Petraeus stated that the US must learn how to wage a new kind of war from Ukraine
Petraeus made these remarks in an interview with CBS News during his visit to Kyiv.
David Petraeus, who has visited Ukraine ten times since 2022, told CBS News that over the past two months Ukrainian forces have achieved greater incremental successes than the Russian army. In his view, such an assessment may seem surprising given Russia’s superiority in manpower, firepower and economic scale, but Ukraine has managed to compensate for this through innovations in the field of unmanned systems.
Petraeus emphasised that Ukraine’s strength lies not only in the drones themselves, but in how they are integrated into a single system. He cited the “overall command and control ecosystem” – which combines reconnaissance, guidance and engagement – as the key advantage. According to him, the Ukrainian Delta platform plays a key role in this, described in the article as a kind of “military Google Maps” with a digital map of positions, targets and other combat information.
According to Petreus, such integration gives Ukrainian forces almost complete surveillance and strike capabilities within a radius of approximately 20 miles from the front line. He cited an example of a battle he witnessed personally: a Russian soldier was continuously tracked by reconnaissance drones taking turns, and then strike drones were deployed against him. In Petreus’s view, if a person has already been spotted on such a battlefield and has not managed to quickly take cover in a well-protected spot, the consequences for them will be fatal.
He also drew attention to the scale of Ukrainian production of cheap FPV drones. One of the manufacturers shown to Petreus during his last trip stated that it would produce 3 million drones this year. By comparison, the United States, according to Petreus, manufactured around 300,000 such devices last year.
Petraeus believes that the next stage will be the wider use of artificial intelligence. He noted that the effectiveness of drone warfare is currently limited by electronic warfare: within a radius of about 20 miles around the front line, both sides are massively jamming communications between FPV drones and their operators. One temporary solution has been fibre-optic drones, which are connected to the operator by cable, but this technology also has its limits — in terms of flight range and the length of cable available.
According to him, the future lies with algorithmically controlled drones that will not rely on GPS and which cannot be jammed using conventional electronic warfare means. Such systems, as Petraeus said, will allow operations even in a heavily congested electronic warfare environment, and will also enable a single operator to control several drones at once. He also suggested that fully autonomous systems, where a human defines the mission and the machine carries it out, could emerge within a few years, and did not rule out that this might first happen in Ukraine.
For the US, Petreus emphasised, the lesson from Ukraine is not simply about purchasing more drones. In his view, it is about a much deeper shift — a new concept of warfare that requires a review of doctrine, training and military structure. He sharply criticised the approach whereby Western armies regard the transfer of a few dozen drones to a tank unit as an innovation. According to Petraeus, instead, we should be thinking about replacing armoured battalions with drone battalions.
He also noted that Ukraine has already set the standard for this approach by creating a separate branch of the armed forces — the Unmanned Systems Forces — rather than simply distributing drones across different branches.
Towards the end of the interview, Petraeus also warned of another threat — the proliferation of swarm drones in the civilian sphere. He noted that the development of autonomous systems, the increase in the number of commercial drones, and the entry of companies such as Amazon and Walmart into the field of unmanned delivery could make it more difficult to detect and repel coordinated attacks. According to him, there are currently no systems capable of effectively defending against swarms of drones, and we need to learn how to do this much faster than we are doing now.
