Drone surveillance is forcing militaries to rethink how they organize and prepare forces, retired U.S. Gen. David Petraeus said, arguing that doctrine, training and procurement must change alongside weapons as exposed troops face detection and attack.
Petraeus, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), made the case Friday, Oct. 23, at the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi. He called for changes to military doctrine, force structure, training and procurement, and said the shift must reach personnel policies and facilities. He argued that a new concept of warfare should guide institutional reforms rather than equipment purchases alone.
The concern, he said, is that drones can expose troop positions to surveillance and strikes, making existing force arrangements less suited to battlefield conditions. Petraeus urged militaries to adapt how they plan and operate.
He said military software should be revised each week and hardware every few weeks. Petraeus also forecast that unmanned systems capable of operating without a human pilot or driver could become more common late in 2026 or during 2027. He said militaries had not reached fully autonomous warfare.
NDTV reported that Petraeus said Ukraine was deploying more than 10,000 drones a day. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence separately said the DELTA Mission Control module had logged more than 3 million missions to strike enemy targets by Oct. 1. Those cumulative mission records count missions rather than distinct drones and do not verify the daily deployment estimate.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a July 15 address that the country was producing 10 million drones a year and aimed to produce 20 million annually. Those figures describe production, not drones deployed each day.
Petraeus compared the changes he believes are needed with reforms made during counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying the earlier effort was small by comparison: “That was nothing compared with what needs to be done now.”
