The Panopticon of Fire: Computational Analysis of Drone Ubiquitousness and Soldier Morale in Ukraine

Evidence from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war notes a profound transformation in the conduct and human experience of warfare. Force employment estimates from the battlefield show that drones alone account for nearly two-thirds of all violent engagements, signalling a decisive shift toward remotely mediated forms of violence. The rapid proliferation of both surveillance and combat drones, therefore, has produced a warring environment where soldiers often cannot detect these systems before they strike. This constant overhead presence of precision strike munitions is not only reshaping operational dynamics but also affecting soldiers' lived experience, including their morale, resilience, and willingness to wage war. Against this backdrop, this study investigates how drones are redefining the ‘lived experience’ of soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine war. Methodologically, drawing upon a supervised machine learning approach, the project classifies and interprets large volumes of first-person accounts, frontline diaries, interviews, and digital testimonies. As a first step, a subset of texts is manually coded to identify expressions of fear, confidence, resignation, aggression, vulnerability to drones, willingness to engage in combat, etc. This labelled dataset serves as the ‘ground truth’ for model training. As models, fine-tuned BERT variants learn linguistic features and lexical cues, such as sentiment patterns, syntactic structures, and context-dependent expression, noting different morale-related contents. Through this computational analysis, the study identifies evolving patterns in emotional tone, perceived vulnerability, expression of fear, fatigue, and determination. By tracing how these sentiments fluctuate in relation to reported encounters with drones, the research highlights the relationship between drone saturation on the battlefield and the psychological foundations of combat motivation and ability. The study contributes to the emerging algorithmic-driven debates on the future of war by exploring how military technological innovation is reshaping the human experience in warfare.