Ukraine Military History Institute
Russia is reorganising its army around drones, not adding a drone unit
Rob Lee starts with a figure that is easy to read past. Russia is planning to roughly double its Unmanned Systems Forces this year, from 87,000 to 165,000 people.
The number is large, but the structure behind it is the more telling part. Lee describes a layered build-out rather than a single new branch.
Russia wants to create around 10 unmanned systems brigades, one for every military district. Two or three more would sit under centralised subordination. Every army command would get an unmanned systems regiment, every fleet would get a regiment, and every division would get a battalion.
Lee calls it a significant reform of the military, one built to absorb UAS, UGVs, naval drones and the rest. That is drones written into every echelon of the force, from district down to division, not a capability bolted onto the side.
Ukraine already made this move, and the US has not
Lee is plain about where each army stands. Ukraine has already moved this way, and very quickly.
His concern is closer to home. "We are not moving nearly fast enough," he says of the United States, and he says it twice in the space of a minute. Structurally, he sees that as a huge issue.
This is the context for the sharpest point Lee makes. Russia and Ukraine are learning from the same war, at the same time, and both are rebuilding their organisations around what they learned. Lee's worry is that the US is watching the result without changing its own structure to match.
Putting FPVs in a battalion misses the idea
The failure Lee describes is not a lack of interest in drones. It is a narrow reading of them.
His example is FPVs. The reasoning he warns against goes: FPVs are interesting, so put them in a battalion. In his words, "That's missing the idea."
What the war has produced, he argues, is a full ecosystem of different drone types. The capability is only part of it. The software, and everything else that goes with it, is the rest. Sam Cook fills in the list: the training, the maintenance, the supply.
Once you accept that, Lee says, it becomes different tactics and different organisational changes, and the way an army is organised has to change too. A drone battalion inside an otherwise unchanged structure is the thing he is arguing against.
The test is whether a brigade can fix its own drones
Lee makes the argument concrete at brigade level. Every Ukrainian brigade, he says, has its own workshops: a UGV workshop and a drone workshop.
The point of those workshops is mundane and decisive. A brigade needs mechanics who can fix equipment when it arrives, so that what is delivered stays in service. Of the US, Lee says simply: "We don't have that right now."
The same gap shows up higher up. Lee notes that Ukraine runs R&D labs at corps level, where innovation happens inside the corps because the system is meant to be decentralised. He calls that important, and again says the US does not have it.
Cook pushes the point further down. Brigades, he says, now have their own R&D labs. Lee's response is a genuine "Do they?", and Cook gives the example: in the 7th Corps, every single brigade has one.
That exchange is worth pausing on. Even Lee registers it as news that the innovation layer has moved below corps level. If the lab sits in the brigade, the distance between a problem found in the field and a fix being made is very short.
An open offer that nobody has taken up
The discussion closes on a detail that reads almost as a parable.
Cook recounts that the commander of the 7th Airborne Corps said he would love to connect with American airborne commanders. He was happy, Cook says, to talk to any American division commander and share his lessons.
Cook cannot see why that offer would not be taken. Some of his own West Point classmates, he expects, are now commanding brigades, and he imagines they would want to get on Zoom with these officers and share lessons learned. The commander on the other end is running exactly the kind of decentralised drone and R&D structure Lee has just described.
Yet as Cook tells it, nobody has taken him up on it. His closing line is a frank admission rather than an analysis: he does not know what is going on with the US military.
The two halves of the argument fit together. Russia is reorganising its force at scale around what this war teaches. A Ukrainian corps commander is offering to teach it directly. And the army Lee and Cook are worried about is, on their account, doing neither.
What to watch
- Russia's Unmanned Systems Forces headcount. Lee gave a plan of 87,000 growing to 165,000 this year. Whether that figure is reached, and whether the district brigades and division battalions actually stand up, is checkable over the coming months.
- Drone maintenance below division in US units. Lee's test is whether a US brigade gains its own drone and UGV workshop with mechanics who can repair what it receives. Until it does, his "we don't have that" stands.
- Whether the 7th Corps offer is accepted. Cook described a standing invitation from a Ukrainian corps commander to American airborne commanders. A first exchange of lessons between them would be the clearest sign the gap he describes is closing.