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The scramble for battlefield drone experience has become a global phenomenon.
While I was embedded with Colombian soldiers fighting on Ukraine’s front lines, several told me they’d battled cartels and insurgents but sought something new: the chance to learn drone warfare.
Eastern Europe is where the action is. Ukrainian drones struck a Russian shadow-fleet oil tanker Friday in what Kyiv described as an unprecedented special operation carried out more than 1,200 miles from the country.
It was the first time aerial drones, rather than naval drones, were used to disable a shadow-fleet tanker. Ukraine also recently hit a Russian submarine with an underwater drone.
Since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, both Kyiv and, especially, Moscow have relied heavily on foreign fighters as casualties have risen.
Russia has sourced personnel from the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia, including more than 15,000 North Korean troops deployed to the Kursk front.
Those North Korean soldiers suffered heavy early losses due to poor preparation, but Ukraine’s intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov warned they are adapting quickly, learning small-unit tactics, first-person-view drone use and counter-drone measures.
This unprecedented exposure is being fed back into Pyongyang’s 1.3-million-strong army.
Ukrainian defense intelligence deputy head Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitskyi said in October that North Korea has begun mass-producing FPV and larger attack drones, directly informed by Russian battlefield methods.
Indeed, the battlefield learning loop extends far beyond Asia.
In Moscow, military propagandists and lawmakers are openly calling for Venezuela to receive large numbers of Russian strike drones.
Russia has quietly dispatched a rotational drone-training and advisory mission to Caracas, according to Budanov, with more than 120 Russian troops led by Col Gen. Oleg Makarevich.
Part of Moscow’s long-standing Equator Task Force, the group is training Venezuelan forces in areas such as unmanned-aerial-vehicle operations and believed to include expertise from elite Russian drone units.
In Haiti, explosive and “kamikaze” drones have struck gang-controlled slums in Port-au-Prince, killing civilians, as drone warfare spills into fragile states.
Ukrainian units have also exported their expertise abroad. Special forces trained Sudanese troops in 2023 in drone operations used against Russian-backed forces, including Wagner mercenaries.
Reporting suggests Kyiv may have provided drone training to Mali rebels seeking to target Russian forces there, and it helped train rebels in Syria who fought the Russia-backed Assad regime.
A recent Kyiv Independent investigation highlighted Brazilian volunteers serving in Ukraine reporting South American criminal groups are using the war to acquire military skills, including basic FPV-drone tactics.
The case of Philippe Marques Pinto, identified by Rio de Janeiro police as a Comando Vermelho member, illustrates the difficulty.
Despite a criminal record for drug trafficking, he was able to join Ukraine’s ranks, move between units and even record a video in uniform pledging loyalty to the gang.
His fellow Brazilians say he was less interested in defending Ukraine than in gaining experience to use at home.
Colombian soldiers describe a similar trend.
One volunteer, Lufan, told me he’d heard of Colombians who served in Ukraine and then traveled to Mexico to join cartel groups for roughly $2,000 a month.
Robinson, known by his call sign Maverick, said both the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel have recruited ex-Colombian soldiers.
These soldiers’ skills have become even more attractive to cartels and mercenary outfits now that some Colombians have gained experience in Ukraine’s technologically driven war — a conflict far removed from Colombia’s low-tech insurgency environment, Robinson said.
Cutting-edge warfare techniques previously remained largely within state militaries or filtered slowly through defense contractors.
Now a fighter can gain advanced drone-warfare experience in Ukraine and deploy those skills anywhere within months, bypassing traditional military-to-military transfer channels.
The Mexican army has confirmed drug cartels are increasingly using bomb-dropping drones against security forces.
Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said more than 260 such incidents were recorded in 2023, and in August the authorities acknowledged two soldiers were killed by explosives dropped from a drone in Michoacán.
One 2024 drone strike was followed by what resembled an infantry-style assault on a remote community.
This October, a trio of explosive-laden drones packed with nails, metal shards and BBs struck the anti-kidnapping unit of the Tijuana state prosecutor’s office near the US border.
American officials are seeing a similar trend: Homeland Security has detected more than 60,000 cartel drone flights near the southern border in six months, with an average of 328 drones coming within 500 meters of the United States every day.
Bryan Pickens, a former US Army Green Beret with two decades of experience who’s fought alongside Ukrainian special forces, warned America is falling behind.
“Cartels are already using Chinese and Russian technology to move drugs across the US border,” he said. “Ukraine can train US operators in interception, surveillance, strike integration and counter-electronic warfare. We need Ukraine to help professionalize Western warfighters, to teach how these systems are used and how to defend against them.”
Pickens pointed to a recent conversation with his younger brother’s Coast Guard unit in Long Beach as a stark example of the vulnerability.
The vessel was on heightened alert due to cartel threats but had no drone defenses.
“No jammers. No shotguns. No spectrum analyzers,” he said. “Across the water were civilian houses. Anyone with a $300 drone could have sunk that boat. That’s not just a Coast Guard problem, that’s military-wide. And it shows how much the West still has to learn from Ukraine.”
“Xen,” a former US special-forces operator who’s worked with a Ukrainian special-forces regiment, said his message from the battlefield to Western partners is: “You are not learning fast enough from Ukraine, and you need to support Ukraine so those lessons don’t disappear through attrition.”
The question is no longer whether drone warfare will spread to nonstate actors — it already has. And the lessons from Ukraine’s battlefields are circulating globally.
“In my view, cheap, mass-produced autonomous drones pose a strategic threat to carrier strike groups and even the US homeland,” said Xen. “US naval radar systems can track roughly 200 targets simultaneously. A state actor could launch tens of thousands of drones in a single day.”
Ukraine’s rapid innovation in drone tactics and electronic warfare makes its combat veterans valuable commodities on global markets and increasingly to America’s defense.
Its front line has become a testing ground not just for European security but for the future of asymmetric warfare worldwide.
English (US)