March 14, 2026
Ukraine Is Running Drone School, and the West Just Failed the Entrance Exam
Yesterday on FiveStack Live, former Congressman, intelligence contractor, and AI-drone savant Denver Riggleman led one of the most important conversations we’ve ever hosted on this Substack — and I don’t say that lightly.
He was joined by three men who didn’t just study this war. They lived it. Dan Henderson, John David Culp, and Alex Drueke have been embedded in Ukraine since Russia launched its genocidal full-scale invasion four years ago. Together, they took Denver, and all of us, to Shahed drone school.
What came out of that conversation was terrifying, illuminating, and absolutely necessary. If you don’t understand what’s happening to the nature of modern warfare right now, you are not paying attention to the thing that matters most for the future of the free world.
Let’s start with who these men are.
🎖️ THE MEN IN THE ROOM
Dan Henderson has been embedded with Ukrainian forces since the early days of the full-scale invasion, developing hands-on expertise in drone warfare tactics, counter-drone operations, and the brutal real-world evolution of unmanned systems on the frontlines. He is among a small group of Western military minds who have watched this revolution unfold in real time — not from a think tank, but from the dirt.
John David Culp is a humanitarian and Ukraine advocate who has made repeated missions into the country alongside his wife Donna since 2022. He has built relationships with Ukrainian military and civilian networks at every level and has become one of the most trusted American civilian voices on the ground truth of this war — not the cable news version, the actual version.
Alex Drueke is something else entirely.
A 12-year U.S. Army Reserve veteran from Tuscaloosa, Alabama — two tours in Iraq, staff sergeant, platoon sergeant — when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Drueke volunteered for the Ukrainian International Legion. Training soldiers was his favorite thing to do in the army. He said it wasn’t even a choice to go. It was something he felt compelled to do, because this was a clear instance of good versus evil.
After two months training Ukrainian units across the National Police, the National Guard, and the Army, Drueke was invited to join special forces operating out of Kharkiv. He was assigned to a recon mission six kilometers from the Russian border — fly a drone, spot Russian artillery, let the Ukrainians bomb it.
It didn’t go as planned.
The team got separated. Drueke and another American ended up stranded with no maps and no radios, spending roughly 12 hours evading the enemy through the woods. Eventually, a platoon of Russians captured them. The Russians put them on their knees, blindfolded them, with guns at their heads. Drueke thought he was going to die.
He didn’t. But what followed was 105 days of Russian captivity that included beatings, electrocution, and psychological torture. To survive, the international prisoners established what they called the “51/49 rule” — no matter how certain they were they would die, they forced themselves to stay 51% positive.
On September 21, 2022, with Saudi Arabia playing a key role in negotiations, Drueke was freed in a prisoner exchange alongside five British fighters, one Moroccan, one Swede, and one Croatian fighter.
He went back to Ukraine. Twice.
Since 2025, Alex has served as official spokesman for Defense Tech for Ukraine (DTU), an international volunteer-led initiative that accelerates the development and fielding of defense technologies — acting as an early-stage technology incubator that transforms prototype innovations into operational tools delivered directly to Ukrainian soldiers.
He is the rarest kind of expert: someone who has the receipts written in his own blood.
😱 WHY THE WHOLE WORLD FEARS UKRAINE
Here’s what the mainstream conversation keeps getting wrong about Ukraine: they frame it as a country fighting for survival. That’s true. But it obscures what Ukraine has actually become.
Ukraine is now the most battle-tested drone warfare nation on the face of the earth. And the world is starting to figure that out — not because Ukraine told them, but because NATO just got a demonstration.
At Estonia’s Hedgehog 2025 exercise — involving more than 16,000 troops from 12 NATO countries — a group of roughly 10 Ukrainian drone specialists, rotated in from the actual front, mock-destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted dozens of simulated strikes within hours. Ten people. Two NATO battalions. Gone.
Using Ukraine’s Delta battlefield-management system — which fuses drone feeds, satellite data, and frontline intelligence into a single real-time interface — the kill chain from detection to strike was compressed into minutes. Commanders at every level can plan, strike, and coordinate from any device, including their phone.
The NATO commanders’ reported reaction? “We are f—.”
This isn’t hype. President Zelenskyy has stated that partners are actively reaching out to Ukraine for help, and that Ukrainian experts are already being deployed on-site to share their capabilities with allies facing drone threats. The country that has been fighting for its life for four years has become the world’s foremost authority on the warfare of tomorrow — and it’s offering to share.
💣 SHAHED DRONE SCHOOL: THE ECONOMICS OF ANNIHILATION
The Shahed drone is ugly, slow, and not particularly sophisticated. It is also destroying the fundamental cost calculus of modern warfare, and nobody in the old-school military establishment wants to say it out loud.
A flying-wing kamikaze aircraft roughly the size of a large jet ski, the Shahed carries between 50 and 90 kilograms of high explosives and has a claimed range of 2,500 kilometers. In 2025, Russia launched between 50,000 and 55,000 Shahed-type drones at targets inside Ukraine — with some flying onward into Polish, Romanian, Belarusian, and Moldovan airspace.
According to Zelenskyy, in the winter months of 2025–2026 alone, Russia launched nearly 19,000 attack drones, over 738 missiles, and more than 14,670 guided aerial bombs at Ukraine.
The math is what should terrify every defense minister in the Western world.
A Russian Shahed drone can cost upwards of $100,000. Ukraine’s FPV interceptor drones — which have been scaled to a production rate of 1,500 per day as of January 2026 — cost between $1,000 and $5,000 each, with an average intercept success rate of 68%.
The Shahed’s real strength isn’t precision. It’s numbers. Cheap drones overwhelm air defenses so that more advanced missiles can more easily hit their targets — they marry technological utility with sheer quantity, changing the calculus of both reconnaissance and strike in modern conflict.
And here’s the part the Gulf states and the Pentagon are learning the hard way right now: Ukraine was forced to become a world leader in drone warfare due to Russia’s invasion. The lessons Ukraine learned are now urgently needed by the U.S. and its allies facing a drone onslaught from Iran.
The U.S. military showed up to a drone war carrying Patriot missiles at $3–4 million a pop. Ukraine figured out how to kill the same threat with a $3,000 FPV interceptor. That’s not a minor tactical footnote. That’s a civilizational gap in understanding.
🌍 THE REVOLUTION NOBODY IN WASHINGTON IS READY FOR
Ukraine has emerged as a global leader in counter-drone technology, exporting not just equipment but expertise to NATO through projects like the “Drone Wall” (DWS-1), and cooperating with the U.S. on Swift Beat, France on X-Wing and Alta Ares, the UK on Octopus-100, and other partners.
In 2025, Ukraine carried out more than 350 successful deep-strike attacks on Russian territory, disrupted operations at 38% of Russian oil refineries, and triggered an unprecedented fuel-market crisis that forced the Russian government to extend its ban on gasoline exports for the third time. This is a mid-sized democracy with a fraction of Russia’s GDP and manpower doing this with drones.
Ukraine wants to share this technology with the free world. They have been begging the West to pay attention for four years.
The question is whether the West — and specifically the United States under a president who views Zelensky as an inconvenience and Putin as a business partner — has the strategic clarity to accept the gift.
🔭 THE BIG PICTURE
This episode of FiveStack Live wasn’t just good television. It was a masterclass hosted by Denver Riggleman — one of the sharpest minds in the country on AI, drone warfare, and national security — featuring three men who collectively represent the full arc of this war: the humanitarian, the strategist, and the man who survived Russian captivity to come back and keep fighting.
What they told us is this: the rules of warfare have changed. Permanently. A $1,000 drone can neutralize a $10 million tank. Ten Ukrainian operators can neutralize two NATO battalions in a war game. Russia launched 55,000 Shahed drones in a single year. And the country that knows more about fighting and defeating this threat than anyone on earth is Ukraine — a democracy that wants to share what it knows with its free-world allies, if those allies will just show up.
The United States and its Gulf state partners are finding out the hard way that old-school warfare doctrine is a liability in this environment. The West cannot afford to learn these lessons on its own timeline. Ukraine has already paid for the education in blood.
Watch this episode. Share it. Force someone you know who still thinks this war is “over there” to watch it too.
Because it isn’t over there anymore. If Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he will go for the Baltic states, Moldova, then Poland — and then NATO is involved. And you will be fighting the Russians. And you will be fighting China.
Alex Drueke said that. A man who survived a Russian mock execution and went back anyway.
You should probably listen to him.
If this matters to you — and it should — share this piece with someone who needs to hear it. And if you’re not already a paid subscriber, now is a pretty good time. Democracy-first journalism doesn’t run on thoughts and prayers.
Today’s Quote:
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
— Socrates
Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Lyudmila and Daniel, John Liccione, Leah Anderson, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
