From Plywood Bomb to Algorithm War
The buzzing “moped” engine of the Geran drone has become the soundtrack of this war in the skies over Ukraine. What started as a cheap, plywood-composite kamikaze drone modeled on the Iranian Shahed‑136 has turned into a whole family of faster, higher-flying and increasingly autonomous platforms.
The logic behind it was always about building a disposable, low-cost analogue to a cruise missile where quantity beats quality. Over a few years, Russia moved this design from imported kits to localized production, optimizing it for mass deployment rather than boutique performance.
Once that logic took hold, everything else followed. A single Geran costs tens of thousands of dollars, but it forces the defender to respond with surface-to-air missiles that are many times more expensive per shot. When you send dozens of drones in one wave, you either drain the enemy’s air defense stocks or you accept that some of them will get through.
This is how the war moved from occasional strikes to sustained, mixed salvos where wave size grew from roughly a hundred attack assets in 2022 to several hundred by 2026. Even if air defenses shoot down the majority, a few thousand launches per month still yield hundreds of successful hits on infrastructure and energy targets. The recent Geran strikes near Kharkiv are just one more reminder that in a war of arithmetic, even “only 20%” leakage is devastating.
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