Last week’s astonishing remote-controlled attack by Ukraine on five Russian airfields – some of them thousands of kilometres from the frontlines – might have changed warfare forever. Militaries all over the world, once they have finished marvelling at the ingenuity, diligence and bravado required to launch blizzards of drones from trucks driven to their targets by unwitting citizens of the nation with whom you are at war, will fret furiously about what it will mean. 

How can military installations be defended in a world where they can be hit anywhere, from anywhere, and by weapons that will not alert any radar? Is there really any point in spending billions of dollars on hi-tech aircraft when it might be demolished by cheap, disposable toys armed with munitions that can be partly manufactured with 3D printers? How confident is the commanding officer of any airfield about the benign nature of every single shipping container that might happen to be, at any given moment, within a few hundred kilometres of their control tower?

We recently heard from a Monocle reader with inadvertent insight into a specific aspect of this sort of warfare – what might be thought of as a dramatic decentralisation of military procurement. The reader had put a 2021 DJI Mavic 3 drone up for sale on Ricardo, which is essentially Swiss Ebay. He’d been contacted by a Ukrainian who explained that he was sourcing drones for Ukraine’s military and that older models were easier to override for combat purposes. The buyer offered to send a photo of the drone in action once it was repurposed (our contact duly received a photo of a Ukrainian soldier holding a drone which was, if not exactly the same one, a similar model).

I contacted the purchaser, who explained that there are small, informal networks of Ukrainians that are crowd-sourcing military materiel all over Europe; the cells are based on pre-war social and professional relationships linking the buyers with serving soldiers. The Swiss connection benefits from the country’s characteristically punctilious restrictions on drone use. “Swiss kids buy drones for fun,” the buyer says, “then realise that they cannot fly everywhere and sell them for half-price.” 

Eager though the sellers may be, they are duly informed of the use to which their drones will be put. A small number maintain traditional Swiss neutrality and decline but, according to the buyer, “In 99 per cent of cases, the Swiss are very happy to help, and offer discounts and pack bars of chocolate into drone bags. The fact that most Swiss men have served in the military and know how army life works helps a lot.”

The necessary funds are privately raised. The buyer reckons that they alone have sent nearly 100 Mavic 3 drones to the Ukrainian army since the war began in 2022. “The drones have a very short life span,” he says, “but it’s still better to send a drone to check whether there are any Russians around the corner than to send a soldier.”

But the question – well, a question – now plaguing strategists is where these leaps forward in drone technology might be leading. The weekend before last, I attended the Black Sea Security Forum in Odesa – one of many Ukrainian cities that has been used, over these past three years, as an unwilling and undeserving testing range for drones built by Russia and Iran. 

Among the people I met was a British military analyst and former soldier who told me that the evolution of drones was now proceeding so rapidly that generations of development were measured not in years or months but weeks: the Turkish-built Bayraktar TB2s, which had inspired folk ballads in the early stages of Ukraine’s resistance in 2022, now seemed like positive antiques. This is not to say that we will not hear more of Bayraktar – just a few weeks ago, the AI-powered Bayraktar TB3 became the first drone capable of completely autonomous liftoff and landing on a short-runway vessel; it can stay in the air for 32 hours and launch supersonic ballistic missiles.

The analyst reckoned that in future conflicts, large-scale deployments of infantry would be all but impossible, massed-armour formations would be hopelessly vulnerable, and that mileage in crewed fighter jets would swiftly decrease. He also noted that in the Black Sea lapping at the shore down the street, Russia’s fleet had recently been defeated by a country without a navy. 

He wondered vaguely whether we were on the verge of outsourcing warfare entirely to machines and androids belting the nuts and bolts out of each other, with every offensive innovation thwarted almost instantly by defensive countermeasure. It’s hard to know whether it sounds dystopian or utopian: what do wars become if people can’t fight them?

Andrew Mueller is a contributing editor at Monocle and host of our weekly world affairs podcast, The Foreign Desk.

For Monocle’s June issue, we profile 10 European defence disruptors. Click here to read more.