“Smart” plywood drones have become one of the most consequential weapons systems on the modern battlefield, with Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces striking Russian defences at distances of up to 50 kilometres using a plywood-framed loitering munition kitted with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence — a development that comes as Wood Central reported Iran’s foam-and-plywood Shahed-136 forced US Patriot batteries to burn through 943 interceptors in four days, draining 18 months of Lockheed Martin production since the start of the conflict.
That is according to footage published by BILD journalist Julian Röpcke— the first media team to observe the HF-1 in active deployment — and confirmed by SOF personnel operating in Sumy Oblast, where Munich-based defence technology company Helsing’s HF-1 has been in operation since at least April last year.
Chosen not as an economy measure but as a deliberate engineering decision, the HF-1’s plywood airframe compresses radar cross-section in ways that aluminium and carbon fibre cannot match — and it is that property, not unit cost, that makes non-metallic construction the material of choice across drone programmes on both sides of the conflict.
“Our drone is equipped with a homing system that helps to capture a target and lock until it’s hit,” a SOF operator using the callsign Romero told Defence Express. “If we lose contact with the drone — the video or control — the drone reaches the target and strikes it.”
After Germany approved Helsing’s delivery in late 2024, the programme expanded substantially: under the full cooperation agreement combining Ukrainian co-production with direct German supply, 4,000 HF-1 units are contracted alongside 6,000 next-generation HX-2 loitering munitions from the same Helsing family, bringing the total to 10,000 AI-capable plywood drones. More than 1,000 HF-1s were confirmed in Ukrainian service by early April 2025, with HX-2 deliveries scheduled to run through to this year.
Factory-fitted to every unit, the autonomous targeting system has nonetheless been held back from combat activation — with Ukrainian crews currently guiding each drone to a pre-identified target and engaging the terminal homing system in the final phase of deployment.
“We can strike their equipment in places where they think they are safe,” said a SOF commander identified by the callsign Destro, whose unit operates at the HF-1’s optimal range of 45 to 50 kilometres. Open-source analysis of strike footage has confirmed kills against Pantsir-S1 short-range air defence systems and Buk-M3 radar units — hardware Russia cannot readily replace at the scale of attrition now underway.
Former Ukrainian government policy advisor Kate Bondar, now at the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies, notes that the capability for drone AI collaboration already exists, but battlefield deployment has remained cautious. “Drones can fly in labs, but in real life, forces are afraid to deploy them because the risk of a mistake is too high,” she said — and SOF commanders on the ground have reached the same conclusion, with troops pressing not for full autonomy but for more units and more trained operators to expand strike coverage along the front.
On the Russian side of the line, the Molniya — a foam-and-plywood platform launched by catapult — has been substantially upgraded since late 2025, incorporating machine-vision AI, Starlink datalinks, and rotating cameras with tenfold optical zoom, according to Ukrainian electronic warfare advisor Serhii Beskrestnov. Where earlier variants carried warheads, modified versions now carry microcomputers and sensors that convert a cheap strike drone into a persistent ISR platform on the same non-metallic airframe, with those modified variants confirmed in active reconnaissance deployment for at least two months by March 2026.
Whilst the battlefield implications are most visible in Sumy and Donetsk, the supply chain dimension is harder to ignore — the Chinese-routed birch plywood underpinning Russian drone production continues flowing into global markets despite sustained pressure for sanctions, whilst Ukraine ramped plywood exports 38 per cent in 2024, with the product now accounting for more than 97 per cent of all Ukrainian timber traded into European markets. Ukraine’s domestic drone industry reached production capacity of more than 8 million FPV units per year by 2026, according to Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council — an unprecedented figure for any country at war.
