HALF-FULL REPORT 06/06/25
Crush Depth: Total War in the Drone Age
D-Day Rebooted: Freedom Still Lands First, Now It Flies
The largest amphibious invasion in human history wasn’t just a military operation, it was a thunderclap of resolve, a violent return of freedom to a continent gasping under the Nazi boot. Eighty-one years ago today, on June 6, 1944, Operation Overlord launched with the fury of 156,000 Allied troops slamming into Hitler’s Atlantic Wall across a 50-mile stretch of French coastline.
This wasn’t merely D-Day, it was Defiance Day. Code named Operation Neptune, the beach landings were part of the larger air-sea Operation Overlord, and began with a brutal aerial and naval bombardment, followed by airborne assaults and five simultaneous beach landings: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. The weather was marginal, the risk enormous, and the stakes total.
Every soldier who hit that surf knew that failure meant more than death; it meant the death of Europe. Under fire from machine guns, mortars, and artillery, they fought their way up mined beaches, through fortified towns, and into the history books. It cracked the German line and marked the beginning of the end for the Third Reich.
Fast-forward these 81 years, and war looks different but the stakes feel the same. The face of warfare is changing, and the revolution is coming from below, literally. Military drone technology, once a niche tool for reconnaissance and surgical strikes, has matured into the primary force-multiplier on the battlefield.
In Ukraine, in Russia, and increasingly around the world, the future of combat is being shaped not by fleets of tanks or battalions of infantry, but by cheap, fast, deadly flying machines built in workshops and basements. Generals and think-tanks are wondering aloud whether it is possible to hold ground with robotic systems and not just use them to deny territory.
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Silicon, Sovereignty, and the Death of Empire: Ukraine’s Drone Revolution and the American Decider Doctrine
Ukraine and Russia are in a full-blown drone arms race. They aren’t waiting for defense contractors or formal acquisitions processes. They’re running on Scrum and garage ingenuity.
These are not model airplane hobbyists with GoPros duct-taped to their UAVs. This is industrialized tinkering at national scale.
Ukraine in particular is pioneering this wave with help from Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite constellation turned military backbone. Without Starlink, Ukraine would be blind. Period.
Russia’s satellite internet capabilities are weaker, slower, and more fragile. That one asymmetric advantage, Starlink broadband from orbit, may be the single most important logistical differentiator of the war.
Interestingly, the symbolic sidelining of Elon Musk by Donald Trump sent a broader message: business must not dictate national policy. This aligns with Ukraine’s own drive toward de-oligarchization. It was no accident that Trump, after downplaying Musk, pivoted to promoting the Ukraine Recovery Fund, emphasizing clean capital flows and private sector transparency in the reconstruction process.
Most of the Trump-Musk riff is probably noise amplified by the media, and Musk remains the most indispensable innovator in the world. Perhaps he just needs some downtime. Or rehab from the psychedelics he allegedly uses to boost his mind above and beyond genius level.
Meanwhile, Trump’s diplomatic choreography as seen by his speaking to Xi Jinping shortly after a call with Putin signaled something deeper: Russia is increasingly seen not as a sovereign peer but a global liability, a destabilizing variable to be jointly managed by actual great powers. That’s a seismic demotion for the Kremlin.
And Ukraine is not waiting. It proved its ability to strike preemptively and seize initiative this week by knocking out Iskander launchers, sabotaging Russian logistics, and even targeting the Black Sea Fleet with naval drones. More symbolically damaging, reports are emerging of Russian soldiers killing their own officers before surrendering.
This isn’t just anecdote, it’s structural rot. The Russian army has burned through the competent cadre it had before the war. What’s left is selfish, brutal leadership that uses conscripts as cannon fodder. Expect more fragging incidents. Ukrainian psychological operations are stoking them by offering rewards, video surrender instructions, promises of safe passage, and glorification of mutiny. There is one constant to war, and it is the effect of Psyops on the enemy mind.
And drone warfare isn’t just physical. It’s psychological. Sirens have returned to the battlefield but this time, they are not mounted to Stuka dive bombers, but on quadcopters. Drones are now being equipped with audio payloads to terrify, distract, or deprive sleep. There is no longer any “rear area” to hide in. A soldier resting under a tree can be spotted by an ISR drone and killed by a strike drone within minutes. There’s no silence. There’s no sanctuary.
And here lies a fundamental asymmetry in motivation. Russia, to this day, insists it is not at war with Ukraine. It is at war with Nazis as a useful euphemism that echoes their Cold War framing against Germany. In WWII, they say, they didn’t conquer Germany; they defeated Nazism. This allowed them to absorb East Germany ideologically. The same trick is being attempted today. Putin does not want to destroy Ukraine. He wants to possess it. That means shaping the narrative for postwar governance, not total annihilation. Today is day 1,199 of Putin’s “72-hour” war.
Ukraine has no such illusions. Their hatred is absolute. They do not see Russians as brothers or liberators. They see them as existential threats, and rightly so. This asymmetry creates a feedback loop of escalation: Russia tries to manage optics. Ukraine tries to survive. One side kills out of strategy. The other kills out of memory.
Putin has been in power for more than two decades. It takes thirty years or more to produce a competent NATO general as real officers are forged through study, field work, and discipline. In Russia, promotion runs through a different system entirely. Their military hierarchy resembles a mafia more than a meritocracy.
Advancement isn’t earned through competence, but through kickbacks and patronage. Sell a tank engine here, skim some antifreeze there, and soon you’ve got warheads that don’t detonate. Their war plan for Ukraine? Vintage 1982. They’re running Cold War doctrine against 21st-century threats.
All over the world, military planners have woken up to the drone and data link revolution. Russia is still trying to muscle through with steel and headcount. They’ve amassed another 60,000 troops on the front line. But they’re burning through a battalion a day or about 1,000 troops lost every 24 hours. That gives them a 60-day window of combat effectiveness with their newly mustered force, at best.
Russia is no longer capable of executing sweeping pincer movements. Instead, they’ve settled into a grind of 100 skirmishes per day across the front. Meanwhile, Ukrainian partisans are hammering their logistics and sowing chaos in the rear. Supply depots, command posts, and fuel trains are all targets for the drones now and nothing is safe.
Historically, we’ve seen the effects from degraded military leadership before. The U.S. military suffered over 800 documented fragging incidents in Vietnam when draftees were forced to fight under poor leadership. But after transitioning to an all-volunteer force in 1973, the military improved leadership standards, pay, and conditions. Since then, there have only been three documented fragging cases in 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The lesson is clear: when an armed force is under pressure and led by incompetent tyrants, it will self-correct violently. Russia has pushed over a million of its own men into this meat grinder under the banner of an imperial delusion. There is a breaking point. If 500 Russian battalions begin to see their officers fragged and their units surrender, the entire war effort could collapse overnight.
That collapse is already visible on the economic front. Russia’s federal reserves are down to $35 billion and dropping fast. In May alone, Moscow posted a $5.8 billion deficit. The West should strike now and hard. Increase sanctions. Target every last ruble. Choke the flow of tech, cash, and capital. Keep oil prices low. Go for the jugular and accelerate the collapse of this Potemkin economy. Like the late Soviet Union, Russia doesn’t need to hit zero for the system to implode. It just needs a good shove.
This is not just a war of weapons. It’s a war of systems. One side is improvising and executing faster than the other can plan. That difference is fatal. Ukraine is inside Russia’s OODA loop.
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Drone Wars: When Swarms Meet Scrap: How Makeshift Countermeasures Expose Russian Rigidity and America’s Brutal Performance Edge
Countermeasures are emerging, but they’re just as makeshift as the drones themselves.
Interceptor drones are now flying as smaller, faster sky darts, often detonated by WWII era shell-proximity-fuzes and directed by onboard radar tech borrowed from civilian automotive sensors.
It seems the best tool to kill a drone is another drone. Interceptor drones burn battery like jet fuel and run hot. Like all drones, they run too hot to hide. They’re easily spotted on thermal, and yet are still effective.
On the ground, special rifle cartridges are being fielded in the form of plastic shot shells packed with anti-drone pellets and a tracer. Shotguns were tried, but rifles are better. Why? Because drones regularly carry multiple-pound warheads. You want to detonate them away from your trench, not right above it.
Lasers offer promise, but the field data now suggests only in dry conditions. They fire as long as power holds, and they can melt plastic rotors with precision. But Ukraine isn’t a desert. It’s damp. Fog, mist, rain, and humidity all reduce laser effectiveness to marginal levels after a few hundred meters. Nets used to work. Now, drone strike packages include a net-killer drone whose sole job is to blow a hole in the defense, so the next wave can come through.
Russia is suffering the most here because their doctrine is rigid. Their war games that are intended to test doctrine are theatrical. They always win. Like North Korea, Russians script the outcome and then pat themselves on the back. Their weapons aren’t tested in failure conditions. They’re tested in parades.
In contrast, U.S. military development, for all its bureaucracy and slow speed, is rooted in adversarial testing. Red teaming. AB trials. The system is designed to find failure and iterate. Russian designs often are tried in third world conflicts and then the design is frozen for mass production for decades. Designs are locked in place to avoid possible embarrassment or worse. Innovation becomes risk. Risk becomes disloyalty.
And drone warfare is nothing if not a constant engine of risk and innovation.
This leaves Russia dangerously exposed. Not because they lack talent or factories, but because their system punishes failure more than it rewards adaptation. The Ukrainians iterate by the hour. The Russians are still signing off on CAD drawings. In the end, this is what will decide the war: not just whose drones fly farther, but whose ideas move faster.
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Spiderweb Strike: Ukraine’s Trojan Drone Blitz and the Death of Russian Strategic Depth
Which brings us to Operation Spiderweb, a black swan moment for Russian air power. In a stunning display of reach and coordination, Ukraine used long-range drones to strike at the heart of Russia’s strategic aviation capability.
The attacks destroyed or damaged more than forty strategic bombers and took out two of the country’s five airborne radar control aircraft.
It wasn’t without warning. Back in 2023, Ukraine’s drone swarms had already struck the Peskov airfield in northwest Russia, annihilating a number of heavy transport aircraft. That wasn’t just a lucky shot as much as it was a signal: Ukraine had agents inside the perimeter. The border or fence was no longer a boundary.
Then came Engels-1 and Engels-2. Russia’s two crown-jewel strategic bomber bases. Ukraine reached out and hit them both last year. The result? Russia was forced to disperse its bombers to secondary airfields and locations that lacked proper infrastructure and hardened hangars.
Treaty obligations under arms control agreements require that strategic bombers remain visible for satellite monitoring. That’s a vulnerability in peacetime. In wartime, it’s a curse. With no hardened shelters at the secondary airfields, and up to 20% of Russia’s bomber fleet, those planes known as hangar queens for always awaiting parts or maintenance, sitting in the few non-hardened hangers available, the Russian Strategic Bomber Force was left exposed. What followed was inevitable.
Ukraine didn’t just strike planes. They struck doctrine. They struck confidence. And in doing so, they reminded the world: in drone warfare, everything is visible, everything is vulnerable, and everything can burn.
But the true brilliance of Operation Spiderweb wasn’t just in the strikes; it was in the setup. Over a year in advance, Ukraine quietly inserted itself into the Russian logistics system. Using a front company disguised as an intermodal freight operator, they shipped containers by truck and rail deep into Russian territory.
Inside some of these containers were drone motherships or custom-built launch platforms designed to remain dormant until the moment came. When the strikes began, these container motherships unleashed swarms of drones from inside Russia’s own logistical infrastructure.
It was the most effective surprise attack on Russian soil since June 21, 1941: Operation Barbarossa. And this time, the blitz wasn’t German tanks. It was Ukrainian technology, operating behind Russian lines, using Russia’s own systems against it. That’s not just battlefield innovation. That’s strategic infiltration at scale.
Now, Russia is forced to react with industrial-scale paranoia. The government has diverted significant forces to implement 100% inspection of trucks and containers across the country. Every box is suspect. Every shipment is a potential Trojan horse.
The Ukrainian containers weren’t just holding drones. They held self-contained satellite uplinks, battery charging systems, and wire-guided relay drones that maintained signal fidelity all the way back to FPV strike units. These fiber-linked drones routed communications below the noise floor of Russian jammers, rendering traditional electronic warfare obsolete.
Welcome to the new battlefield. It hums. It buzzes. It sees in the dark. And it has a license to kill.
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Kill Chain Collapse: Putin’s Drone War Meltdown and the Rise of Ukraine’s Undersea Arsenal
And now, Vladimir Putin has a KGB man’s problem. In the wake of Operation Spiderweb, he must decide who takes the fall. The FSB? The military? Neither is safe.
Many of the senior officers from the targeted bases were in Moscow that weekend, sobering up from May Day festivities on a lazy spring Sunday morning.
Someone will pay. A witch hunt is coming.
Russia is hitting back hard with its heaviest assets, such as MIRVed Orelikon missiles. Already, as this is being written, Ukraine is enduring a massive bombardment of 410 missiles with more surely inbound. But this, too, reveals the strategic imbalance. Russia is spending hundreds of millions to retaliate against thousand-dollar assets. From an economic warfare standpoint, Russia is bleeding cash to keep up.
The Kerch Strait Bridge reopened yesterday, June 5th, after suffering two coordinated attacks the previous Sunday. The first strike was a detonation of one metric ton of TNT placed by combat divers and delivered by an underwater cargo drone, buried under the silt at the base of a pier supporting the ship channel’s elevated section.
The second strike, another metric ton of explosives, was delivered by an unmanned submersible drone that traveled hundreds of miles beneath the Black Sea from Ukrainian-controlled waters. These attacks demonstrated not only reach but precision.
And yet Ukraine has more in its arsenal. Intelligence suggests the existence of a new unmanned undersea drone platform over 130 feet long, capable of delivering 11,000 pounds of TNT, or roughly half the explosive power of a U.S. MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast). This monster drone has not yet seen combat. But if and when it does, the results will likely redefine naval sabotage as we know it.
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Drone Hellfire: How Cheap Killers Are Shredding Legacy Armies and Redefining Modern War
Drones are altering the battlefield in three fundamental ways:
First, they separate the human operator from the battlefield by, in the case of Operation Spiderweb, thousands of miles. A pilot no longer needs to be anywhere near the front to launch a precise attack.
Second, drones turn the battlespace into a true three-dimensional zone. Unlike aircraft that pass overhead, drones can loiter. They can hover, wait, reposition, and strike when targets are vulnerable.
The battlefield is no longer a line; it’s a volume, and that volume is being mapped and exploited in real-time.
Third, drones can strike deep into the enemy’s rear and hit the supply lines, command nodes, fuel depots, and even airfields. This reach changes everything.
Attacking the rear doesn’t just destroy matériel. It collapses the time horizon for the front. In traditional warfare, a beleaguered front-line unit could hold out, knowing reinforcements or resupply might arrive in hours or days. Drones annihilate that margin. If the rear is compromised, and if the trucks, trains, or fuel convoys never make it then the front can’t afford to wait. It must fall back, surrender, or be destroyed.
This dynamic rewrites doctrine. It compresses operational tempo and forces real-time adaptation. There is no safe zone.
Ukrainians have turned drones into smart munitions, relay nodes, surveillance assets, and even psychological weapons. They drop anti-tank mines from the air with pinpoint accuracy. They run kamikaze-style FPV (First Person View) drones guided by operators hundreds of miles away.
The operators themselves are rarely soldiers. They’re gamers. Civilian contractor nerds with adrenaline and joysticks, not rifles. A forward deployed combat-tech team plugs in the fiber communications line or positions the drone, and the remote pilot executes the strike like he’s playing Call of Duty. It works.
Right now, humans are still in the loop. AI drones are on the lab bench, especially in the West, with NVIDIA silicon powering neural networks that can recognize and strike targets autonomously. But no one’s fielding these at scale. Yet.
Instead, the true revolution is logistical and economic. It’s not about replacing soldiers with robots. It’s about using $500 drones to destroy $5 million systems. That’s economic warfare. That’s precision as a trajectory from WWII carpet bombing prior to the Normandy invasion, to GPS-guided JDAMs, to drones flying into the weak point of a tank’s armor. This is war by decimal point.
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Decentralized Death from the Sky: How Ukraine’s Disposable Drone Swarms and Chinese Cheap Shots Are Outgunning the Dinosaur West
The U.S. and its allies still dominate the high end. Western drones excel at long-duration ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) and force-multiplier roles like aerial refueling.
These platforms are exquisite, high-altitude, and high-cost. They are great for spotting trouble from orbit or feeding targeting data to long-range missiles. But they are not mass-producible. They are not disposable.
At this time, Ukraine far outpaces the USA and NATO in disposable, under 1,000 ft flying altitude suicide drones.
The centralized US defense industry is a dinosaur relative to the Ukrainian dispersed industry, and is another example of the arc of history bending in the direction of decentralization in the age of microchips.
Meanwhile, China has entered the chat. Chinese drones tend to be cheap and numerous, though less rugged. When they work, they work well enough. The difference is cost: one twentieth to one hundredth of the price of Western designs.
While Chinese microchips can’t compete with NVIDIA on raw horsepower, in a swarm environment quantity becomes its own kind of quality. It’s not the best chip that wins. It’s the one you can afford to lose by the thousands.
Chinese farmland purchases adjacent to American military bases certainly raise alarms as farm have barns, and barns can hide drone swarms preparing for an attack.
The casualty math is evolving too. Early in this war, most deaths were caused by artillery and shrapnel. Now, it’s drones. Reports suggest that up to 70% of casualties are now drone-related. The designs are still toy-like, made from carbon fiber, foam, and salvaged electronics. But the trend is toward harder, tougher platforms. Machines that can take a drop, get wet, get cold, and still kill.
Jamming was once an effective defense. It’s less so now. Fiber optic drones, which use physical cables instead of radio signals, are immune to jamming. These drones slither through trenches and around buildings, hugging the earth, staying under radar and electronic warfare umbrellas. They act as signal relays, internet node routers, and attack platforms in one. When they go quiet, you don’t know if they’re waiting or dead.
Which brings us to sleeper drones as the booby traps of the 21st century. These drones fly out, land, or pretend to crash. Then they wait. On fiber, with no RF emissions, they can stay alive for days. When a vehicle or soldier walks past, they activate. Some detonate. Others take off and pursue like a hunter.
This replaces static minefields with mobile, reprogrammable, repositioning death traps. Entire instant-on, instant-off, dynamic minefields can now fly in based on battlefield conditions. It’s tactical intelligence mixed with mobility.
Speed now beats armor. The foot soldier’s best defense is to move fast and stay small. That’s why we’re seeing the return of motorcycle assault teams. Light, mobile, hard to hit, perfect for placing relay drones or sleeper munitions before disappearing into the tree line. Every drone strike package is now a combined arms operation: sensor, shooter, relay, and decoy all in one.
Naval drones have joined the fray too, and they are devastating. Ukraine has used Starlink-guided naval drones both on the surface and subsurface to attack Russian Black Sea assets with shocking success. These drones require constant uplink and low latency. Without Starlink, they would be blind and deaf. With it, they are guided torpedoes with a brain.
The problem of latency is not exclusive to warfare. Just yesterday, Japan’s private lunar exploration company experienced its second crash landing on the Moon. The unmanned lunar lander failed due to signal latency. This is the delay between sending commands from Earth and receiving feedback from space. This is the second time a laser rangefinder system failed due to this delay, highlighting a vulnerability that also exists in long-range drone warfare.
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Autonomy and Freedom: How AI-Driven Drones and a Supreme Court Bulwark Secure America’s Arsenal and Liberty Against Globalist Assault
When drones or spacecraft operate too far from controllers, or suffer from signal degradation, they become dangerously unreliable.
The solution? Greater automation. The next generation of drones and spacecraft will require onboard autonomy and real-time decision-making.
That’s why advancements in computer chips, especially those capable of running AI models efficiently, are now mission-critical.
Meanwhile, today the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down Mexico’s claim that American gun manufacturers were responsible for cartel violence. This case, long in the making, originated during the Obama administration’s covert weapons trafficking programs as an attempt to flood Mexican cartels with U.S. firearms in hopes of creating chaos that would justify international firearms restrictions.
The end goal? Global momentum for banning the U.S. Bill of Rights. Had it succeeded, similar legal theories could have outlawed U.S. drone manufacturing on grounds of “dual use.”
This ruling secures not only American rights, but the ability to produce and export dual-use drone technologies.
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Mike Ryan is a chemical engineering consultant to heavy industry.