Ex-CIA director David Petraeus says U.S. needs to learn “whole new concept of warfare” from Ukraine

Former CIA director David Petraeus has traveled to Ukraine 10 times since Russia’s invasion in 2022. During his most recent trip last week, he told CBS News that Russia “no longer has the upper hand.”

“Over the last two months, the Ukrainians have actually made greater incremental gains than have the Russians,” Petraeus, a retired U.S. Army general, said in an interview in Kyiv after visiting units near the frontlines.

Petraeus said that assessment might have seemed unlikely given Russia’s advantages in manpower, firepower, and economic scale. But he argues that Ukraine has offset those disadvantages through its innovation in its unmanned systems.

Ukraine’s edge, he said, is not just the drones themselves, but the system built around them. 

“What’s the real genius is how they’re pulling it all together,” Petraeus said, pointing to an “overall command and control ecosystem” that integrates surveillance, targeting, and strike capabilities. At the center is Ukraine’s Delta battle management platform, which serves as a sort of “military Google maps”, displaying a digital map of positions, targets, and other relevant information, an engineer familiar with the technology told CBS News.

That integration allows Ukrainian forces to possess nearly absolute surveillance and strike capabilities, within roughly 20 miles of the frontline. Petraeus described watching a frontline engagement in which a Russian soldier was tracked continuously by rotating surveillance drones before attack drones were deployed.

“Once you’re observed on this battlefield and you can’t get into a deeply buried position really quickly, it’s not going to end well,” he said.

Ukraine is also scaling production of low-cost first-person-view drones at a pace far beyond Western militaries. One Ukrainian manufacturer that Petraeus visited last week told him that it “is going to make 3 million drones this year alone,” compared to roughly 300,000 produced by the United States last year.

Artificial intelligence, Petraeus said, will accelerate these innovations. Currently, drone warfare is limited by electronic warfare. In the roughly 20 miles around the frontlines saturated with remotely piloted first-person-view drones, combatants jam connections between drones and operators, decreasing their effectiveness. One solution has been fiber-optic drones, which connect to their operators through long cables spooling out of their tails. But fiber-optic drones have limitations on how far they can fly and how much cable is available.

Using algorithms, rather than GPS connections, to fly drones will ease these constraints. “What’s coming is going to be algorithmically piloted drones that you can’t jam,” Petraeus said. These systems will be able to operate even in heavily contested electronic warfare environments by reducing reliance on GPS, he added. The technology will also allow human operators to control more than one drone at a time.

Petraeus said fully autonomous systems, where humans still define the missions but machines execute them, may also emerge soon.

“I think that will be possible within a couple of years, and we may well see it first here,” he said, noting that advances in technologies like object identification and facial recognition are already enabling greater autonomy.

For Petraeus, the lessons for the U.S. extend far beyond buying more drones or better incorporating them into military structures.

“In some Western countries right now, they think that innovativeness is giving 50 drones to an armored battalion,” he said. “No. What we should do is scrap the armored battalions and replace them with a drone battalion.”

That shift, he argued, requires more than procurement reform. It demands what he called a “whole new concept of warfare,” including changes to doctrine, training, and force structure. Ukraine, he noted, has created the standard for this by creating an Unmanned Systems Force, rather than simply implementing drones into different forces.

The risks of failing to adapt, particularly in counterdrone capabilities, go beyond the battlefield. Petraeus warned that advances in drone technology could pose a heightened risk of terrorism, as “drone swarm” technology allows operators to control more drones at one time and commercial drone use expands.

“A real swarm will be enabled when you have autonomous systems,” he said, adding that such capabilities are “very, very worrisome.” At the same time, companies like Amazon and Walmart are “beginning delivery by drone,” increasing the number of aerial systems in civilian airspace.

Together, those trends could make it harder to detect and defend against coordinated drone attacks.

“We don’t have systems yet,” that could effectively “defend against drone swarms,” Petraeus said. “We need to learn a lot more, much more rapidly than we are.”