The jamming problem

The defining weapon of the Russia–Ukraine war is the first-person-view (FPV) drone: a cheap quadcopter with an explosive charge, flown by a human into its target via radio. Its great weakness is that radio link. Russian electronic warfare has become extremely effective at jamming both the control signal and GPS, blinding drones in the final, decisive seconds of an attack.

Two answers have emerged. The first is physical: fiber-optic drones that trail an unjammable spool of cable — by September 2025, Russia alone was reportedly producing 50,000+ fiber-optic FPV drones a month (CSIS). The second is autonomy.

Cheap AI, big effect

Ukrainian developers have fielded small onboard AI vision modules that let a drone identify and lock onto a target with its camera alone — no GPS, no live radio command. Once locked, the drone can complete the terminal dive even under full jamming. The reported effect is dramatic: per CSIS and IEEE Spectrum, autonomous terminal guidance raises strike-success rates from around 10–20% to 70–80%. One Ukrainian brigade reported its FPV success rate jumping from roughly 20% to 80% after integrating AI vision. A module from the company Fourth Law was reported to cost around $70 per unit (The Defense Post).

That price point is the real story. Battlefield autonomy here isn't a billion-dollar program; it's a sub-$100 bolt-on, deployed by the tens of thousands.

The autonomy line

This is exactly the capability the autonomous-weapons treaty debate is about. A drone that finds and strikes its target using only onboard machine vision, after the human-issued command, sits right on the edge of 'meaningful human control.' In practice most systems still require a human to select the target and commit the attack before the AI takes over terminal guidance — but the trend line is clear, and the economics push toward more autonomy, not less.

The defensive mirror

The same AI is going on defense. In May 2026 Ukraine deployed an AI-powered turret that independently detects, tracks and analyses incoming UAVs — the human operator's only job is to press a button to confirm the strike (Euromaidan Press; The Defense Post). It's a neat illustration of where this is heading: machines doing the perceiving and the tracking, humans reduced to a single confirm-or-veto tap, at machine speed.