Here's why drones can't be used to deliver aid to Ukraine

A number of Ukrainian cities have been under a brutal siege by Russia for weeks now, and aid is flooding in — but with a lack of secure humanitarian corridors, getting it to where it’s needed continues to be difficult. There have been calls for a humanitarian airdrop. Without negotiated access, though, that carries a risk of planes being shot down — and there are concerns that non-Ukrainian planes entering the airspace could escalate the conflict. That’s left some wondering: Could food and other essential aid be delivered using drones? The idea was floated recently by Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, who wrote on Twitter that it was “Time to send large unmanned aircraft with humanitarian aid to Ukrainian cities under siege. Worst case scenario is some food and medicine falls into the wrong hands while many innocent lives are saved.” He continued: “Drones have been used to deliver humanitarian goods to besieged Syrian cities for years. … So it's a good idea, the technology does exist, [and] there are humanitarian precedents.” “If you were on the ground, would you want a bunch of tech bros from Silicon Valley in cargo shorts experimenting over your kids’ shelter location?” --— Nathaniel Raymond, lecturer, Yale University But several experts jumped in to dismiss the idea and said the claim that unmanned drones have been used to deliver aid in Syria is incorrect. Among them was Nathaniel Raymond, an aid worker-turned-lecturer at Yale University. He helped develop guidelines on the humanitarian use of drones, which are more formally known as unmanned aerial vehicles. “Quite simply, the technology doesn’t exist to do it safely,” Raymond told Devex. “It would increase risk to civilians on the ground without providing a meaningful benefit.” Drones have never been successfully used to deliver general aid to conflict zones, he said, and people who suggest that they could be “frankly don’t know what they’re talking about.” The challenge, experts said, is one of risk versus benefit. With existing technology, drones would only be able to deliver small amounts of aid to besieged populations. At the same time, sending them into conflict zones could put civilians at risk. “Most drones can only carry a very small amount of mass,” said Mark D. Jacobsen, a professor of strategy and security studies at Air University, the U.S. Air Force’s military education center. “So the question then is, can you get enough mass into a besieged area to be worth it over other kinds of transportation technology?” That “transportation technology” would traditionally mean trucks. In March, for example, the International Committee of the Red Cross was able to deliver 200 tons of aid to Ukraine this way. By contrast, a small drone can only carry 10 or 20 pounds, Jacobsen said. While drones can be used to deliver medical supplies to remote locations and could eventually make sense for specialized use cases in conflict zones, much larger ones would be needed to deliver any significant amount of food and water. That’s a problem, because those kinds of drones can’t run on batteries, Raymond said; they need to be powered by liquid fuel, and that creates dangers, especially in a conflict scenario. There is a high chance of drones being attacked or having their signal jammed, causing them to crash. “You have to use a liquid fuel fixed-wing [drone],” Raymond said. “It’s likely going to get shot down — and when it gets shot down, it’s basically going to be a missile landing on civilian populations filled with fuel.” A conflict zone is also not the right environment for experimentation, according to Raymond. “We ethically can’t mitigate the risks enough to experiment,” he said. “If you were on the ground, would you want a bunch of tech bros from Silicon Valley in cargo shorts experimenting over your kids’ shelter location?” He cited the example of Uplift Aeronautics, a project that aimed to develop drones capable of delivering humanitarian aid to besieged cities in Syria — but that ultimately failed. During one trial at Stanford University, a drone crashed into a dry lake bed and caused a fire that burned three acres of land. That drone was battery-powered and could only carry around 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), said Jacobsen, who founded Uplift Aeronautics and was responsible for the crash. With “even the small drones that are electric, the batteries used in drones are very high density and very flammable and explosive,” he said. While Jacobsen believes that it might be possible to use small drones for one-off, specialized deliveries in conflict zones, “the question is, can you actually build something that scales? And [for] that, I’m a pretty strong believer [that the answer is] no, not easily,” he said. “That was … one of the things I learned from my project. And people continue to reach out to me [asking], ‘Hey, how could we do this?’ And I kind of advise them, ‘Don’t try, because it’s probably two orders of magnitude harder than you think to do at scale.’” Beyond the huge technological challenges, he said, there are also issues around cost. Making such a mission financially viable is difficult, given the small amounts of aid that can be delivered and the high chance of drones being destroyed, especially compared with ground deliveries. There are also liability issues. One risk that came up during the attempted Syria airlift project was the possibility of sanctions violations; another was that drones could be captured and weaponized. “How do you keep control of your technology? ... What if you hit airliners? What if they crash, start fires, hurt people?” Jacobsen said. Despite the challenges, he predicted that drones will increasingly be used for humanitarian purposes. “Particularly as more kinds of drones become more widespread, I think you’ll see more of this as, like, one piece of an airlift,” likely led by large-scale organizations with existing drone capabilities that can be adapted for wartime, he said. But even with technological advances, Raymond suggested that there are too many other obstacles. Above all, trying to penetrate a besieged city in this way “undermines our negotiations for humanitarian access,” meaning carefully negotiated, larger-scale ground deliveries such as ICRC’s may not get through. “Even with the Russians, we negotiate access. That is the basis of the humanitarian code. … And that’s how we do it,” Raymond said. “We are not pirates. … We are not smugglers. We are humanitarians.”