What began as an outpouring of civic solidarity has become, in short order, a foundational layer of Ukraine’s aerial posture. The Army of Drones initiative — a constellation of state-coordinated fundraising on the UNITED24 platform, Monobank “jars,” diaspora drives, and private campaigns — moved beyond symbolic support to fund, procure, repair, and field tactical and loitering unmanned aerial systems at scale. UNITED24 and associated campaigns have channeled large sums into drone procurement and sustainment, and the program explicitly includes buying new systems, repairing donated commercial units, and training operators.

Two concrete patterns explain why this hybrid civic-state model matters. First, crowdfunding accelerated procurement cycles for specific, useful platforms — everything from Mavic-class reconnaissance quadcopters to dedicated loitering munitions. For example, a joint campaign delivered 300 Mavic 3T thermal UAVs to front-line units, and Ukrainian authorities reported more than 3,200 systems purchased for the front lines in the first months of the program. Second, discrete community-driven efforts bought offensive systems such as the Warmate loitering munition: a Monobank/UNITED24 drive financed 40 Warmate systems with roughly UAH 64 million, and those systems were transferred to units and put into service.

The operational impact is real and observable. Kyiv’s drone forces have been credited by Ukrainian officials with striking large numbers of Russian materiel in concentrated periods; public reporting highlighted weeks when drone units reportedly neutralized dozens of tanks, artillery pieces, and other systems. Whether one accepts every headline number at face value, the qualitative change is clear: small, relatively inexpensive unmanned systems began to impose effects that previously required much costlier munitions or risked far greater human exposure.

Technically, the democratization of aerial strike capability rests on two developments. One is the rise of fast, cheap, operator-driven first-person-view platforms that are rugged, modular, and easy to produce or assemble in small workshops. The Washington Post and others documented how FPV and improvised loitering munitions proliferated because they are low-cost, repairable, and tactically flexible against armor and logistics points. The other is institutional: UNITED24 and allied initiatives provided a transparent funnel for public donations, and ministries set procurement priorities and logistics channels so donated funds and hardware could be turned into operational units quickly.

These successes should not be conflated with an unambiguous improvement in the moral quality of warfare. Crowdfunded weapons create a novel accountability vector. Citizens who buy a reconnaissance drone to “dronate” or who contribute to a jar to buy a kamikaze UAV are not just funding bandages or food. They are enabling lethal effects. The line between volunteer support and direct participation in kinetic operations therefore becomes ethically porous. If the state acts as curator, approving platforms and allocating them to units, the government bears responsibility for the downstream use. But the social fact remains: donors perceive an immediate, nearly tactile connection to battlefield effects, and that changes the social contract between citizen and state.

Practical accountability problems follow. Who audits end-use when thousands of civilian donations and hundreds of small procurements cross multiple private suppliers? How are export controls, supply chain provenance, and component-level security enforced when much of production is decentralized? Ukraine attempted to mitigate some of these risks by centralizing receipts through official accounts and by publishing inventories, but verification at the tactical level remains organizationally expensive and technically difficult.

There are strategic and escalation risks too. Crowdfunded loitering munitions and swarms lower the threshold for persistent harassment of logistics nodes and rear-area infrastructure. When a state can mobilize a transnational donor base to finance these capabilities, deterrence signaling becomes noisier. Adversaries must now account for nontraditional supply lines feeding low-cost lethal effects. At the same time, the relative affordability of FPVs and batch-produced loitering munitions increases the attrition tolerance of a defending force but also incentivizes adversaries to invest more heavily in electronic warfare, counter-UAS, and hardening measures, which in turn raises the cost curve elsewhere.

There is also an engineering lesson here about scale and reliability. Crowdfunding buys numbers quickly, but not necessarily sustainment. Cheap FPVs and hobbyist quadcopters are consumables; high operational tempo and deliberate enemy countermeasures erode inventories fast. That is why Kyiv coupled crowdfunding with investment in local production, repair hubs, and operator training. A procurement stream that buys devices without the lifecycle logistics to maintain them will buy only a momentary advantage.

Finally, consider the normative horizon. The Army of Drones model points to a future in which publics are operationally engaged in kinetic campaigns through micro-donations. Democracies will need public norms and legal frameworks that address when and how citizens may underwrite force, how transparency about end-use is guaranteed, and how liability and post-hoc review are handled. These are not purely Ukrainian problems. Any polity facing protracted conflict or irregular adversaries will see similar civic impulses if given the means.

Policy recommendations, offered briefly and in the spirit of cautious realism:

  • Treat civic donations for lethal systems as a distinct legal category. Make transparent end-use audits a precondition for campaigns that fund strike systems. Governments must accept the political and moral burdens that accompany facilitating such donations.
  • Invest in supply-chain verification and repair networks rather than one-off purchases. Scale requires sustainment more than more units.
  • Develop international norms about civilian-funded military hardware. If small donors across borders can underwrite strikes, states and multilateral bodies should clarify legal and ethical boundaries to reduce dangerous ambiguities.

The Army of Drones is, in short, a case study in civic militarization. It demonstrates technical ingenuity, social solidarity, and tactical effectiveness. It also forces uncomfortable questions about the diffusion of responsibility in war. Technology lowered the barrier to participation. Society must now decide whether lowering that barrier was, on balance, a necessary defence of the polity or a recalibration of how a community should bear the moral weight of violence.