FPV Drones -The Next War Is Already Here — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Noah Smith, Noahpinion
Summary
FPV drones have displaced artillery as the battlefield’s main casualty producer, with Azhnyuk attributing 70–80% of frontline casualties to them. Ukraine manufactured about 4 million FPVs last year and publicly targeted 7 million this year; a roughly $500 drone compares with a 155 mm shell priced near $4,000. Artillery remains necessary, but FPVs now occupy the “god of war” slot formerly held by artillery.
Autonomy is the compounding layer that turns cheap drones into software-defined weapons whose capabilities can change overnight. Terminal guidance alone raised one operator’s mission-success rate from 20% to 71% and expanded his kill zone from 3 km to 10 km. Azhnyuk argues full autonomy could multiply accessible operators by 100, mission success by 10, and utility per drone by 10: “four orders of magnitude” more capability.
Electronic warfare does not invalidate drones; it forces a choice among radio, autonomy, and fiber-optic control. Fiber can avoid radio jamming and radio shadows, but a 20 km system can add roughly 3 kg, constrain maneuverability, and become problematic by 30–40 km. AI-data-center demand reportedly drove the same fiber from about $4 to $32 per kilometer within months: “We’re out. We sold it all to the Americans.”
China’s manufacturing base is the episode’s largest strategic tail risk. Against Ukraine’s 4 million FPVs, Azhnyuk posits that China could make 4 billion autonomous, battery-powered systems—including fixed-wing impactors reaching 200–300 km—and distribute millions from ships or containers. He would not declare China the supreme conventional power without combat evidence, but “we cannot count that out.”
The West is behind across four connected layers: autonomy, mass manufacturing, components, and rare-earth processing. Azhnyuk’s answer is to treat Kyiv as a “defense valley,” import its battlefield feedback loops, reform procurement, and build allied industrial scale before a crisis. His stark comparison: Ukraine and Russia moved from drone technology “of 2025” to “2026,” while Europe moved only from winter to spring 2022.
Counter-drone investments must survive the cost-exchange-rate test, not merely demonstrate a successful interception. Azhnyuk contrasts a roughly $3 million laser requiring about three seconds per FPV with 6,000 drones costing the same amount; he doubted it could handle even 600 arriving together. Shotguns, jammers, nets, porcupine-like armor, and cheap autonomous interceptors matter because “the economics matter.”
AI safety and military deployment are inseparable because a faster adversary can make restraint existentially costly. Azhnyuk says the host’s “level 6” AI-command scenario could technically be done now, with deployment across command levels the harder problem; the hosts press him on distribution shift, target selection, and machines allocating human risk. His provocative forecast is that within 5–10 years, using less-precise non-AI weapons “will be immoral” because they may cause more collateral damage.
Drones transform warfare without eliminating combined arms, social endurance, or the need to hold territory. Even with drones causing most casualties, operations still integrate infantry, aviation, tanks, reconnaissance, logistics, psychological operations, and dozens of drone types; Azhnyuk does not see the rifleman disappearing soon. His final prescription is correspondingly broader than a product pitch: “Be prepared for war. Got to invest in defense and security.”
Deep dive
1. Russia’s invasion converted a pet-tech founder into a defense builder
Azhnyuk and his fiancée landed in Kyiv around 11 p.m. on February 23, 2022, despite a cab driver warning that everyone else was leaving. Eight hours later, bombs were falling; his family packed, improvised diesel containers from emptied windshield-washer bottles, helped friends escape, and spent 17 hours driving west without knowing whether Kyiv would hold.
His route into technology ran through applied mathematics at Kyiv Polytechnic, an academic family, entrepreneurship, and Petcube, which he built while living in San Francisco from 2014 to 2020. His compressed biography became: “I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers.”
Early work included lobbying American lawmakers for support and Lend-Lease, helping establish the Brave1 defense-innovation cluster, and supporting the D3 fund associated with Eric Schmidt. By 2023, Azhnyuk concluded that the war would persist, drones had created the first software-defined weapons platform, and he should harness the “global techno-capitalist machine” for Ukraine’s defensibility.
2. Immediate survival outranks hypothetical dual-use harms
Azhnyuk describes a period of “soul searching” over building things that enable killing, but Russia’s occupation, abducted children, sexual violence, economic destruction, and stated assault on Ukrainian nationhood resolved it for him. “The only morally right thing to do is to fight back. And it is immoral not to fight back.”
Noah Smith’s pushback — worth keeping: weapons built for a morally defensible national struggle will not necessarily remain there, so their future customers and uses create responsibilities for the maker. Azhnyuk concedes “there’s definitely some responsibility,” but treats that as a governance question shared by knives, fire, and large language models rather than a unique indictment of autonomy.
His decision rule is situational rather than absolutist: a mythical unified government might calculate every downstream consequence before acting, but countries face adversaries developing the same technologies independently. “When you’re in a forest in front of a wolf, you’re first going to deal with the wolf that wants to eat you and then you’re going to go consult Greenpeace.”
3. The Fourth Law is building an integrated autonomy-and-imaging stack
The Fourth Law began with a goal of “massively scalable drone autonomy.” In parallel, Azhnyuk and his Pexip co-founders, partners, and friends started a thermal-camera venture called Ad Systems; the businesses were moving closer together and might merge into what he called a leading Ukrainian team in drone AI and thermal imaging.
The operating stack has three units: cameras, autonomy, and complete drones. Daytime and nighttime cameras plus autonomy modules sell to more than 200 Ukrainian drone manufacturers, while the UAV unit supplies FPV strike drones, bombers, and interceptors to Ukraine’s armed forces and government.
Its interceptor portfolio includes systems against Shahed-type attack drones and ISR reconnaissance drones, but not complete deep-strike drones. The battery-powered Zero interceptor reaches 326 km/h, versus roughly 220 km/h in Shahed cruise and as much as 280 km/h in its terminal phase.
Autonomy spans approximately the last 500 meters of terminal guidance, bombing, target detection, and autonomous navigation across seasons, terrains, day and night, quadcopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. The group also operates simulation and warfighter training and was preparing to construct two plants producing thermal-camera semiconductor sensors.
4. Fiber optics trade jamming resistance for payload, range, and cost
Azhnyuk separates two frequently conflated technologies: “AI replaces a human,” while fiber optics make communications more resilient. A fiber-controlled drone can still use AI, including one system controlling hundreds of aircraft, but the cable itself principally defeats radio jamming.
The overlooked problem is radio horizon. Ukrainian FPVs descend toward ground targets behind forests, hills, and Earth’s curvature, losing video or control in the final tens of meters; a U.S. Drone Dominance competition reached about 10 km, while Ukrainian buyers expect at least 20–25 km and often strike at 30–40 km with ordinary 10-inch FPVs.
Terminal guidance emerged partly as the answer: an operator locks a target from perhaps 200–500 meters away, then the drone continues after the radio or video link disappears. Fiber solves the link directly, but a 20 km installation can add roughly 3 kg; longer systems require larger drones, surrender explosive payload, and become highly problematic around 30–40 km.
Fiber also stopped being unambiguously cheap. Azhnyuk says AI-data-center demand helped push prices from roughly $4 to $32 per kilometer within months; factories told Ukrainian and Russian buyers, “We’re out. We sold it all to the Americans.” Russia scaled fiber first, but he judged Ukraine mostly caught up as of perhaps three months before the conversation.
5. FPVs have dethroned artillery without making older weapons obsolete
The battlefield is saturated: Ukraine manufactured about 4 million FPVs last year, Russia perhaps 20% fewer, and Ukraine announced a 7 million target for this year. Azhnyuk would not disclose fiber-versus-autonomy damage shares, but offered the larger number: FPVs cause 70–80% of frontline casualties.
Artillery once earned the title “god of war” by causing roughly 80% of casualties; FPVs now occupy that ranking. Azhnyuk nevertheless resists a one-weapon thesis: artillery, mortars, armor, aviation, and other systems remain necessary even as their roles change.
His economics are deliberately approximate: a NATO-standard 155 mm shell costs around $4,000 against perhaps $500 for an FPV. Including gun amortization, survivability, and tactical flexibility, he calls the FPV potentially “three orders of magnitude” more versatile—not a one-for-one firepower replacement, but a radically better cost-to-effect instrument.
After Rheinmetall’s CEO reportedly dismissed Ukrainian drones as uninteresting products made by housewives, FPV manufacturer Alexey Babenko supplied the sharper comparison: “The drones we manufacture in one day will be more than enough to destroy all the tanks Rheinmetall manufactures in the year.” Azhnyuk estimates roughly $500 per drone against perhaps $5 million or more per tank, though protective technology might eventually revive armor.
6. Terminal guidance already rewrites battlefield arithmetic
Azhnyuk’s “full autonomy” does not mean humans never choose violence. A person initially specifies the target area, as with artillery; the drone then takes off, navigates, finds the designated area and target, bombs it, assesses damage, returns, and lands. “A human decision is always made at some point.”
His five-level taxonomy is specific: level one, terminal guidance; level two, bombing; level three, autonomous target detection and engagement decision; level four, autonomous navigation; and level five, autonomous takeoff and landing. It was inspired by self-driving classifications but does not map directly onto them.
The strongest field specimen comes from an operator with the call sign Grom. Adding only level-one terminal guidance reportedly lifted mission success from 20% to 71% and expanded his kill zone from 3 km to 10 km by defeating jamming, radio shadows, navigation errors, and the final aiming burden.
Full autonomy’s claimed multiplier combines 100 times as many potential users because months of pilot training disappear, 10 times mission success, and 10 times utility because a recoverable bomber replaces a one-way kamikaze. Applied to an already cheap platform, Azhnyuk calls that “four orders of magnitude” of additional capability.
7. Battlefield autonomy is an eight-dimensional deployment problem
FPV teams ideally work beneath persistent ISR coverage. DJI Mavics may stay aloft for about half an hour, while larger fixed-wing systems can observe for hours or nearly a day; those aircraft designate targets, confirm strikes, and determine whether another drone is required to finish a damaged vehicle or position.
Azhnyuk maps autonomy across eight dimensions: autonomy level, platform, operating domain, higher-order behavior such as swarms or drone carriers, physical environment, command and control, supporting infrastructure, and distribution scale. A fixed-wing, level-three, ground-to-air interceptor in winter is therefore a different engineering and operating problem from an autonomous quadcopter bomber.
The supporting dimensions are often the real bottleneck. Simulation, data collection, security, software deployment, and coordination across tens of thousands of assets must integrate with battlefield command; deploying 100 systems and deploying 100,000 are “two very different ball games.” A prototype is not a fielded product, and a fielded product is not mass capability.
8. AI safety becomes a race against a faster adversary
A host raises the machine-learning objection directly: fog, seasons, terrain, and novel targets create distribution shifts that could make computer vision fail catastrophically. Azhnyuk answers comparatively—mortars can miss by roughly half a kilometer, whereas autonomous drones may reduce friendly fire and collateral damage rather than introduce precision risk from zero.
His most provocative prediction is conditional but clear: “Five to 10 years from now it will be immoral to use weapons without AI,” just as he expects manual driving eventually to become unacceptable on public roads. The argument is not that AI is infallible; it is that less precise weapons may become predictably more dangerous.
Asked about a host’s “level six” thought experiment involving a unified AI in operational command, Azhnyuk says it could technically be done now, while ubiquitous deployment across platoon, company, battalion, and higher command remains harder. He cites a public claim that, in an operation in Iran, a Patriot system was used for target designation and that AI produced something like a list of 1,027 targets for human confirmation.
The safety dilemma is speed: if an adversary makes decisions “a thousand times faster” with such systems, the side abstaining must catch up or lose. Azhnyuk still names wrong targeting, civilian harm, and decisions that sacrifice friendly personnel as genuine risks; his claim is that safety work cannot be allowed to stop development needed for existential survival.
9. The rifleman survives because autonomy still faces a brutal long tail
A host recalls predicting in 2013 that swarms of autonomous suicide drones would cleanse battlefields of human infantry, despite objections that electronic warfare would ground them or that humans must hold territory. His evidence today is the increasingly sparse frontline, where soldiers hide in dugouts while drones dominate exposed space.
Azhnyuk’s counterpoint is simple: a soldier with a rifle inside a dugout prevents the other side from occupying it. A Ukrainian punk song titled “2030” imagines AI and cyborg warfare continuing while ordinary infantry still freeze in dugouts and hold the line; he thinks that may prove closer to reality than a rapid end of the rifleman.
Humanoid robots remain plausible because the built world is designed around the human body. Without the recent pace of large-language-model improvement, Azhnyuk would have put useful battlefield humanoids at least 10 years away; accounting for exponential progress and cheap local models, he allows that it “might be” closer to five.
The constraint is the long tail familiar from self-driving cars and AI agents. Perception, planning, and control can each use classical algorithms, separate neural networks, or one end-to-end model, but every added behavior creates more failure modes. Even with drones causing most casualties, taking ground still coordinates thousands of people, dozens of drone types, aviation, tanks, logistics, reconnaissance, and psychological operations.
10. China’s latent drone capacity is the strategic tail risk
Azhnyuk begins cautiously: China does not sell directly to Ukraine, does sell directly to Russia, and sits at the beginning of many Ukrainian supply chains; Ukraine does not seek conflict and hopes Beijing remains neutral. Yet his industrial scenario is intentionally severe: “China can produce 4 billion” FPVs against Ukraine’s 4 million.
Those need not remain short-range quadcopters. China could produce autonomous, battery-powered fixed-wing impactors reaching 200–300 km, load millions into shipping containers, freight vessels, barges, or autonomous submarines, and approach coastlines from Taiwan to California with more targets than submarines, aircraft, or anti-ship missiles could preempt.
Countering that mass requires comparable numbers of inexpensive interceptors at sea or in the air. The West presently lacks four layers: autonomy technology, mass-manufacturing capacity, components, and rare-earth refining. “Whoever has bigger manufacturing capacity, that side wins” when the scenario is pushed to its limit.
Asked whether China is therefore already Earth’s supreme conventional military power, Azhnyuk refuses the claim: Chinese drones and forces remain untested, and aircraft carriers, missiles, satellites, electronic warfare, and air forces still matter. But China is not a declining Soviet Union; he sees it ahead in electric vehicles and humanoid robotics and near the West in AI. “We cannot count it out.”
11. The Western answer is allied scale, faster procurement, and credible will
A host pushes back against static factory comparisons: America entered World War II with limited defense production and ultimately outproduced its opponents, while a prolonged emergency could sweep away factory restrictions and mobilize allies such as Japan and Europe. Azhnyuk shares the long-term optimism but wants urgency before an attack, not after it.
His first policy prescription is tighter integration with Kyiv, where “the future of defense has already arrived.” Ukraine’s “defense valley” includes hundreds of firms, combat-tested commanders, government infrastructure, and rapid feedback from soldier to brigade level; U.S. procurement reform and Drone Dominance should absorb that operating system and “scale that up big-time.”
Europe’s pace alarms him. Ukraine and Russia moved from drone technology “of 2025” to “2026,” while Europe advanced only from winter to spring 2022 and the United States arguably moved less; Poland bought roughly 100 tanks and four submarines without training even 1,000 FPV operators. He credits blunt American pressure with waking Europe, but says it remains too slow.
Industrial capacity is only one axis of endurance: populations must accept suffering, political leaders must sustain a defensive war, and alliances must remain credible. Azhnyuk argues the Budapest Memorandum’s failed security assurances taught governments that nuclear weapons may be the only dependable deterrent, predicting more national nuclear programs over the next couple of decades; a host explicitly names Japan, South Korea, and Poland.
12. The drone race has no single leaderboard
Azhnyuk rejects a blanket claim that Ukraine is “ahead.” There are at least 30 categories across air, ground, surface, and undersea domains—reconnaissance, logistics, evacuation, mining, demining, strike, relay, and interception—and each must be scored separately.
Ukraine operates a competitive “zoo,” sometimes with dozens or more than 100 companies in a category; Russia more often centralizes around one to three products and scales them. Ukraine recently moved ahead in frontline strike after catching up on fiber, may be improving in 40–200 km mid-strike, recently gained an edge in deep strike, and has consistently led at sea and, in his judgment, on the ground.
Russia retains advantages in areas including GPS-free navigation and CRP antennas, plus glide bombs reportedly ranging as far as 80 km. Azhnyuk stresses that range is inseparable from launch altitude, aircraft vulnerability, radar coverage, and air-defense geometry—and repeatedly qualifies that he is explaining these matters as a technologist, not a military professional.
Drone interceptions of Russian helicopters are still edge cases rather than a systematic campaign, but he thinks battery-powered interceptors, fixed-wing hunters, or larger drone carriers could make helicopter hunting routine. Frontline attack helicopters may decline; helicopters remain useful, however, including for shooting down Shahed-type deep-strike drones on both sides.
13. Counter-drone economics punish exquisite defenses
Shotguns already down hundreds or thousands of FPVs, but individual survival depends heavily on skill. One Russian soldier reportedly shot down seven attacking drones before eventually being killed; Azhnyuk’s blunt expectation for the “average non-Rambo” caught in the open is that he will probably die.
Electronic countermeasures work perfectly only when they cover the drone’s frequency and the attacker lacks fiber or autonomy. Physical defenses therefore proliferate: roads within roughly 50 km of the front are covered by fishnet corridors, while tanks wear nets and protruding poles like porcupines so warheads detonate half a meter or a meter away from their armor.
Emerging active defenses include handheld, harpoon-like launchers whose onboard AI guides a small interceptor into an incoming FPV, or armored vehicles carrying hundreds of protective drones that launch automatically. Systems such as Rheinmetall’s Skynex can work, but the decisive question remains the price and volume of each effect.
Azhnyuk’s exhibit is a roughly $3 million, 10 kW laser that needs about three seconds on one FPV: the same money buys 6,000 $500 drones, and he doubted it could handle even 600 arriving together. A bigger laser worsens weight, mobility, replacement cost, and coverage. The required mental shift is from exquisite $14 billion platforms toward cheap, distributed mass that iterates like software—hence his closing call: “Be prepared for war.”