The expanding role of drones in the Russia–Ukraine war has transformed the dynamics of Electronic Warfare and accelerated the pace at which military organisations must innovate. This article examines recent political-science research on drone employment, places it in the broader context of global defense adaptation, and connects these developments to SkyRadar’s work on platform-based innovation and training ecosystems.
The ongoing SkyRadar series on Electronic Warfare has argued that modern conflict is increasingly shaped not by the dominance of individual platforms, but by the capacity of armed forces to innovate faster than the adversary. This transformation—mapped in contemporary EW, C4ISR and battlefield digitalisation—has been accelerated by the wide deployment of unmanned aerial systems in the Russia–Ukraine war. The political-science study “From reconnaissance to Combat: The multifaceted role of drones in the Russia-Ukraine War” provides a useful lens for understanding this shift, showing how drones have become central to operations, decision-making and the orchestration of larger kill chains.
What emerges from the article is a portrait of warfare no longer dominated by mass manoeuvre formations but shaped by distributed sensors, low-cost precision systems, and the continuous struggle between detection and concealment. At its core, it is a story of accelerated adaptation. Both Russia and Ukraine have integrated drones into reconnaissance, artillery correction, precision strike, and psychological pressure. Ukraine’s mixture of commercial quadcopters, foreign loitering munitions, and domestically produced ISR drones demonstrated how a flexible, bottom-up innovation ecosystem can compensate for structural disadvantages. Russia, in turn, began to field systems such as the Orlan-10 or Lancet in increasingly coordinated ways, using them not only for targeting but also for challenging Ukrainian air defenses. The mutual deployment of reconnaissance and attack drones turned the entire frontline into a dense web of surveillance and counter-surveillance, where exposure is punished within minutes and situational awareness becomes a condition of survival.
Although the article focuses partly on the implications for India, its insights generalize to Europe, Southeast Asia and African regions, where states face growing pressure to build resilient, self-sufficient capacities in surveillance, air defense and electronic warfare. The Indian case, as presented by the authors, demonstrates the strategic risks of technological dependence and fragmented industrial capabilities. For Europe, these findings resonate with the GIDS assessment of an innovation deficit within Western militaries and the structural rigidity of procurement systems. In Southeast Asia, territorial tensions and reliance on maritime surveillance have already prompted states to integrate drones as early-warning and deterrence tools. African forces, operating under conditions of constrained budgets and wide territorial coverage, increasingly see drones as a pragmatic way to maintain situational awareness and respond to asymmetric threats. Across all these contexts, the underlying requirement is the same: the ability to learn, adapt and integrate new capabilities into doctrinal and operational practice at high speed.
This is where the link to Electronic Warfare becomes most visible. The article notes that many drones on both sides evade detection because of their small signatures, flight profiles and materials.
For air-defence units, this creates an environment in which radar operators, EW officers and command teams must constantly adjust parameters, reconfigure sensors and understand how adversaries alter their tactics. It is precisely the shift that SkyRadar’s training philosophy addresses—moving from platform-specific teaching to decision-loop-oriented training, where detection, classification and response are taught as interdependent functions. Drone warfare collapses time: ISR feeds strike decisions in minutes, and EW countermeasures provoke immediate tactical evolution. Training therefore must simulate this tempo and complexity, integrating radar fundamentals, small-target detection, electronic attack and countermeasures, and the cognitive dimension of rapid assessment.
Beyond tactical adaptation, drone warfare illustrates a systemic transformation in how militaries innovate. The SkyRadar publication on platform-based innovation frames this change clearly: modern defense actors must move from isolated capabilities to open, modular ecosystems that allow rapid integration of new technologies without restarting the entire procurement cycle.
The Russia-Ukraine war has shown how commercial drones, AI-supported targeting tools and improvised communication networks can be woven into an effective sensor-to-shooter infrastructure when an ecosystem of engineers, volunteers and software communities is mobilized. In contrast, highly centralized or rigid defense systems struggle to adjust when threat patterns evolve weekly. This difference between improvisation and structured innovation reflects what the SkyRadar article terms the transition from battlefield adaptation to systemic adaptation—turning ad-hoc solutions into scalable capabilities through platform architectures that maintain security and reliability.
Placed in this context, the Journal of Political Science article becomes part of a broader discussion on how modern conflicts reward integration, openness and rapid iteration. For training providers and military academies, the implications are straightforward. Synthetic radar environments, EW simulators and modular training architectures—such as those developed within the SkyRadar ecosystem—provide a way to prepare operators and planners for this new battlespace. They enable forces in Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa to experiment with detection strategies, analyse electronic signatures, understand the vulnerabilities of UAS in contested environments and practice decision-making loops that reflect contemporary operational pressures.
As drone warfare continues to shape the battlefield, innovation itself becomes a strategic resource. The convergence of political-science perspectives on drones and the platform-based innovation concepts articulated in SkyRadar’s work offers a coherent analytical frame: defense actors must not only acquire drones or counter-drone systems, but also cultivate the organisational and technological flexibility required to integrate them into evolving EW and C4ISR structures. This is the underlying theme of SkyRadar’s series—modern warfare is becoming a systemic competition of learning, adaptation and platform-enabled innovation.
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Giri, U.K. and Tiwari, S.K. 2024. From reconnaissance to combat: The multifaceted role of drones in the Russia–Ukraine war. Journal of Political Science, pp. 1–16.
Scholten, S. and Scholten, U. 2025. Platform-Based Innovation: Scaling Adaptation Through Open Ecosystems. SkyRadar Blog, 8 November. Available at: https://www.skyradar.com/blog/platform-based-innovation-scaling-adaptation-through-open-ecosystems