„The Amazon for Drone Warfare“: Zur Plattformisierung der Drohnenkriegsführung im Russisch-Ukrainischen Krieg

Russia’s war in Ukraine has been marked by both parties’ extensive use of drones. While the early phases of the war saw the development of what we have called Consumer Drone Warfare, that is, the use of off-the-shelf or ready-to-fly drones provided by large manufacturers like DJI or Autel, there has been a notable shift towards locally assembled First-Person-View or FPV Drones in recent times. We argue that this development is made possible by – and in turn fuels – the platformization of warfare by the Ukrainian military.
In this article, we trace three distinct but interwoven sites of platformization: 1) the modular FPV drone itself, understood as a military platform for sensor and weapon systems; 2) the Delta System, an ecosystem of applications for planning and cooperatively executing drone strikes; 3) and the Brave1 Market, a logistics platform connecting military units to equipment and weapon manufacturers which has been dubbed “the Amazon for Drone Warfare.”
In doing so, we will show that platformized drone warfare reshapes and economizes processes of military organization and procurement according to the logics of markets and gamification. As they render the chain of operations from drone development to battlefield deployment (ac)countable, Delta and Brave1 are designed to facilitate quality control and self-organization vis-a-vis an increasing number of military tech start-ups and heterogenous hardware parts. We posit that the infrastructures for drone development and data collection established by platformized FPV drone warfare act as stepping stones towards (semi-)autonomous forms of drone warfare powered by machine learning and AI systems.