Editor’s Word: As President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discuss assembly face-to-face in Alaska later this week to debate an finish to the conflict in Ukraine, The Cipher Temporary is publishing this uncooked and unfiltered private account of right this moment’s conflict by means of the eyes of a former U.S. Particular Forces operator, who’s combating alongside Ukrainian troopers. We’ve granted his request for anonymity for private safety causes. You possibly can learn extra from the writer on his X account.
OPINION / EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — I wrote this report on the night time of Twenty second-Twenty third July 2025 within the area of two and a half hours, after midnight, and after having not completed any writing in years; and thus, I will be forgiven, I hope, for my idiosyncrasies and informality. I am a soldier.
I’m going by the callsign ‘Xen’ and I presently work below a Ukrainian Particular Operations Forces (SOF or “SSO” in Ukraine) regiment. My group 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. navy and lengthy earlier than the full-scale Russian invasion.
My causes for coming to Ukraine as a soldier-volunteer had 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 had 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 stuck wing drone strike operations. We practice (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, up to now two years, it has turn out to be clear that Russia is just not such a joke in any case, which ought to come as no shock to college students of historical past.
Regardless of fierce resistance and good innovation, Ukraine is dropping floor at an unsustainable fee, and morale is dropping. Whereas it will nonetheless take fairly just a few years on paper for Russia to attain its conflict targets, the actual fact is that collapse on the entrance could also be imminent.
What does this conflict seem like now?
A 20-year-old soldier sits in his bunker with a small group, on a mission he deliberate himself, flying $500 drones that had been assembled by volunteers in some basement in accordance with a always 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 through Starlink a always 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 group 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. This can be a far cry from the duties of a U.S. Marine infantry lance corporal.
From his place just a few 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 means of 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 journey motorbikes simply to hurry the method.
Even when 95% of them are killed of their march, a small proportion will move by means of 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 complete 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 through livestream. On the finish of the mission, the soldier will go residence and move on his kill footage to attain “factors” for his command to obtain extra 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 doubtless now – an autonomous terminal assault munition.
Regardless of the weapon, it was finally deployed towards him by a highly-skilled Russian drone group, hiding 5 or twenty kilometers behind the meat protect of infantry. By a mix of sheer evolutionary strain, the vestiges of a command-economy, and assistance from international powers (China specifically), Russia has of late, managed to largely out-innovate and out-scale Ukraine.
His buddy at one other unit continues the struggle fairly in a different way. He drives to conflict 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 techniques, and air protection techniques. When he’s completed together 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 approach again to a safehouse.
The enemy would love nothing greater than to seek out the place he sleeps or works and ship aerial bombs or midrange drones his approach. 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 greatest he is aware of how, hoping it’s sufficient to masks his digital signature. When a neighboring group is focused, it’s troublesome to say simply what they did incorrect or how they had 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, placing 500 kilometers or extra deep towards logistics and trade? Ought to they even hassle sporting uniforms once they hop out of a van for a pair hours to launch their pre-programmed drones, only for a traitorous native to simply establish 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 recent conflict, and the way quickly people are being taken out of the loop, and with how a lot engineering the typical drone soldier is being requested to know and carry out – how for much longer will it even make sense for educated troopers to struggle this fashion? Why not merely have the businesses launch the drones on their very own?
The truth is, Discipline Service Representatives already typically ride-along with drone groups, to indicate methods to appropriately make use of their platforms. I’m not even speaking right here of the actual fact somebody may remotely make use of unmanned weapons techniques from throughout the globe, in principle.
Listed here are some related societal forces or technological developments which can be driving the large warfare revolution that’s occurring in Ukraine: digitization, democratization, automation, miniaturization (Moore’s regulation), deflationary part 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 just a few 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 conflict, needed to be prepared forward of time to take care of 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 method seen in Ukraine or the authoritarian top-down method of Russia and China, there have to be a large acceleration of the navy and industrial OODA (observe, orient, resolve, act) loop with respect to tech employment (by way of technique, doctrine, TTPs, organizational construction, funding, and scaling). Our present decrepit establishments within the West can not 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 navy industrial advanced, our personal American model of corruption, our slow-moving congressional approvals course of, our fascination with extremely costly flagship applications, and so on.
The Cipher Temporary brings expert-level context to nationwide and world safety tales. It’s by no means been extra vital to know what’s occurring on this planet. Improve your entry to unique content material by changing into a subscriber.
Ukraine has far outstripped its personal outlays for drone manufacturing, creating an trade from nothing to provide hundreds of 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 conflict have typically stunned individuals, however on reflection, have appeared conservative. My prediction right here is that the overwhelming majority of drones utilized in Ukraine which can be produced for lower than $2000 will likely 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 sport. We already management single drones and drone motherships through top-down perspective and point-and-click instructions. If that is potential in Ukraine, what precisely are China’s capabilities?
I’ll go away it to suppose 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. navy brazenly refers to them as our adversary. So long as empires emerge (nevertheless veiled is their kind), and so long as they situation and debase fiat forex and debt, my principle holds that world wars will proceed.
I’m not right here to evaluate proper or incorrect. We’re the Athenian “empire”, with our allies preferring to suckle off us moderately than develop robust militaries of their very own, and we in flip draw 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 vitality that we are able to’t actually perceive till it has touched us. If impartial or allied nations watch us permit Ukraine or Taiwan to fall, they are going to roll over to the axis arrayed towards us. (Sue me in case you do not like Peloponnesian Warfare metaphors.)
From historic empires to the Napoleonic Wars to the buildup to WW2, we must always perceive {that a} nation which achieves complete 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 sources. It isn’t unthinkable that Russia may steamroll over Europe in the event that they defeat Ukraine, which (outdoors of Russia) has Europe’s largest navy and largest geographical footprint.
The Chinese language are getting ready for conflict at breakneck velocity and are partaking in growing saber-rattling. They’re supplying either side of the conflict in Ukraine with elements – thereby scaling their very own trade for conflict – however they’re principally lending assist to the Russians. They’re studying far quicker than the West, already making steps for the combination of drones right down to the bottom ranges of their navy construction. They’re most likely properly forward of the Russians and Ukrainians by now by way of swarming and autonomous drone applied sciences.
Within the USA, we could retain an edge by way of the farthest reaches of our technical developments, however by way of 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 expect an American provider battle group can defend itself towards ten or 100 thousand totally autonomous Chinese language USVs and UAVs of varied courses? Assuming the battle group may even observe and interact the incoming swarm, it doesn’t have sufficient munitions to cease it, and digital warfare will likely 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 means of”) innovation like directed vitality towards UAVs, do we actually suppose these will likely 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 tons of of delivery containers concurrently and launching hundreds of expendable (say, $20,000 every) autonomous deep-strike UAVs at our energy grid or different key targets?
People who can not fathom such an assault are naïve. In my earlier profession, pals at U.S. customs instructed me that Chinese language nationals had been stockpiling rifles within the U.S. by coercing their trade college students finding out in America to buy searching rifles through a loophole. The scholars, earlier than departing, would reap the benefits of one other loophole to present the rifles to incoming trade college students, who would additionally purchase rifles, creating an ever-increasing stockpile. U.S. Customs and Border Safety finally obtained smart to it and began monitoring them.
Additionally, Chinese language nationals within the U.S. are infamous for penetration-testing U.S. navy services, for instance merely attempting to drive vans straight by means of gate guard posts. Presumably these aren’t elite spies doing this, however moderately scared people who find themselves below coercion, not wanting hurt to befall their households throughout the ocean. This can be a problem for the American thoughts to understand however is actuality.
People additionally suppose our lifestyle won’t ever go away so long as we have now this or that, such because the Second Modification – “A rifle behind each blade of grass”. But when we lose our dominant standing on this 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 outdoors our borders. And over a era or two we may simply discover ourselves fractured and carved up after regularly dropping first monetary dominance after which the power to cohesively defend ourselves. To not point out, if you’d like your iPhone, you higher be capable of defend worldwide delivery and funds. It might appear an amoral tackle worldwide affairs, however don’t neglect within the international locations that will take our place as king, dissention is punished virtually 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 in case you’ve learn the entire above. Cease hand-wringing in regards to the dominos which will fall if Russia collapses as a result of dropping to Ukraine. Overtly and totally help Ukraine, give them what they should win this conflict. We’ve a key window of alternative earlier than mass-produced low cost autonomous drones are unleashed, throughout which American financial strain and strategic placing energy may collapse a fragile Russia in a single day or virtually in a single day. Subsequent, associate with Ukraine and use their institutional data to coach, advise, and help our personal navy and trade in revamping and scaling.
From the very 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 completed. A top-down restructuring of the navy and procurement course of would work. Or tons of of billions in non-public funding to create the drones, prepared to be used when the general public sector will get smart, would work too.
The above actions will function an actual and psychological deterrent to our different enemies, giving us respiratory room to organize for the inevitable.
Are you Subscribed to The Cipher Temporary’s Digital Channel on YouTube? There is no such thing as a higher place to get clear views from deeply skilled nationwide safety consultants.
Learn extra expert-driven nationwide safety insights, perspective and evaluation in The Cipher Temporary as a result of Nationwide Safety is Everybody’s Enterprise.