Learning from Ukraine: Naval drones and strategic advantage
The Memorandum | No. 06.2025
29th October 2022 marked a turning point in naval warfare. Just eight months after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) – essentially drone boats – launched a bold raid on the large Russian naval base of Sevastopol in occupied Crimea. These diminutive craft skilfully evaded defences and homed in on Russian warships, some penetrating deep inside the previously thought safe harbour.
The attack came close to hitting key Russian naval assets, including the flagship, the Admiral Makarov, a frigate, which inherited the role from the ill-fated Moskva, a cruiser. While this first raid ultimately inflicted little material damage, its psychological impact was huge. It showed that Ukraine had the means to strike deep inside Russia’s protected harbours, challenging the superior fleet’s sea control. And it was only the beginning: in the months that followed, Ukrainian USVs chased Russia’s Black Sea Fleet back to the eastern coast of the Black Sea, sinking a string of important logistics ships and two combatants. They achieved a level of threat, and reach, which would have been unthinkable only months earlier. Suddenly, the Black Sea looks a lot smaller than before 2022.
This is part of a drone revolution in warfare. In the naval sphere, drones are shifting the advantage to the navies which can adapt to the opportunities they present.
What Ukraine has achieved with USVs is unprecedented. The smaller naval force, almost powerless on paper, has pushed back a vastly superior conventional force to the point of humiliation. It can be left to naval historians to find parallels in history, but the obscurity of their examples will tell the bigger story. Naval wars were not supposed to go this way; Russia certainly cannot have expected to find itself in such a position.
Uncrewed platforms have rebalanced the naval power in the Black Sea, upsetting conventional wisdom in the process.
So European navies, of which the Royal Navy is central, find themselves at a crossroads of naval technology. At the same time as this is happening on the technology front, we are seeing an increasingly emboldened Russia, and a seismic shift in United States (US) foreign policy, which is challenging alliances and pushing Europe towards greater defence independence. It will be vital that European navies adapt to the new realities rather than trying to compensate for a withdrawing US power by mirroring lost capabilities.
Revitalised European navies should adopt uncrewed strategies similar to those used by Ukraine to secure their local seas – including the confined waters of the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the waters around Britain – in the event of a future conflict. For this, they need to shift to a wartime mindset and embrace innovation, as Ukraine has done. This also means that they must resist the peacetime tendency to impose overly narrow yet exacting requirements which undermine the key advantages of uncrewed platforms: affordability, adaptability, speed of development, and rapid deployment.
There are implications beyond the war in the Black Sea. At the same time, the Houthis in Yemen, equipped with Iranian technology USVs, are inflicting significant damage on global trade. The conflict in the Red Sea, where the Iranian backed Houthis have been attacking passing ships since October 2023, reinforces the usefulness of uncrewed platforms in the offensive role.
The Houthis’ approach to attacking ships has been to throw anything and everything at their target. Ships caught in their sights can expect combinations of sea skimming missiles, ballistic missiles, weaponised aerial drones and USVs as they negotiate the narrow chokepoints around the entrance to the Red Sea. Of these, the USVs have arguably been the most effective. In several of the cases where a targeted ship was ultimately abandoned and sunk, the initial disabling blow has come from USVs.
The Houthis have received substantial material and technical assistance from Iran, including missiles, aerial drones, and USVs. Yet, many of these platforms are suitable for local manufacture, demonstrating the accessibility of the technology. Like Ukraine’s, the Houthi’s USVs are based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and low-tech, even crude, implementations. Their USVs are less sophisticated and capable than Ukraine’s, but well suited to their purpose.
The Red Sea experience has shown that merchant ships are generally more susceptible to being disabled by USVs than, for example, anti-ship ballistic missiles. The same may be less true of warships, which are smaller and have a central superstructure jammed with vital equipment. But the bigger takeaway, however, is that the age of USV warfare is truly with us; it is not just a Black Sea phenomenon. The technology is accessible to smaller countries and even non-state actors, and their targets might not only be the best equipped and defended warships.
USVs used in the offensive role such as in the Black Sea, for all their merits, come with limitations. It can be argued that there are fewer opportunities for the Ukraine-style offensive-orientated USVs in open waters, and their impact will be lessened.
Leading navies are or aspire to be, ‘blue water’ fleets. This means that they can operate in the vast expanses of the world’s oceans, at great distances from their home ports with limited shore support and for great lengths of time.
However, the areas which can be considered blue water are shrinking. The uncrewed platforms, combined with steadily improving intelligence, communications and ever better shore based anti-ship weapons, are pushing blue water far back over the radar horizon off shore. The Baltic, Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf have been considered constrained waters for some time. Today they could be dominated, or at least contested, by simple weaponised uncrewed platforms. And around Britain – in the North Sea, Irish Sea and English Channel – there are obvious areas where the same applies.
Before 2022, there were many USV projects in the navies of free and open countries. Most were unarmed, a few had machine guns, but none were of the concept deployed by Ukraine. This meant that there were no off-the-shelf USVs in development which could have been transferred to Ukraine in an unmodified form to perform this mission. It is as if the navies of free and open countries had not foreseen the single most effective and, with hindsight obvious, application of uncrewed boats.
There may be some who feel that this characterisation is unfair, or at least a little harsh. It is true that leading navies were very aware of the small boat threat. Navies such as the Royal Navy had spent decades improving close-in defences to deal with the Iranian mosquito fleet, and this could be extended to the USV threat. We can reasonably suppose that, in Russia’s shoes, they would have performed much better against the USVs threat than Russia did. But this was the issue; it was viewed as a threat much more than an opportunity. As a new era of naval warfare dawns, and in a world where Europe, and especially Britain, finds itself surrounded by confined seas, this needs to change.
We need to unlock the potential strategic advantage of small, cheap, less-than-perfect but useful in a real war, offensively orientated, uncrewed, surface vessels.
Regardless of one’s personal views on naval strategy, it is undeniable that uncrewed technologies are shaping both threats and opportunities at sea.
Faced with the incredible pace of geopolitical change, and the background noise of institutional inertia, it will be a challenge for free and open navies and governments to learn the right lessons from the unfolding war in the Black Sea. But a greater danger may be that they do not allow themselves the intellectual freedom and space to learn any lessons at all.
H I Sutton is a writer, illustrator and analyst who specialises in submarines and sub-surface systems.
This article is part of the Council on Geostrategy’s Strategic Advantage Cell.
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