After the Estonian startup KrattWorks dispatched the first batch of its Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopters to Ukraine in mid-2022, the company’s officers thought they might have six months or so before they’d need to reconceive the drones in response to new battlefield realities. The 46-centimeter-wide flier was far more robust than the hobbyist-grade UAVs that came to define the early days of the drone war against Russia. But within a scant three months, the Estonian team realized their painstakingly fine-tuned device had already become obsolete.
Rapid advances in
jamming and spoofing—the only efficient defense against drone attacks—set the team on an unceasing marathon of innovation. Its latest technology is a neural-network-driven optical navigation system, which allows the drone to continue its mission even when all radio and satellite-navigation links are jammed. It began tests in Ukraine in December, part of a trend toward jam-resistant, autonomous UAVs (uncrewed aerial vehicles). The new fliers herald yet another phase in the unending struggle that pits drones against the jamming and spoofing of electronic warfare, which aims to sever links between drones and their operators. There are now tens of thousands of jammers straddling the front lines of the war, defending against drones that are not just killing soldiers but also destroying armored vehicles, other drones, industrial infrastructure, and even tanks.
Ukrainian troops tested KrattWorks’ Ghost Dragon drone in Estonia last year.KrattWorks
“The situation with electronic warfare is moving extremely fast,” says Martin Karmin, KrattWorks’ cofounder and chief operations officer. “We have to constantly iterate. It’s like a cat-and-mouse game.”
I met Karmin at the company’s headquarters in the outskirts of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. Barely a couple of hundred kilometers to the east is the tiny nation’s border with Russia, its former oppressor. At 38, Karmin is barely old enough to remember what life was like under Russian rule, but he’s heard plenty. He and his colleagues, most of them volunteer members of the
Estonian Defense League, have “no illusions” about Russia, he says with a shrug.
His company is as much about arming Estonia as it is about helping Ukraine, he acknowledges. Estonia is not officially at war with Russia, of course, but regions around the border between the two countries have for years been subjected to persistent jamming of satellite-based navigation systems, such as the
European Union’s Galileo satellites, forcing occasional flight cancellations at Tartu airport. In November, satellite imagery revealed that Russia is expanding its military bases along the Baltic states’ borders.
“We are a small country,” Karmin says. “Innovation is our only chance.”
Navigating by Neural Network
In KrattWorks’ spacious, white-walled workshop, a handful of engineers are testing software. On the large ocher desk that dominates the room, a selection of KrattWorks’ devices is on display, including a couple of fixed-wing, smoke-colored UAVs designed to serve as aerial decoys, and the Ghost Dragon ISR
quadcopter, the company’s flagship product.
Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band
radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.
The Ghost Dragon reconnaissance drone from Krattworks can navigate autonomously, by detecting landmarks as it flies over them. KrattWorks
The drone’s dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services:
GPS, Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and Russia’s GLONASS. It’s been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they’re flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.
At the heart of the quadcopter’s matte grey body is a machine-vision-enabled computer running a 1-gigahertz Arm processor that provides the Ghost Dragon with its latest superpower: the ability to navigate autonomously, without access to any global navigation satellite system (GNSS). To do that, the computer runs a
neural network that, like an old-fashioned traveler, compares views of landmarks with positions on a map to determine its position. More precisely, the drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position.
A promotional video from Krattworks depicts scenarios in which the company’s drones augment soldiers on offensive maneuvers.
“Even if it gets lost, it can recognize some patterns, like crossroads, and update its position,” Karmin says. “It can make its own decisions, somewhat, either to return home or to fly through the jamming bubble until it can reestablish the GNSS link again.”
Designing Drones for High Lethality per Cost
Just as machine guns and tanks defined the First World War, drones have become emblematic of Ukraine’s struggle against Russia. It was the besieged Ukraine that first turned the concept of a military drone on its head. Instead of Predators and Reapers worth tens of millions of dollars each, Ukraine began purchasing huge numbers of off-the-shelf fliers worth a few hundred dollars apiece—the kind used by filmmakers and enthusiasts—and turned them into highly lethal weapons. A recent
New York Times investigation found that drones account for 70 percent of deaths and injuries in the ongoing conflict.
“We have much less artillery than Russia, so we had to compensate with drones,” says
Serhii Skoryk, commercial director at Kvertus, a Kyiv-based electronic-warfare company. “A missile is worth perhaps a million dollars and can kill maybe 12 or 20 people. But for one million dollars, you can buy 10,000 drones, put four grenades on each, and they will kill 1,000 or even 2,000 people or destroy 200 tanks.”
Near the Russian border in Kharkiv Oblast, a Ukrainian soldier prepared first-person-view drones for an attack on 16 January 2025.Jose Colon/Anadolu/Getty Images
Electronic warfare techniques such as jamming and spoofing aim to neutralize the drone threat. A drone that gets jammed and loses contact with its pilot and also loses its spatial bearings will either crash or fly off randomly until its battery dies.
According to the Royal United Services Institute, a U.K. defense think tank, Ukraine may be losing about 10,000 drones per month, mostly due to jamming. That number includes explosives-laden kamikaze drones that don’t reach their targets, as well as surveillance and reconnaissance drones like KrattWorks’ Ghost Dragon, meant for longer service.
“Drones have become a consumable item,” says Karmin. “You will get maybe 10 or 15 missions out of a reconnaissance drone, and then it has to be already paid off because you will lose it sooner or later.”
Russia took an unexpected step in the summer of 2024, ditching sophisticated wireless control in favor of hard-wired drones fitted with spools of optical fiber.
Tech minds on both sides of the conflict have therefore been working hard to circumvent electronic defenses. Russia took an unexpected step starting in early 2024, deploying hard-wired drones fitted with spools of optical fiber. Like a twisted variation on a child’s kite, the lethal UAVs can venture 20 or more kilometers away from the controller, the hair-thin fiber floating behind them, providing an unjammable connection.
“Right now, there is no protection against fiber-optic drones,”
Vadym Burukin, cofounder of the Ukrainian drone startup Huless, tells IEEE Spectrum. “The Russians scaled this solution pretty fast, and now they are saturating the battle front with these drones. It’s a huge problem for Ukraine.”
One way that drone operators can defeat electronic jamming is by communicating with their drone via a fiber optic line that pays out of a spool as the drone flies. This is a tactic favored by Russian units, although this particular first-person-view drone is Ukrainian. It was demonstrated near Kyiv on 29 January 2025.Efrem Lukatsky/AP
Ukraine, too, has experimented with optical fiber, but the technology didn’t take off, as it were. “The optical fiber costs upwards from $500, which is, in many cases, more than the drone itself,” Burukin says. “If you use it in a drone that carries explosives, you lose some of that capacity because you have the weight of the cable.” The extra weight also means less capacity for better-quality cameras, sensors, and computers in reconnaissance drones.
Small Drones May Soon Be Making Kill-or-No-Kill Decisions
Instead, Ukraine sees the future in autonomous navigation. This past July, kamikaze drones equipped with an autonomous navigation system from U.S. supplier
Auterion destroyed a column of Russian tanks fitted with jamming devices.
“It was really hard to strike these tanks because they were jamming everything,” says Burukin. “The drones with the autopilot were the only equipment that could stop them.”
Auterion’s “terminal guidance” system uses known landmarks to orient a drone as it seeks out a target. Auterion
The technology used to hit those tanks is called terminal guidance and is the first step toward smart, fully autonomous drones, according to Auterion’s CEO, Lorenz Meier. The system allows the drone to directly overcome the jamming whether the protected target is a tank, a trench, or a military airfield.
“If you lock on the target from, let’s say, a kilometer away and you get jammed as you approach the target, it doesn’t matter,” Meier says in an interview. “You’re not losing the target as a manual operator would.”
The visual navigation technology trialed by KrattWorks is the next step and an innovation that has only reached the battlefield this year. Meier expects that by the end of 2025, firms including his own will introduce fully autonomous solutions encompassing visual navigation to overcome GPS jamming, as well as terminal guidance and smart target recognition.
“The operator would only decide the area where to strike, but the decision about the target is made by the drone,” Meier explains. “It’s already done with guided shells, but with drones you can do that at mass scale and over much greater distances.”
Auterion, founded in 2017 to produce drone software for civilian applications such as grocery delivery, threw itself into the war effort in early 2024, motivated by a desire to equip democratic countries with technologies to help them defend themselves against authoritarian regimes. Since then, the company has made rapid strides, working closely with Ukrainian drone makers and troops.
“A missile worth perhaps a million dollars can kill maybe 12 or 20 people. But for one million dollars, you can buy 10,000 drones, put four grenades on each, and they will kill 1,000 or even 2,000 people or destroy 200 tanks.” —Serhii Skoryk, Kvertus
But purchasing Western equipment is, in the long term, not affordable for Ukraine, a country with a per capita GDP of
US $5,760—much lower than the European average of $38,270. Fortunately, Ukraine can tap its engineering workforce, which is among the largest in Europe. Before the war, Ukraine was a go-to place for Western companies looking to set up IT- and software-development centers. Many of these workers have since joined Ukraine’s DIY military-technician (“miltech”) development movement.
An engineer and founder at a Ukrainian startup that produces long-range kamikaze drones, who didn’t want to be named because of security concerns, told
Spectrum that the company began developing its own computers and autonomous navigation software for target tracking “just to keep the price down.” The engineer said Ukrainian startups offer advanced military-drone technology at a price that is a small fraction of what established competitors in the West are charging.
Within three years of the February 2022 Russian invasion, Ukraine produced a world-class defense-tech ecosystem that is not only attracting Western innovators into its fold, but also regularly surpassing them. The keys to Ukraine’s success are rapid iterations and close cooperation with frontline troops. It’s a formula that’s working for Auterion as well. “If you want to build a leading product, you need to be where the product is needed the most,” says Meier. “That’s why we’re in Ukraine.”
Burukin, from Ukrainian startup Huless, believes that autonomy will play a bigger role in the future of drone warfare than
Russia’s optical fibers will. Autonomous drones not only evade jamming, but their range is limited only by their battery storage. They also can carry more explosives or better cameras and sensors than the wired drones can. On top of that, they don’t place high demands on their operators.
“In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task,” Burukin says. “That’s where the development is heading.”
The cat-and-mouse game is nowhere near over. Companies including KrattWorks are already thinking about the next innovation that would make drone warfare cheaper and more lethal. By creating a drone mesh network, for example, they could send a sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drone followed by a swarm of simpler kamikaze drones to find and attack a target using visual navigation.
“You can send, like, 10 drones, but because they can fly themselves, you don’t need a superskilled operator controlling every single one of these,” notes KrattWorks’ Karmin, who keeps tabs on tech developments in Ukraine with a mixture of professional interest, personal empathy, and foreboding. Rarely does a day go by that he does not think about the expanding Russian military presence near Estonia’s eastern borders.
“We don’t have a lot of people in Estonia,” he says. “We will never have enough skilled drone pilots. We must find another way.”
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