Creative Ukrainian Soldiers utilize a modified consumer hobby drone to drop mortar rounds directly on top of separatist positions in 2014. This is the video that proved drones are the future of warfare.

This is a classic video, and I was surprised to not find it in our library already. To my knowledge, this is one of the first released videos of a modified consumer hobby drone being used to deliver a payload directly on-target, and the first guys to officially do it are Soldiers from the Ukrainian military.

When this video first released, it was the moment that I realized I needed to get on a soap box to start screaming about how drones are going to change the face of war. No longer were drones limited to first-world military super powers who can afford things like the Predator. Anyone, anywhere in the world, with access to Amazon can go online and buy themselves a $200 hobby drone, and then with two hours of time to improvise a system, they can engineer a way to deliver a small explosive payload with it.

I was proven right not too long after this when the videos started pouring out of Syria as well. The situation actually got so bad that companies like DJI started installing firmware hacks into their hardware that made it so their products would not even operate if the drone registered that it was located in several blacklisted regions, Syria being one of them.

Today, these commercially available drones are still being used to reshape the battlefield in favor of the smaller, less-funded groups of extremists all around the world. While it wasn't a smaller, under-funded group who started the trend, they were definitely some of the first guys to prove the concept.