Editor’s Notice: As President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin speak about assembly face-to-face in Alaska later this week to debate an finish to the struggle in Ukraine, The Cipher Temporary is publishing this uncooked and unfiltered private account of as we speak’s struggle by the eyes of a former U.S. Particular Forces operator, who’s preventing alongside Ukrainian troopers. Now we have granted his request for anonymity for private safety causes. You’ll be able to learn extra from the writer on his X account.
OPINION / EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — I wrote this report on the evening of Twenty second-Twenty third July 2025 within the area of two and a half hours, after midnight, and after having not achieved any writing in years; and thus, I might be forgiven, I hope, for my idiosyncrasies and informality. I am a soldier.
I am going by the callsign ‘Xen’ and I at the moment work below a Ukrainian Particular Operations Forces (SOF or “SSO” in Ukraine) regiment. My staff chief and I are each former U.S. Particular Operations personnel. With out losing time on the small print, I’ll say that we’re “true believers” who supported Ukraine lengthy earlier than we left the U.S. army and lengthy earlier than the full-scale Russian invasion.
My causes for coming to Ukraine as a soldier-volunteer have been so intensely private. I used to be motivated by ethnicity, historical past, philosophy, and a deep instinct of the place all indicators in my life have been pointing.
I principally spun my wheels my first yr in Ukraine – it was extra Jarhead than Band of Brothers. I’m now actively collaborating in fight operations – specifically, rotary and glued wing drone strike operations. We prepare (and lately are educated by…), advise, help, accompany, and allow Ukrainian SOF; and in such capability, have near-total freedom of motion, granting us a breadth and depth of understanding throughout the battle.
Everybody is aware of how badly Ukraine upset the notion of Russian invincibility in 2022. Sadly, previously two years, it has turn into clear that Russia is just not such a joke in spite of everything, which ought to come as no shock to college students of historical past.
Regardless of fierce resistance and sensible innovation, Ukraine is shedding floor at an unsustainable fee, and morale is dropping. Whereas it might nonetheless take fairly a couple of years on paper for Russia to realize its struggle targets, the actual fact is that collapse on the entrance could also be imminent.
What does this struggle appear like now?
A 20-year-old soldier sits in his bunker with a small staff, on a mission he deliberate himself, flying $500 drones that have been assembled by volunteers in some basement based on a continually up to date distributed protocol. Refinements to the drones are made at his battalion’s casual drone lab, the place some elements are 3D-printed and others are crowdfunded. The younger soldier screens by way of Starlink a continually rotating livestream of quadcopter or fixed-wing expendable drone ISR platforms, both freely asking to kill or ready to be directed by an obligation officer to take action. His staff is all the time making small changes and attempting new issues with their drones, floor stations, and antennas, though most of them had zero engineering expertise earlier than discovering themselves right here. It is a far cry from the duties of a U.S. Marine infantry lance corporal.
From his place a couple of kilometers from the entrance, our drone soldier will fly his drones towards infantry only one to 10 kilometers deep into enemy territory. The infantry they hunt stroll relentlessly ahead, across the clock, like zombies, singly or in pairs (or small groups) by rubble, tree traces, and even open fields. They’ve little alternative however to take a rifle and press ahead for a fast dying – what waits behind them is worse. Some trip motorbikes simply to hurry the method.
Even when 95% of them are killed of their march, a small proportion will cross by the massive gaps within the porous, skinny Ukrainian defenses, and will shock and gun down the unsung Ukrainian infantry or mortar groups. Some could even make it far sufficient to slaughter drone groups of their hides. In the event that they take even one tree line a day throughout a entrance, it’s greater than sufficient.
This entire drama unfolds each in entrance of officers in conventional Tactical Operations Facilities, and more and more, in entrance of splintered command groups and people watching from safehouses by way of livestream. On the finish of the mission, the soldier will go dwelling and cross on his kill footage to attain “factors” for his command to obtain further official funding.
Sadly, this younger soldier’s service is lower brief when he was wounded whereas being pushed to his subsequent place in a Humvee. Maybe it was a fiber optic FPV drone, or a remotely laid mine, or a loitering munition guided by an expendable ISR drone, or a radio-guided FPV drone indifferent from its mothership-repeater platform, or – more and more probably now – an autonomous terminal assault munition.
Regardless of the weapon, it was finally deployed towards him by a highly-skilled Russian drone staff, hiding 5 or twenty kilometers behind the meat defend of infantry. By a combination of sheer evolutionary stress, the vestiges of a command-economy, and the help of overseas powers (China specifically), Russia has of late, managed to largely out-innovate and out-scale Ukraine.
His buddy at one other unit continues the combat fairly in another way. He drives to struggle in an unmarked van or truck, flying midrange (30-80 km) drone missions from 10-20 kilometers from the entrance, destroying exquisitely costly Russian rocket artillery, digital warfare methods, and air protection methods. When he’s achieved along with his mission, he drives from his bunker to a village simply a number of kilometers away and stops for a espresso, melting into the inhabitants earlier than rigorously making his method again to a safehouse.
The enemy would love nothing greater than to search out the place he sleeps or works and ship aerial bombs or midrange drones his method. He’s additionally a younger soldier with little understanding of intelligence company fieldcraft, however he nonetheless diligently swaps SIM playing cards or locations units in Faraday luggage as finest he is aware of how, hoping it’s sufficient to masks his digital signature. When a neighboring staff is focused, it’s troublesome to say simply what they did unsuitable or how they have been pinpointed, or if it was in actual fact, only a random strike.
And what in regards to the troopers who perform deep strike operations, launching drones from 50 or 100 kilometers or extra from the entrance, putting 500 kilometers or extra deep towards logistics and trade? Ought to they even hassle carrying uniforms after they hop out of a van for a pair hours to launch their pre-programmed drones, only for a traitorous native to simply determine them and textual content their location to the enemy?
And with how shortly the short- to mid- to deep-strike ranges have elevated in only a couple years of contemporary struggle, and the way quickly people are being taken out of the loop, and with how a lot engineering the common drone soldier is being requested to grasp and carry out – how for much longer will it even make sense for educated troopers to combat this fashion? Why not merely have the businesses launch the drones on their very own?
Actually, Area Service Representatives already typically ride-along with drone groups, to indicate how you can accurately make use of their platforms. I’m not even speaking right here of the actual fact somebody may remotely make use of unmanned weapons methods from throughout the globe, in idea.
Listed here are some related societal forces or technological developments which might be driving the big warfare revolution that’s taking place in Ukraine: digitization, democratization, automation, miniaturization (Moore’s regulation), deflationary element prices, crowdfunding, cryptocurrency, social media, networked units, open supply / open protocol, decentralization, distribution, crowd engineering, soldier as engineer, engineer as soldier, 3D printing (broadly outlined), AI (broadly outlined), sensor fusion, and on and on.
“Necessity is the mom of invention”, and Ukraine has had a couple of years now to invent. The answer has largely been compartmentalized and decentralized, coming from the underside up. But when an observer nation, with out the apparent impetus of open struggle, wished to be prepared forward of time to cope with an adversary (reminiscent of China) who has been steadily innovating in parallel, what can they do?
The sum impact of the above elements is that this: if a top-down answer within the West is to compete with both the previous backside up strategy seen in Ukraine or the authoritarian top-down strategy of Russia and China, there have to be an enormous acceleration of the army and industrial OODA (observe, orient, determine, act) loop with respect to tech employment (when it comes to technique, doctrine, TTPs, organizational construction, funding, and scaling). Our present decrepit establishments within the West can’t obtain this and require radical restructuring. Hopefully, that is self evident and I don’t have to launch right into a monologue in regards to the army industrial complicated, our personal American model of corruption, our slow-moving congressional approvals course of, our fascination with extremely costly flagship applications, and many others.
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Ukraine has far outstripped its personal outlays for drone manufacturing, creating an trade from nothing to supply thousands and thousands of drones. These drones are sometimes already partly autonomous (typically totally autonomous within the case of deep strike) and have gotten extra so each week. Moreover, autonomy is coming to cheaper and cheaper drones.
My private predictions for the tempo of improvement and course of the struggle have typically shocked individuals, however looking back, have appeared conservative. My prediction right here is that the overwhelming majority of drones utilized in Ukraine which might be produced for lower than $2000 might be totally or near-fully autonomous (as desired) inside two years, and that decrease expert troopers will use them as shorter vary fire-and-forget weapons whereas elite groups will command drones in a swarming capability, like in a method recreation. We already management single drones and drone motherships by way of top-down perspective and point-and-click instructions. If that is attainable in Ukraine, what precisely are China’s capabilities?
I’ll go away it to assume tanks and historians to ascertain linkages between the spreading fires of worldwide battle. What I do know is that battle is certainly spreading and the first adversaries are fairly clear. The Chinese language know we’re their enemy. The U.S. army overtly refers to them as our adversary. So long as empires emerge (nonetheless veiled is their type), and so long as they challenge and debase fiat foreign money and debt, my idea holds that world wars will proceed.
I’m not right here to guage proper or unsuitable. We’re the Athenian “empire”, with our allies preferring to suckle off us reasonably than develop sturdy militaries of their very own, and we in flip shrink back from making good on our guarantees. Our enemy – the Russians and Chinese language (the Spartan “empire”) could seem backwards to us now, however can summon a conquering, jealous power that we will’t actually perceive till it has touched us. If impartial or allied nations watch us permit Ukraine or Taiwan to fall, they’ll roll over to the axis arrayed towards us. (Sue me if you happen to don’t love Peloponnesian Warfare metaphors.)
From historic empires to the Napoleonic Wars to the buildup to WW2, we should always perceive {that a} nation which achieves whole victory over one other nation, removed from being exhausted, can typically simply springboard to additional conquests, influencing or urgent the defeated populace into swelling their forces and assets. It isn’t unthinkable that Russia may steamroll over Europe in the event that they defeat Ukraine, which (exterior of Russia) has Europe’s largest army and largest geographical footprint.
The Chinese language are getting ready for struggle at breakneck velocity and are partaking in rising saber-rattling. They’re supplying either side of the struggle in Ukraine with parts – thereby scaling their very own trade for struggle – however they’re principally lending help to the Russians. They’re studying far quicker than the West, already making steps for the mixing of drones all the way down to the bottom ranges of their army construction. They’re in all probability properly forward of the Russians and Ukrainians by now when it comes to swarming and autonomous drone applied sciences.
Within the USA, we could retain an edge when it comes to the farthest reaches of our technical developments, however when it comes to integration, scaling, and institutional data, we fall brief.
We’re fortunate if a regiment has a drone platoon. We arrogantly assume that digital warfare and strategic airpower will avail us towards the Chinese language. If handfuls of Ukrainian naval drones may defeat the Russian navy within the Black Sea, how precisely do we predict an American service battle group can defend itself towards ten or 100 thousand totally autonomous Chinese language USVs and UAVs of varied lessons? Assuming the battle group may even monitor and have interaction the incoming swarm, it doesn’t have sufficient munitions to cease it, and digital warfare might be of little use towards an autonomous foe.
If we place our hopes on some protection (by no means thoughts that “the bomber all the time will get by”) innovation like directed power towards UAVs, do we actually assume these might be fight prepared, scaled, built-in, and educated on so that each vessel has layered 360-degree protection with them – within the subsequent two years?
And if Ukraine’s Safety Service was capable of cripple Russian strategic air energy with a handful of small quadcopters in Operation Spiderweb, what precisely will we anticipate the Chinese language to have ready for us? What’s to cease a number of civilian-flagged Chinese language tankers off the coast of the U.S. from opening lots of of transport containers concurrently and launching hundreds of expendable (say, $20,000 every) autonomous deep-strike UAVs at our energy grid or different key targets?
Individuals who can’t fathom such an assault are naïve. In my earlier profession, associates at U.S. customs informed me that Chinese language nationals had been stockpiling rifles within the U.S. by coercing their alternate college students finding out in America to buy searching rifles by way of a loophole. The scholars, earlier than departing, would reap the benefits of one other loophole to present the rifles to incoming alternate college students, who would additionally purchase rifles, creating an ever-increasing stockpile. U.S. Customs and Border Safety finally obtained clever to it and began monitoring them.
Additionally, Chinese language nationals within the U.S. are infamous for penetration-testing U.S. army amenities, for instance merely attempting to drive vehicles straight by gate guard posts. Presumably these aren’t elite spies doing this, however reasonably scared people who find themselves below coercion, not wanting hurt to befall their households throughout the ocean. It is a problem for the American thoughts to understand however is actuality.
Individuals additionally assume our lifestyle won’t ever go away so long as now we have this or that, such because the Second Modification – “A rifle behind each blade of grass”. But when we lose our dominant standing on the planet – our “empire” of kinds – with its huge management over the worldwide monetary system, that lifestyle will disappear essentially.
Our dominance is a strategic deterrence towards chemical, organic, and nuclear threats (Ukraine’s plight is instructive right here) originating exterior our borders. And over a era or two we may simply discover ourselves fractured and carved up after progressively shedding first monetary dominance after which the power to cohesively defend ourselves. To not point out, in order for you your iPhone, you higher be capable to shield worldwide transport and funds. It could appear an amoral tackle worldwide affairs, however don’t neglect within the international locations that will take our place as king, dissention is punished nearly universally by dying or disappearance. We nonetheless retain the ethical excessive floor, regardless of our flaws and misadventures.
So, what ought to the U.S. do now? It’s fairly apparent if you happen to’ve learn the entire above. Cease hand-wringing in regards to the dominos that will fall if Russia collapses resulting from shedding to Ukraine. Overtly and totally assist Ukraine, give them what they should win this struggle. Now we have a key window of alternative earlier than mass-produced low cost autonomous drones are unleashed, throughout which American financial stress and strategic putting energy may collapse a fragile Russia in a single day or nearly in a single day. Subsequent, associate with Ukraine and use their institutional data to coach, advise, and help our personal army and trade in revamping and scaling.
From the best ranges of energy, whether or not within the non-public or public sector, somebody who’s a “true believer” must order work to be achieved. A top-down restructuring of the army and procurement course of would work. Or lots of of billions in non-public funding to create the drones, prepared to be used when the general public sector will get clever, would work too.
The above actions will function an actual and psychological deterrent to our different enemies, giving us respiration room to arrange for the inevitable.
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