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 warfare in Ukraine, The Cipher Transient is publishing this uncooked and unfiltered private account of as we speak’s warfare by way of the eyes of a former U.S. Particular Forces operator, who’s preventing alongside Ukrainian troopers. We’ve got 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 evening of Twenty second-Twenty third July 2025 within the house of two and a half hours, after midnight, and after having not achieved any writing in years; and thus, I could be forgiven, I hope, for my idiosyncrasies and informality. I am a soldier.
I am going by the callsign ‘Xen’ and I presently work underneath a Ukrainian Particular Operations Forces (SOF or “SSO” in Ukraine) regiment. My crew chief and I are each former U.S. Particular Operations personnel. With out losing time on the main points, 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 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 largely spun my wheels my first 12 months in Ukraine – it was extra Jarhead than Band of Brothers. I’m now actively taking part in fight operations – particularly, rotary and stuck wing drone strike operations. We prepare (and as of late 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 change into clear that Russia will not be such a joke in any case, 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 charge, and morale is dropping. Whereas it might nonetheless take fairly just a few years on paper for Russia to attain its warfare objectives, the actual fact is that collapse on the entrance could also be imminent.
What does this warfare appear like now?
A 20-year-old soldier sits in his bunker with a small crew, on a mission he deliberate himself, flying $500 drones that had been assembled by volunteers in some basement in accordance with a consistently 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 consistently 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 crew is at all times making small changes and making an attempt 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 way of rubble, tree traces, and even open fields. They’ve little selection however to take a rifle and press ahead for a fast loss of life – 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 way of the massive gaps within the porous, skinny Ukrainian defenses, and will shock and gun down the unsung Ukrainian infantry or mortar groups. Some might 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 house 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 quick 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 in the end deployed towards him by a highly-skilled Russian drone crew, 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 the help of overseas powers (China particularly), Russia has of late, managed to largely out-innovate and out-scale Ukraine.
His pal at one other unit continues the combat fairly in a different way. He drives to warfare 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 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 method 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 method. He’s additionally a younger soldier with little understanding of intelligence company fieldcraft, however he nonetheless diligently swaps SIM playing cards or locations gadgets in Faraday luggage as finest he is aware of how, hoping it’s sufficient to masks his digital signature. When a neighboring crew is focused, it’s tough to say simply what they did flawed or how they had been pinpointed, or if it was in actual fact, only a random strike.
And what concerning 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 business? 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 establish them and textual content their location to the enemy?
And with how rapidly the short- to mid- to deep-strike ranges have elevated in only a couple years of recent warfare, 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 know 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?
In truth, Area Service Representatives already usually ride-along with drone groups, to indicate tips on how to 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 can be driving the large warfare revolution that’s taking place in Ukraine: digitization, democratization, automation, miniaturization (Moore’s legislation), deflationary part prices, crowdfunding, cryptocurrency, social media, networked gadgets, 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 warfare, wished to be prepared forward of time to cope with an adversary (resembling China) who has been steadily innovating in parallel, what can they do?
The sum impact of the above components 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 should be a large 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 concerning the army industrial advanced, our personal American model of corruption, our slow-moving congressional approvals course of, our fascination with extremely costly flagship packages, and so forth.
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Ukraine has far outstripped its personal outlays for drone manufacturing, creating an business from nothing to provide tens of millions of drones. These drones are sometimes already partly autonomous (usually absolutely 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 warfare have usually 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 shall be absolutely 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 technique recreation. We already management single drones and drone motherships by way of top-down perspective and point-and-click instructions. If that is potential in Ukraine, what precisely are China’s capabilities?
I’ll depart it to suppose tanks and historians to determine 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 (nevertheless veiled is their kind), and so long as they challenge and debase fiat forex and debt, my idea holds that world wars will proceed.
I’m not right here to evaluate proper or flawed. We’re the Athenian “empire”, with our allies preferring to suckle off us slightly than develop sturdy 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”) might seem backwards to us now, however can summon a conquering, jealous power 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’ll roll over to the axis arrayed towards us. (Sue me should you don’t love Peloponnesian Conflict metaphors.)
From historical empires to the Napoleonic Wars to the buildup to WW2, we should always perceive {that a} nation which achieves complete victory over one other nation, removed from being exhausted, can usually simply springboard to additional conquests, influencing or urgent the defeated populace into swelling their forces and sources. It’s not 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 making ready for warfare at breakneck velocity and are partaking in growing saber-rattling. They’re supplying each side of the warfare in Ukraine with elements – thereby scaling their very own business for warfare – however they’re largely lending help 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 army construction. They’re most likely nicely forward of the Russians and Ukrainians by now when it comes to swarming and autonomous drone applied sciences.
Within the USA, we might 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 quick.
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 provider battle group can defend itself towards ten or 100 thousand absolutely autonomous Chinese language USVs and UAVs of varied lessons? Assuming the battle group may even observe and have interaction the incoming swarm, it doesn’t have sufficient munitions to cease it, and digital warfare shall be of little use towards an autonomous foe.
If we place our hopes on some protection (by no means thoughts that “the bomber at all times will get by way of”) innovation like directed power towards UAVs, do we actually suppose these shall 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 in a position to cripple Russian strategic air energy with a handful of small quadcopters in Operation Spiderweb, what precisely will we count on 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 a whole bunch of delivery containers concurrently and launching 1000’s of expendable (say, $20,000 every) autonomous deep-strike UAVs at our energy grid or different key targets?
People who can’t fathom such an assault are naïve. In my earlier profession, buddies at U.S. customs instructed me that Chinese language nationals had been stockpiling rifles within the U.S. by coercing their change college students learning in America to buy searching rifles by way of a loophole. The scholars, earlier than departing, would benefit from one other loophole to reward the rifles to incoming change college students, who would additionally purchase rifles, creating an ever-increasing stockpile. U.S. Customs and Border Safety ultimately bought 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 making an attempt to drive vans straight by way of gate guard posts. Presumably these aren’t elite spies doing this, however slightly scared people who find themselves underneath 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 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 earth – 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 technology or two we may simply discover ourselves fractured and carved up after regularly shedding first monetary dominance after which the flexibility to cohesively defend ourselves. To not point out, if you would 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 loss of life 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 should you’ve learn the entire above. Cease hand-wringing concerning the dominos that will fall if Russia collapses on account of shedding to Ukraine. Overtly and absolutely assist Ukraine, give them what they should win this warfare. We’ve got 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 army and business 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 achieved. A top-down restructuring of the army and procurement course of would work. Or a whole bunch 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 respiratory room to arrange for the inevitable.
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