Ukraine’s Lessons for Future Combat: Unmanned Aerial Systems and Deep Strike

Abstract

The Russia-Ukraine War holds many lessons for the US Army and American policymakers and leaders on the nature and role of reconnaissance-strike complexes in modern combat, especially Ukraine’s development of a battle-management system that fuses unmanned aerial systems and satellite reconnaissance to enable the fire coordination for deep strikes into the enemy rear. In the research presented here, open-source analysis and interviews in Ukraine focus on the development and employment of reconnaissance-strike complexes with respect to deep strike and the likelihood of mutual territorial attack.