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Drone Warfare in Ukraine with Simon Shuster

·55 min·5 clips

Brave One turned confirmed Russian tank strikes into 40 points that units can spend on drones.

1. Software Engineering Daily episode on drone warfare in Ukraine follows Simon Schuster and K-Ball through the war's software, hardware, and ethics. 2. Simon Schuster is the guest, a Time magazine correspondent who has reported on Russia and Ukraine for about two decades and wrote The Showman on Volodymyr Zelensky. 3. K-Ball is the host, and he uses Schuster's reporting to ask what Ukraine's war reveals about the future of warfare. 4. Schuster frames the war as a shift from tanks and artillery in February 2022 to drones, jamming, and battlefield software within months. 5. He says Ukrainian civilians and engineers improvised in garages, while U.S. and European support helped them counter Russia's air superiority. 6. The first turning point he describes is the use of commercial FPV drones, many built around DJI hardware, for reconnaissance and one-way strikes. 7. He says Ukrainians then adapted agricultural drones and naval drones for battlefield tasks, including a Dragon Drone that sprayed burning fuel into trenches. 8. Starlink became essential when Ukrainian teams put a Starlink antenna on a drone in a garage on the outskirts of Kyiv in spring 2022. 9. Schuster says that experiment let pilots control drones through the internet instead of vulnerable radio links. 10. He explains that both sides answered with electronic warfare, spoofing, and fiber-optic drones that trail a physical cable to avoid jamming. 11. He says those fiber-optic drones can be jam-proof, but they are vulnerable to trees, cuts, and other physical failures. 12. Schuster describes Delta as a battlefield-awareness system that maps drones and lets operators click a drone to see its live camera feed. 13. He says the more sophisticated systems require programmers, military officers, and diaspora coders working across Ukraine, Canada, the United States, and Europe. 14. The most striking innovation he covers is Mikhail Fyodorov's Brave One marketplace, which assigns points to confirmed strikes. 15. Schuster says a Russian tank was worth 40 points in the early version, and units could spend those points on more drones or equipment. 16. He says the monthly leaderboard turned drone units into public celebrities and pushed them to share tactics, hardware choices, and training. 17. He then turns to AI-assisted targeting at Skyfall, where an interface reportedly lets operators choose how much certainty software needs before striking. 18. Schuster says the company has held back wider release because Ukrainian law does not yet clearly assign responsibility for an autonomous mistake. 19. Engineers, defense technologists, and AI-policy watchers will like it. 20. Listeners wanting a pure combat-history recap may skip it.

As heard by us

A sharp look at how Ukraine turned drone warfare into a public system of morale, evidence, and unresolved limits.

Ukraine's drone war comes through here as a fight shaped not only by hardware, but by incentives, visibility, and trust in information. Simon Schuster follows how drone commanders built public profiles through social accounts, billboards, and television interviews, turning…

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Want to see how Ukraine turned drone warfare into a strange mix of rankings, morale, data, and battlefield feedback?

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