Rise of the Machines

Illya Sekirin is a Ukrainian military analyst writing from inside the conflict that has rewritten how armies think about uncrewed systems. Rise of the Machines, published by Helion & Company in 2026, is his attempt to set down — while the war is still being fought — how drones moved from a peripheral capability in February 2022 to the dominant killer on the line of contact.

The book argues that the Russia-Ukraine war has produced the first genuinely drone-centric battlefield in history, and that the change is structural rather than cyclical. Sekirin treats the cheap quadcopter, the racing FPV strapped with a shaped charge, and the long-range strike drone not as supplements to artillery and armour but as a new combat arm with its own tactics, logistics, attrition rate, and command culture. He returns repeatedly to a single point: the side that learns faster, iterates hardware faster, and trains operators faster is the side that holds the ground.

Most of the volume is organised around how that learning has actually happened. Sekirin walks through the early improvisation of 2022, when volunteer workshops welded grenade-droppers onto consumer DJI Mavics, and then the rapid professionalisation of 2023 and 2024 as units like Magyar’s Birds, the 414th “Magyar” Strike UAV Brigade, and the dedicated Unmanned Systems Forces formalised the doctrine. He examines the FPV kill chain in detail — spotter, pilot, repeater, the role of Starlink, the contest over the 800 MHz and 1.2 GHz bands, the arrival of fibre-optic-tethered drones that defeat jamming, and the first serious experiments with terminal-guidance autonomy when the link drops. Russian adaptation gets equal attention: Lancet loitering munitions, Shahed-136 swarms launched from Yelabuga, the Orlan reconnaissance grid, and the slow build-out of Rubicon and other Russian dedicated drone units. Strategic-depth strikes against refineries, airbases, and the Kerch Bridge are treated as a separate campaign with its own logic. Sea drones — the Magura V5, Sea Baby, and the campaign that pushed the Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol — get their own extended treatment.

Where the book sits in the field is straightforward. It is less polemical than the policy literature coming out of Washington and London, more granular than the journalism, and written by someone who can name the units, the workshops, and the engineers. Readers looking for a high-altitude survey of autonomy and ethics should look elsewhere; Sekirin is interested in what works at two kilometres on a Tuesday morning. For military planners, defence engineers, and anyone trying to understand what the next war will actually look like, it offers the closest thing yet to a field manual written from the inside of the change.