West Point’s former Army vice chief: Russian troops surrendered to machines, not humans

The timing of this essay says as much as the content. Published today by West Point’s Modern War Institute, retired General James Mingus and Lieutenant Colonel Maggie Harris lay out what readers of this site have watched unfold in real time for three years: drones and ground robots are rewriting how wars are fought and whether the other side even wants to fight back.

Mingus is not a commentator. He was the 39th vice chief of staff of the Army. This essay is the fifth in an eight-part series he is leading at MWI on transforming the Army for future battlefields. When a former second-highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Army writes that soldiers laid down their arms to robotic systems, the institution is no longer debating whether this shift is real. It is telling its officers to prepare for it.

Here is what you need to know:

• The event: Ukraine’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade conducted an operation near Kharkiv using explosive drones and a kamikaze ground robot. Russian troops surrendered to the machines. No Ukrainian soldier set foot in the engagement zone.
• The source: A new essay in West Point’s Modern War Institute series on transforming the Army, written by General Mingus and Lt. Col. Harris.
• The argument: Autonomous systems are reshaping combat operations and the psychology of everyone involved, on both sides of the front line.

The Kharkiv surrender confirms a pattern DroneXL has tracked for years

The West Point essay describes the Kharkiv operation as the moment Russian soldiers surrendered not to humans, but to machines. Mingus and Harris call it a glimpse into the future of warfare. For those of us tracking this conflict daily, it is less a glimpse and more a confirmation of what has been building since at least mid-2023.

We first reported on Russian soldiers surrendering to drones back in June 2023, when a conscript named Ruslan Anitin followed a DJI Mavic 3 out of a trench near Kupiansk. By August 2024, Ukraine had formalized the process into organized non-contact surrender campaigns using drones equipped with speakers and microphones. The “I Want to Live” hotline arranged more than 4,000 surrenders through drone guidance.

What makes the Kharkiv incident different is the addition of a ground robot. According to Euromaidan Press’s detailed account, the NC13 ground drone unit from the 2nd Assault Battalion hit the dugout entrance first with an FPV drone, then detonated a kamikaze ground robot carrying three antitank mines. When a second robot moved in, the surviving Russian soldiers held up a cardboard sign reading “We want to surrender.” A Mavic drone then guided them to Ukrainian lines. The entire treeline was secured in 15 minutes. No shot was fired. No Ukrainian was at risk.

The pattern continues. Just last week, on the same Northern Slobozhanskyi axis, two Russian soldiers with callsigns Gorets and Khirurg surrendered to Ukraine’s 158th Mechanized Brigade. Ukrainian forces then used a drone with a loudspeaker to broadcast their voices to other Russians hiding nearby. Three more soldiers emerged and surrendered. Russian command responded by opening fire on its own defecting troops. That detail says as much about the psychological impact of drone warfare as any West Point essay.

Mingus identifies three shifts the U.S. Army must absorb

The essay breaks the transformation into three categories. Autonomous systems are changing how forces fight by accelerating tempo, enabling 24/7 operations, and moving combat away from direct human exposure. A single operator can now manage a swarm of drones or a team of ground robots. The instruments of war themselves are also changing, with unmanned platforms handling logistics, casualty evacuation, obstacle breaching, and direct fire support.

But it is the essay’s third category that lands hardest: these systems are changing the psychology of both sides.

Mingus writes that constant drone surveillance creates what the essay describes as “anticipatory anxiety” in soldiers, a persistent dread that lingers even when no drone is visible. The machines extend the danger zone far beyond traditional front lines. There is, as one study he cites puts it, nowhere to hide.

That psychological reality matches what we reported just yesterday. The Financial Times’ “kill zone” investigation confirmed that everything within 15 kilometers of the Ukrainian front has become a drone-dominated no-man’s-land where even ground transportation is near-impossible. Two Ukrainian soldiers held their position near Orikhiv for 165 days without rotation. Thirty relief attempts failed.

The gamification problem West Point is now acknowledging

The essay raises a point we have covered extensively: the psychological distance drone operators experience when viewing targets through screens. Mingus writes that drone piloting interfaces resemble video games, creating detachment from the battlefield and potentially dehumanizing the enemy.

Ukraine has taken this dynamic further than any military in history. The country’s “Call of Duty” style gamification system awards points for verified kills, redeemable for new drones and equipment through an online marketplace. Four hundred drone units now participate. First Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told The Guardian that operators treat combat as “technical work” with “almost no emotional reaction.”

That efficiency comes with a cost Mingus identifies but does not resolve: who is accountable when a machine makes a lethal decision? The essay notes that delegating life-and-death choices to autonomous systems creates a potential accountability gap. It is a question that will only get harder to answer as AI targeting modules handle the final 500 meters of a strike while the human operator selects the target from a screen.

NATO already learned this lesson the hard way

Mingus frames this as forward-looking. But NATO already got a wake-up call. During the Hedgehog 2025 exercise in Estonia, roughly 10 Ukrainian drone operators acting as the adversary force destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 strikes in half a day against a NATO battle group of several thousand troops. The NATO side, according to multiple participants, was “just walking around” without concealment. The overall result was described as “horrible.”

Ukraine’s first fully unmanned assault took place in December 2024, combining ground robots and FPV drones. By December 2025, ground drones were handling 90% of frontline logistics for some units. And just last week, Ratel Robotics integrated a fiber-optic drone launcher into its ground vehicle, creating a mobile platform that combines ground and aerial unmanned systems into one unit.

Consider that timeline: first unmanned assault to integrated ground-aerial launch platforms in just 14 months. What Mingus frames as a future scenario is, in many cases, already operational reality on the Ukrainian front.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ve covered this war’s drone revolution for over three years now, and what strikes me about the Mingus essay is not what it says but where it’s published. West Point’s Modern War Institute is the intellectual engine of the U.S. Army’s officer corps. When a retired four-star general writes there that soldiers surrendered to robots and calls it “a glimpse into the future of warfare,” the institutional message is clear: this is no longer optional reading. It’s doctrine in the making.

But I think Mingus undersells the speed of this shift. He writes about what autonomous systems “will” do. Ukraine is already doing it. The 3rd Assault Brigade operation he describes wasn’t a technology demonstration. It was a Tuesday. I remember covering the first Anitin surrender story in June 2023 and thinking it was a one-off, a desperate soldier and a Mavic in the right place. Less than two years later, Ukraine formalized the process into organized drone-guided surrender campaigns. Now ground robots are breaching fortifications with antitank mines while FPVs provide overwatch. The pace of iteration is faster than any conflict I’ve tracked in nine years of covering this industry.

The psychological dimension deserves more attention than the essay gives it. We’ve reported on soldiers surrendering to DJI Mavics, ground robots accepting prisoners, and operators treating kills as data points in a gamified leaderboard. The NYT Editorial Board warned in December that AI-powered drone swarms could soon “hunt and kill on their own.” The Pentagon lost its own war games against these systems. And yet the U.S. government is still fighting over whether firefighters should be allowed to keep their DJI drones.

Expect this essay to become required reading at Army service schools within six months. The question is whether it leads to real acquisition reform or just more PowerPoint slides. Based on what I’ve watched NATO absorb from the Hedgehog exercise, I’m cautiously optimistic that at least the Europeans are moving. The Americans? We’ll see.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.