Rise of the Machines

Illya Sekirin is a Ukrainian military analyst who has spent the war documenting how uncrewed systems displaced older certainties about ground combat. Rise of the Machines, published in 2026 by Helion & Company — a British imprint whose “Europe at War” and “@War” series have become the main vehicle for serious tactical-level writing on the Russia-Ukraine conflict — is his attempt to compile that documentation into a single structured account while the war is still being fought. The book arrived at a moment when Western armies had begun to accept, somewhat belatedly, that the shift away from manned aviation and towards cheap, attritable, loitering munitions was not a Ukrainian improvisation but a doctrinal pivot that would outlast the conflict. Sekirin writes for readers who have followed the war in the daily telemetry of social media clips and after-action notes, but who want the pattern behind them. He draws on unit-level sources, on manufacturers’ workshops in Lviv and Kyiv, and on operator diaries, with the comfort of a writer who can speak to the pilots directly and does not need a translator to understand what they mean when they describe losing a signal at the last two hundred metres.

The central argument of the book is that the Russia-Ukraine war has produced the first genuinely drone-centric battlefield in history, and that the change is structural rather than cyclical. Earlier wars used drones; this war is organised around them. Sekirin frames the cheap quadcopter, the racing-frame FPV 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, maintenance culture, and command idiom. The side that learns faster, iterates hardware faster, and moves operators from training to the front faster, is the side that holds the ground. Everything else — the volume of artillery fire, the number of brigades, the depth of reserves — matters less than it did two years earlier. He is careful not to overstate the point. Drones do not replace infantry; they do not take ground; they do not hold a position overnight when the batteries run out. What they do is make every traverse across open fields a lethal event, and in doing so, they have hollowed out the manoeuvre repertoire both armies had before the war.

The book is organised chronologically but also by capability, and the sections overlap deliberately. An opening tour of February 2022 to the autumn of that year describes the improvisation period, when the Aerorozvidka collective and volunteer workshops in Kyiv welded grenade-droppers onto DJI Mavic 3s and when the first R18 octocopters flew night sorties around Hostomel. Sekirin treats this phase with respect but without romance; the technology was crude, the losses were enormous, and the kills, measured against the industrial scale that would come, were small. A second block covers 2023, the year that FPV warfare became a system rather than a stunt. Sekirin walks through the standing-up of dedicated units — most of all the 414th Separate Strike UAV Brigade under Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, now the public face of the drone war — and the parallel formation of Russian analogues, which lagged by about nine months but caught up by late 2024. A third block, covering 2024 and the first half of 2025, is given to the establishment of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces as a separate service branch, under Vadym Sukharevskyi and then under successors who shaped the first joint drone-infantry tactics at the brigade level. The book then turns outward: a long chapter on strategic-depth strike, a chapter on sea drones, a chapter on the electromagnetic war beneath all of it, and a closing section on the question of autonomy.

The concrete material is where Rise of the Machines earns its place in the literature. Sekirin walks through the FPV kill chain in detail: the spotter in a Mavic 3 at eight hundred metres’ altitude vectoring a pilot in a dugout a kilometre back, the repeater drone orbiting above to extend the control link beyond the line of sight, the Starlink terminal patched into the operator’s laptop, the pilot’s goggles showing a view that lags by eighty milliseconds, the terminal lunge at the engine deck of a T-72 or into the open hatch of an infantry fighting vehicle. He is precise about the frequencies — the long contest over the 800 MHz band, the migration to 1.2 GHz when Russian jammers caught up, the subsequent push to 720 MHz and to the unusual 2.4/5.8 GHz hybrids that evade broadband jammers by hopping. He traces the arrival of fibre-optic-tethered drones, pioneered in Russian hands with the Prince Vandal of Novgorod series and then rapidly reproduced on the Ukrainian side, which solved the jamming problem by discarding radio entirely and spooling out kilometres of hair-thin cable behind the aircraft. He covers the first serious experiments with terminal-guidance autonomy, where a small onboard vision model holds the target lock when the human link drops in the last few seconds, and he is careful to distinguish this from the policy conversation about “killer robots” that his readers may expect him to join — he treats the autonomy, bluntly, as an engineering response to electronic warfare, not an ethical choice.

Russian adaptation receives equal attention, which is one of the book’s quiet strengths. Sekirin is not interested in reassuring his readers. He takes the Lancet-3 loitering munition seriously as a system that has, by his account, destroyed more Western-donated artillery than any other Russian weapon. He describes the Shahed-136 campaign in operational terms — the production line at Yelabuga in Tatarstan that Iran helped stand up and that Russia then scaled past Iranian capacity, the modified Geran-2 variants with jet engines and heavier warheads, the launch rails that let a cluster of airframes rise together on a dark night and fan out across European Russia to converge on a Ukrainian substation at dawn. The Orlan-10 reconnaissance grid, which was once dismissed in Western analysis for its Japanese cameras and amateurish construction, is treated here as the backbone of Russian artillery correction at the operational level, and its successor Orlan-30 as a genuine problem for Ukrainian air defence. Sekirin devotes a careful section to the Rubicon Centre for Advanced Unmanned Technologies, stood up in 2024, which has produced the first Russian drone unit capable of matching the Ukrainian iteration cycle. He does not pretend that it has caught up — but he does not pretend it is not catching up, either.

Strategic-depth strike is treated as a separate campaign with its own logic. The attacks on Russian oil refineries from mid-2024 onward, the strikes on long-range aviation bases at Engels and Olenya, the repeated attempts on the Kerch Bridge, and the long-range raids by converted light aircraft deep inside Tatarstan are all walked through with named operators and dated events. Sekirin reads this campaign as a strategic doctrine in its own right — not a reprisal and not a decoy, but a deliberate attempt to make the Russian rear expensive enough to shift political calculation in Moscow. He is cool about its results. He thinks it has worked at the level of refinery throughput and tanker loadings; he is sceptical that it has reached the level of political effect that Kyiv hoped for. Here the book is more cautious than much of the Western commentary it will be read against.

Sea drones get their own extended treatment, and Sekirin is in his element describing them. The Magura V5 and the Sea Baby — the latter a product of the Security Service of Ukraine rather than the Ministry of Defence, a bureaucratic detail he thinks matters — are the two systems that pushed the Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol and reduced it to a coastal squadron hugging the eastern shore of the Black Sea. He walks through the attacks on the Ivanovets corvette, on the Sergey Kotov, on the Caesar Kunikov, and on the Olenegorsky Gornyak before them. He treats the sea drone campaign as a case study in a smaller principle he returns to throughout the book: a single-domain navy that has not developed its own counter-uncrewed capability can be driven off a sea by an opponent with no surface fleet at all, provided the opponent iterates faster than the navy can adapt. He thinks the lesson generalises uncomfortably well to the eastern Mediterranean and to the South China Sea.

The underlying contest, in Sekirin’s reading, is electromagnetic. He is firm that drones are a function of the electromagnetic environment they fly in, not independent instruments, and that any serious reader of the war has to understand the Russian electronic warfare ecosystem — Pole-21, Shipovnik-Aero, Krasukha, Murmansk-BN — and the Ukrainian answer to it, which is more distributed, cheaper, and now mostly built on components reverse-engineered from captured Russian equipment and on Western chipsets from Analog Devices and Texas Instruments. He writes about the open-source flight stacks that both sides have standardised on — ArduPilot, PX4, Betaflight for the FPV frames, MAVLink as the lingua franca of command and telemetry — and his treatment of them is unusual in a military book, written as if the open-source commons were itself a theatre of the war, which in his view it is.

Reception has been consistent with where the book sits. Western defence press has read it as the clearest tactical primer available in English, and both the Royal United Services Institute in London and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington have cited it in their 2026 output. The Modern War Institute at West Point placed it on its reading list within months of publication. Push-back has come from two directions. More sceptical analysts, including some veterans of the counter-insurgency literature, have argued that Sekirin generalises too readily from a specific conflict with specific terrain and specific electronic conditions to a universal doctrine, and that the European plain is not Taiwan and not the Gulf. A separate thread of criticism, mostly from writers worried about autonomous weapons, has objected that the book treats the move towards onboard autonomy too matter-of-factly and does not engage with the ethical and legal literature. Sekirin’s implicit response, in later interviews, has been that the Ukrainian soldier flying the drone does not have the option of waiting for a treaty. The two camps have not reconciled and probably will not.

Where the book sits in the field is relatively clear. 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, the engineers, and the frequencies. Readers looking for a high-altitude survey of autonomy, ethics, and the future of the laws of armed conflict should look elsewhere; Sekirin is interested in what works at two kilometres on a Tuesday morning when a Russian company tries to cross a treeline. It pairs well with Mick Ryan’s work on operational adaptation, with the shorter RUSI reports by Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds on Russian force generation, and with Franz-Stefan Gady’s writing on European force design. It does not substitute for a strategic history of the war — Serhii Plokhy and others will do that — and it does not substitute for the aviation literature on crewed-uncrewed teaming that American authors are producing around the Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme. It occupies a seat that was empty: the practitioner’s manual, written while the practice is still forming.

What is likely to age well is the structural argument and the unit-by-unit case material. The structural argument — that a drone-centric battlefield is now the default, and that mass, iteration speed, and electronic warfare depth are the three axes on which armies will be judged — is already being absorbed into Western doctrine documents, and will almost certainly outlive its specific examples. The case material will remain useful as a historical record of how the shift happened, because Sekirin wrote it close enough to the events to catch the names and the dates while they could still be verified. What will age fastest is the specific technology. The 1.2 GHz FPV, the fibre-optic tether, the current generation of Shahed variants, the current Russian jammer line-up — all of these will be replaced within a few years, probably by systems with more onboard intelligence, longer autonomy, and tighter coupling to a mesh of ground sensors. Sekirin seems aware of this and treats the specifics as a snapshot rather than a conclusion. For a reader coming to the subject in 2030, the book will read as the first careful account of a transition whose later chapters are still being written along a line of trenches that stretches from the Dnipro to the Donets.