This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague John Hardy of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy watching Ukraine about the drone war and the drone evolution over these last nearly four years of warfare.

John begins the answer, mentioning, of course, that this requires much more attention in future.

I will heed his remarks and get to it soon enough.

Here's John introducing the very beginning of drone discernment on the battlefield.

Much more of this tonight, much more in coming days.

Dron War.

Yeah, so this question is, I think, worthy of its own podcast.

I'll just kind of quickly say that, I think, to anyone following this war, even casually,

it's obvious that drones have played a big role.

I think sometimes their importance can be kind of... even casually, it's obvious that drones have played a big role.

I think sometimes their importance can be kind of overstated or misstated, maybe a better way to put it.

But certainly, they've been very important. If you look back at the very beginning of the full-scale war, I think kind of ISR drones,

the TB2, the Turkish remotely piloted aircraft, Ukraine.

It was kind of effective for Ukraine during the war's first few days or weeks.

Those became less effective as Ukrainians, excuse me, as the Russians kind of got their act together with air defense.

Later on in the war, FPV drones became much more important, especially in 2023 onward.

That kind of supplemented the kind of bomber drones, often kind of heavy agricultural type UAS,

that especially the Ukrainians, much less so the Russians,

have used to drop munitions.

Both sides also use kind of smaller quad coppers.