Operational and practical insights into the use of drones and UxVs in conflicts

The field of drones and UxV is large and diverse, and research efforts are increasingly addressing 
a broadening range of issues and applications. One reason for this rapid increase in 
relevance of uncrewed systems, especially aerial systems, is their use in armed conflict such as 
in Ukraine since 2022 and, more recently, in the Middle East.  
What we observe from those conflicts is that the practical needs and the operational reality 
often differ massively from the guarded reality that many research projects assume. For 
example, many research efforts assume that communication 
and localization are pervasively available, which they are often not. 
As a result, what is observed in the skies of Ukraine is often a stunning feat of engineering where 
frontiers are continuously pushed, but it is also regularly an unholy amalgamation of hacks, 
tricks, patches and exploits that often last only days before they stop working. As a commonly 
discussed example, consider the use of fiber-optic cable to circumvent jamming, which while 
solving the practical challenges on the ground, are from a research point of view a step 
backwards.
This paper / talk will discuss recent changes and insights of the operational reality of using 
UxV in cluttered, contested and adversarial environments. 
This paper and presentation will be something like a literature study, but instead of reporting on 
the state of the art from a research and scientific point of view, we provide this from an 
operational perspective. We will do so on the bases of (unclassified and publicly available) 
recent publications and reports, drawing, on one hand, on the publications from national 
research labs such as TNO, NLR, VTT, FFI, FOI, RMA, Fraunhofer, and DLR, and on the other hand, on reports from think tanks such as RAND and RUSI, as well as publicly available NATO documents.