interview The war in Ukraine is increasingly becoming a battle of drones, and defense software firm Auterion has just won a $50 million Pentagon contract to supply 33,000 AI-powered “strike kits” that aim to augment Ukrainian UAVs and push them to the front lines.

The [1]so-called "strike kits" consist of a circuit board based around the defense company's Skynode S system, which uses custom software to avoid jamming and give a level of autonomy to drones once an operator has picked the target.

"We've built a proprietary software defined radio controller to avoid jamming," Auterion CEO Lorenz Meier told The Register . "We have a very fast hopping link that is encrypted. So you go from analog to frequency hopping and encryption, so that is a significant benefit."

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He explained that some systems, operating under line-of-sight, are limited in the extent to which the controller can do final targeting. The Skynode systems can be flown higher, until the operator identifies the right target, then sent on their mission without operator control for the last mile.

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This will give the Ukrainian operators a significant advantage, he claims, since most Russian jamming systems are range limited and can only operate in that last mile. Having a drone smart enough to carry out the job without a link to the operator negates such jamming.

"You can lock onto the target while you still have the link, and then you can lose the link as you approach the target, which defeats any manually guided drone, but does not defeat our product," he told us.

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The Ukrainian army has already successfully tested around 3,000 drones using the circuit boards and software added to off-the-shelf hardware. But Ukraine claims to have manufactured around two million drones last year and [6]has a goal of four million this year. So 33,000 advanced bits of kit are a drop in the ocean, for now.

The drones used are domestically produced in Ukraine and have the strike kits added in later using standard connection ports. The custom OS allows the use of AI vision systems developed by Auterion for targeting and navigation, something Meier has been working on for many years both in academia and in business.

The Ukrainian forces have used drones to great effect in ambush attacks like [7]Operation Spiderweb , where over 100 drones were reportedly smuggled close to five Russian airbases, thousands of miles from the front line. The drones reportedly destroyed or damaged [8]more than 40 planes. Meier declined to comment on whether his software was used in the attacks.

[9]Ukrainian hackers claim to have destroyed major Russian drone maker's entire network

[10]Military-tech upstart Anduril pushes further into NATO with German arms maker deal

[11]America and Britain gear up with Project Flytrap to bring anti-drone kit to the battlefield

[12]Hegseth signs flying memo to expand military use of cheap drones in oddball video

On the other side of the conflict, Russia has massively stepped up its production after initially underestimating the usefulness of drones in combat. It has secured the manufacturing rights to Iran's Shahed 136 drone and then augmenting its flight capabilities and calling the platform the Geran-2.

Footage released last week shows the latest Russian drone factory, with teenagers building Geran-2s that can be launched from a modified American pickup truck. Some drones have also been found [13]kitted out with Starlink antennas for command and control.

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An [15]investigation by Russian publication-in-exile The Insider claims state-backed games are being used to steer kids toward drone warfare. One such game features intelligent bears piloting drones to defend their "energy honey" from waves of cyber-bees. Backed by Putin, the Berloga platform has enrolled over 600,000 students, with the aim of guiding them into real-world drone development, according to the report.

But this approach has some fundamental flaws, Meier argued. He believes that first-person drones, where the operator wears a helmet to see what the drone sees, are going to be obsolete.

"The forces that tend to rely on a lot of soldiers today stick to trying to do manual control, whereas we do not have that luxury in the Western world. We want to spare the lives of soldiers. We don't want to put them close to the front line." He says that mass-drone swarms that seem to be the coming thing in warfare would overwhelm human operators by sheer amount of targets that need to be dealt with.

We want to have as much automation as possible

"We want to have as much automation as possible and that means that we don't want, from a doctrine perspective, to create a situation where we have all-manual control drones. That the goal here is to counter that with drones that have some level of automation, if not autonomy," Meier said.

"You can intercept a slow flying Shahed or ISR drone with a human pilot. That is a World War Two speed level, so to speak. It's the same speed as a WWII, but I'm expecting speeds, if it's head on, of several 100 miles an hour, and humans can't deal with that."

The cost-benefit analysis is clear. A Russian T-90 tank, or the American M1A1 unit, costs around $4.5 million to manufacture, but both are extremely vulnerable to a top-down strike on the cockpit using a drone where the armor is thinnest. Auterion's kit costs around $1,000 per unit for the chip board and that makes for cost-effective drone operations.

NATO is getting the message, Meier said. The UK, Germany, and the Netherlands are getting on board with drones in a big way - not just with his company's kit. The future of warfare is no longer about large battalions of expensive hardware and logistical supplies - drones are much cheaper and don't require supply lines that are also prone to attack.

Meanwhile, both sides are now gearing up for drone defenses, including [16]stringing fishing nets over key supply routes to disable such attacks, somewhat akin to the old barrage balloons used in WWII. It's what evolutionary scientists call a red queen race – things advance so we just have to run faster to keep up. ®

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[1] https://auterion.com/auterion-secures-contract-to-deliver-33000-skynode-drone-strike-kits-to-ukraine/

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aIlEdSyOs7CxP-czG1HDWgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aIlEdSyOs7CxP-czG1HDWgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aIlEdSyOs7CxP-czG1HDWgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aIlEdSyOs7CxP-czG1HDWgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[6] https://kyivindependent.com/ukrainian-manufacturers-able-to-produce-4-million-drones-per-year-umerov-says/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/02/ukrainian_drones_russia_bombing/

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/02/operation-spiderweb-visual-guide-ukraine-drone-attack-russian-aircraft

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/ukrainian_drone_attack/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/18/anduril_rheinmetall_drones/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/23/us_army_drones/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/hegseth_signs_flying_memo_to/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/27/starlink_drone_russia_ukraine/

[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aIlEdSyOs7CxP-czG1HDWgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[15] https://theins.ru/en/inv/283351

[16] https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2025/jul/28/drone-warfare-in-the-ukraine-war-in-pictures

[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/