone struck the target, and that was only when
conditions were optimal. A mortar’s price per shot is lower than a first-person view drone. Drones can nominally have an advantage over
mortars in range, but this is variable and depends on the terrain, the
specific location of the mortars relative to the drone launch site, and
the deployment of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets
that find the targets for drones or mortars. In practice, I don’t
remember a single case when we struck a target that was beyond the range
of mortars, and we certainly never struck a target that was beyond the
range of artillery.

Secondly, for the rare cases when troops actually need tactical-level,
organic precision-strike capability, and when actually carrying out such
a strike is feasible, I would recommend something a little bit more
high-end than a first-person view drone. NATO countries and their allies already produce high-quality loitering munitions, like the Switchblade.
Such loitering munitions provide greater precision in day and night,
more ease of use, and higher resistance to electronic interference than first-person view drones. They are also more expensive, but their cost
is, like first-person view drones, coming down. The investment in
quality seems to justify the greater expense, especially since, at most,
one in ten first-person view sorties is a precision strike.


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Jakub Jajcay is a former officer in the Armed Forces of the Slovak
Republic, where he served in a number of elite units. He is currently
working on his Ph.D. in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies of
Charles University in Prague.

Image: Ukrainian Ministry of Defense photo by Vitaliy Pavlenko

CORRECTION: A critical word was removed from the article by mistake
during the late stages of the editorial process. The sentence in
question originally read as published, “On the face of it, this success
rate is bad, but that is not the whole story.” It was, however, intended
to say, “On the face of it, this success rate is not bad, but that is
not the whole story.”

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