There is a seductive metaphor that keeps returning when observers talk about the new choreography of modern battle. Small, fast, brightly angled machines tear through the night and leave behind sudden, visceral afterimages. Witnessed from a distance the violence can look like a fireworks display: spectacular, transient, engineered for effect. Up close it is a different aesthetic entirely. The spectacle is not a celebration. It is an instrument of death and of control.
The machines at the center of this paradox are the FPV, or first person view, drones. Originally evolved from racing hobbyists’ quadcopters they have been adapted into inexpensive loitering munitions that an operator flies using goggles and a live video link. On the Ukrainian battlefield and elsewhere their speed and agility make them hard to defeat and effective against soft targets and exposed equipment. These are not autonomous swarms in the cinematic sense. They are, for the most part, manual tools of a new kind of close quarters strike that place a skilled pilot at the end of a very cheap supply chain.
That cheapness matters. When you can build hundreds or thousands of strike-capable airframes for the price of a single conventional guided missile you change the arithmetic of operations. States and nonstate actors alike have sought to scale production and distribution of FPV-type systems. Kyiv made public plans and procurement efforts oriented toward mass acquisition and local manufacture as the conflict intensified in 2023 and into 2024. The transition from artisanal tinkering to industrialised output is what turns individual gadgetry into a strategic resource.
The visual language of the battlefield has changed with this industrialisation. Videos posted by combatants show machines diving and slamming into vehicles and positions, sometimes followed by flames and smoke that, when edited and distributed, read like the high contrast clips of an action movie. That is why the fireworks metaphor holds some purchase. But there are two corrections to make. One is tactical. FPV operations usually sit inside a layered targeting system that includes cheaper reconnaissance drones and human intelligence. They are nodes in an overall sensor and shooter architecture rather than stand alone showpieces. The second correction is moral. Spectacle is no substitute for accountability. A vivid image of a strike can obscure whose law or whose rules applied when it happened.
The weaponisation of hobbyist platforms also provoked an arms race at the spectrum level. Electronic warfare, jamming and improvised countermeasures have become central to protecting troops, equipment and lines of supply from these buzzing intruders. Ukrainian firms and research groups scaled up radio frequency countermeasures described in coverage of the front in spring 2024, and military planners increasingly treat electromagnetic protection as an integral part of manoeuvre and logistics. In other words the light in the sky produces a shadow. To contest it, defenders must invest in invisible fields of denial and in ever more adaptive counter-technology.
If there is a civilian analogue to the wartime spectacle it is the choreographed light show created by fleets of LED-equipped drones. Since the late 2010s commercially operated swarms have been used to replace or augment fireworks displays at opening ceremonies, halftime shows and corporate events. Those demonstrations reveal a benign technical lineage: precise navigation, collision avoidance and coordinated timing. They are useful cultural proofs of concept for swarm control but they also highlight a rhetorical trap. A formation of lights in the sky can be framed as art or as an instrument of intimidation depending on who is flying and why.
The comparison is useful because it exposes two bedrock tensions. First is the operational tension between mass and precision. Fireworks and light shows are designed to create distributed visual effects with predictable, programmed outcomes. FPV kamikaze systems exploit precise manual control inside a massing logic. A theatre of many cheap strikes can achieve effects that a single expensive missile cannot. Second is the normative tension between spectacle and responsibility. A public display is organised, licensed and constrained by safety regimes. In war, the same kinds of coordinated aerial movements take place in zones where the fog of combat, the pressure of improvisation and the anonymity of distributed manufacturing complicate responsibility.
For ethicists and policy makers the immediate questions are not about aesthetics. They are about thresholds and governance. At what point does a hobbyist toolkit become an industrialised weapon? When does mass production of cheap munitions invite new norms or treaties to regulate production, export and employment? The law of armed conflict was written in an era when the relevant technologies were centralized and traceable. FPV systems are often assembled from off the shelf parts and distributed through informal supply networks. That diffusion strains conventional accountability mechanisms.
For engineers and strategists there are lessons as well. The defensive answer is not simply more jamming. Jamming is effective against radio guided systems but deficient where operators switch to backup methods, to fibre tethering or to other countermeasures. True resilience combines passive protection, dispersal, improved medical evacuation doctrine and investments in detection. The offensive answer is not simply to increase production. More of the same will eventually meet diminishing returns as defenders adapt. The smarter route is to move up the value chain: better sensors, secure links, and systems that can operate in contested electromagnetic environments without handing away attribution.
Finally we should consider the cultural effect. Images of drones slicing the sky live longer than the strikes themselves. For those watching, the aesthetic flattening of violence into spectacle desensitises. For those fighting, the proximity of mechanised death reorders courage and care. If we insist on a metaphor, let it be a double one. Fireworks are beautiful but they are also pyrotechnic devices with known hazards. The FPV revolution is beautiful only in the narrow technical sense of clever adaptation. In moral and strategic terms it is a hazard that requires deliberate governance, robust countermeasures and a careful rethinking of what accountability looks like when the sky itself becomes a contested stage.
The challenge for scholars and practitioners is therefore to keep two perspectives in view simultaneously: the craft of the engineer and the claims of the ethicist. We must study the choreography of these machines and at the same time insist on the rules that should govern their deployment. Only by refusing the seduction of spectacle can policy catch up to technology and restore some measure of human judgement to a theatre where machines currently provide most of the action.