Former CIA Director David Petraeus said the United States must adopt a “whole new concept of warfare” based on lessons from Ukraine’s use of drones, CBS News reported on Tuesday, April 7.
Petraeus, a retired US Army general, made the remarks during a visit to Kyiv after observing Ukrainian units near the front line.
“Over the last two months, the Ukrainians have actually made greater incremental gains than have the Russians,” he said.
Drones, battlefield integration
Petraeus said Ukraine’s advantage lies not only in drones but in how they are integrated into a broader battlefield system.
He pointed to Ukraine’s Delta platform, which combines surveillance, targeting, and strike capabilities into a unified digital system.
The setup allows Ukrainian forces to monitor and engage targets across large sections of the battlefield in near real time, he said.
Scaling production, future warfare
Ukraine is rapidly scaling production of low-cost first-person view drones, far exceeding output in Western countries, Petraeus said.
He added that future developments will likely include algorithm-driven drones that are less vulnerable to electronic warfare.
“What’s coming is going to be algorithmically piloted drones that you can’t jam,” he said.
Petraeus also said autonomous systems could emerge within a few years, with machines executing missions defined by human operators.
implications for US military
Petraeus said Western militaries need to rethink their force structures rather than simply adding drones to existing units.
“In some Western countries… they think that innovativeness is giving 50 drones to an armored battalion,” he said.
“No. What we should do is scrap the armored battalions and replace them with a drone battalion.”
He added that Ukraine has already moved in this direction by creating dedicated unmanned systems forces.
Petraeus warned that rapid advances in drone technology could increase global security risks, including the potential for coordinated drone attacks.
He said current systems are not yet capable of effectively defending against drone swarms.
“We need to learn a lot more, much more rapidly than we are,” he said.
Ukraine has significantly expanded its use of long-range drones to strike Russian military and energy infrastructure, with dozens of coordinated strike packages launched in early 2026 alone, targeting facilities ranging from oil terminals to ammunition depots.
At the same time, Ukrainian drone operations have increasingly focused on disrupting Russia’s energy exports, including repeated strikes on key oil terminals in the Black Sea and Baltic regions, reflecting a broader strategy to weaken Moscow’s economic and logistical capacity.