When more data makes war harder to read

Ukraine has turned drones, sensors and battlefield software into an industrial-scale war machine. Yet the lesson is not simply that more technology wins. It is that advanced systems can also produce too many pictures of the same war.

By Hubert Raymond and Jean Langlois

In October 2024, Russia launched more than 2,000 attack drones against Ukraine in a single month. Ukrainian forces said they intercepted 1,185 of them, while 738 were “lost” after electronic warfare or navigation failure. The numbers are striking, but the operational lesson is not only about drones. It is about saturation. Modern war is becoming a problem of volume, interpretation and speed. Ukraine has understood this faster than most European armies. In 2024, President Volodymyr Zelensky said the country could produce four million drones a year and had already contracted 1.5 million. RUSI later estimated that Ukrainian production had grown from only 3,000–5,000 drones in 2022 to more than 2.2 million in 2024, with projections of 4.5 million in 2025. This is not an incremental change. It is the industrialization of tactical sensing and strike.

Scale creates its own fog

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