Ukrainian soldiers are being trained for bomb-dropping drones — with water balloons

• Western training for Ukrainian soldiers involves water balloons dropped from drones, mimicking grenades.
• The training is supposed to be relatively realistic to prepare troops for the battlefield.
• Though Ukrainian troops are going through the training, the West is learning lessons, too.

Western partners are training Ukrainian soldiers with water balloons that are dropped from drones. Other armies have tried things like tennis balls, but in the UK, it's water balloons that mimic the grenades and other explosives falling from drones in the Ukraine war.

As drone warfare takes on greater prominence in Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Western training for Ukrainian soldiers has increasingly incorporated drones. The training includes prepping soldiers for the drones that drop bombs.

The small, cheap, off-the-shelf drones that are now buzzing all over Ukraine were initially used primarily as surveillance assets, for situational awareness, but now, they execute a range of missions on the battlefield, including precision strike. In response, training programs have had to adapt.

"We've had to expand our usage of drones. We now use drones in an offensive manner," Col. Boardman, commanding officer of the British-led training program Operation Interflex, told Business Insider. "We don't just use them as flying cameras," he said, "now, we drop water balloons from them." The UK defense ministry asked for him to be identified only by his rank and last name.

He said "that simulates dropping explosives and allows us to introduce that level of threat into the picture."

Operation Interflex, run by the UK and involving 13 other partner nations, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, and Lithuania, has trained more than 56,000 Ukrainians. It offers training to new recruits about to enter the battlefield for the first time, as well as training for more seasoned soldiers who have experienced the fight and want to deepen their skills and become better leaders.

Boardman said the Ukrainians enter the fighting immediately after their training. "We probably teach them more than we would teach our British Army recruits because our British Army recruits don't go straight to war off the back of their basic training," he said.

Ukrainian troops have to be ready for an intense, grinding battlefield that the UK Ministry of Defence says has seen around 1 million combat losses on the Russian side alone. The horrific conditions have motivated the trainers to make training as realistic as they can, as the Ukrainians can't afford to be unprepared.

Boardman said British drone operators are involved in the training of Ukrainian soldiers "because we requested their support in effectively trying to replicate the drone environment as best we can."

The training also uses amputees, with fake bloodand movie makeup to up the realism, to act as wounded soldiers who have had limbs blown off and need treatment.

Boardman said "the idea is to bring a bit of shock and a little bit of reality to really get the recruit into the moment, to make them really think it's a genuine casualty they're having to deal with."

The war has been brutal, and that kind of training is critical for learning battlefield first aid. But more pressing in this fight is being ready for the drone war.

Drones are being used more than in any other conflict in history, impacting everything from tactics to soldier morale to deaths. Many drone operators say that as many as 80% of Russia's front-line losses are caused by drones, rather than by other weaponry. These destructive weapons have cost Ukrainian forces as well.

There are so many drones in the sky that soldiers can easily find themselves confused about which side they belong to. In a panic, some try to jam or shoot down everything.

Though the West is training Ukrainian soldiers for war, it's also taking lessons from the war, with drones being a growing priority for Western militaries.The Pentagon, for instance, is launching a drone school with Ukrainian military advisors, Denmark plans to send personnel into Ukraine to learn drone warfare, and many Western drone companies want to make sure that Ukrainian soldiers are using their tech so they get feedback from the war.

The Ukrainian military has much more direct experience with drones compared to Western countries training its soldiers.

Ukraine is fighting an intense conflict against a larger adversary that features multiple types of warfare, from trench warfare to fierce artillery battles. The West, on the other hand, has spent the last couple of decades in wars with smaller adversaries that it had a great advantage over in terms of force size and firepower. These were counterinsurgency and anti-terror fights.

Many Ukrainian soldiers receiving Western training have recently experienced the kinds of conditions they are getting trained for, such as trench warfare, while it's something the trainers have never experienced themselves.

Boardman described it as a dynamic that both groups are aware of and benefit from.

He said that some Ukrainian soldiers will "know very well how to clear a trench because they were doing it a few weeks ago," and when they are instructed on best practices, they can communicate what might work best.

He said there is a "really rich mutual understanding going on" where the UK and partner countries carefully listen to the Ukrainians' experiences and share NATO doctrine in return, and "it ends up with the sum being much greater than the parts, which is really valuable for us."

"We are also feeding all that knowledge into the British Army," Boardman explained.

He said that the UK is developing drone warfare tactics, but "we are not currently at war, so we are not, probably, developing them at the same pace that the Ukrainians are — by necessity, almost."

Since the UK was "on operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the operating environment has changed with the ubiquitous presence of drones, which changes everything," he said, but the Ukrainians are "very good at sharing the understanding with us."

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