Ukraine’s drone pilot training program turned into a video game so anyone can feel the “speed” of modern warfare

London – Gamers around the world can purchase and play at home a miniature version of a first-person drone training program developed and used by the Ukrainian armed forces. The game’s evolution—from battlefield training tool to home entertainment—is the first to note, and is directly related to Ukraine’s efforts to deter it. The four-year invasion of Russia.

The “Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator” (UFDS) is available for purchase online for about $30. It has the same ultra-realistic physics and piloting controls that helped teach it Ukrainian drone pilots Search and destroy Russian tanks, missile launchers and troops. The full simulator is available, free of charge, for use by all members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Vlad Plaksin, CEO of the Drone Fight Club Academy, a facility that trains Ukrainian military drone pilots, was one of the main developers and driving forces behind the UFDS. The academy has trained more than 5,000 Ukrainian military drone pilots since it was established at the start of the war, and last year it partnered with the US Air Force in a training session at Ramstein air base in Germany.

Plaksin told CBS News that one goal of turning the military program into a video game is to train young Ukrainians to fly drones, “to allow them to not go to lunch with rifles.”

Interest in anything related to drones among young Ukrainians has soared during the war, thanks in large part to the country’s military drone pilots, Plaksin said, achieving heroic status.

“Most young people want to fly, they want to hit (Russian targets), they want to grow up in this new world of robotics,” he told CBS News.

The game’s creators call it “a public adaptation of a leading FPV (first-person view) drone trainer, built on Ukrainian front-line lessons,” allowing players to “learn to fly like a front-line pilot, take on real-world mission scenarios, and feel the rush of modern FPV warfare.”

In hyper-realistic detail, it includes different types of drones to pilot in combat missions against Russian targets, with weather conditions and other variables, providing a realistic enough experience for anyone to learn and practice the basics of drone warfare.

There are many games that offer similar FPV warfare experiences, including driving tanks, piloting fighter jets, and commanding submarines. But UFDS is the first to be developed directly from military software.

Ethical concerns?

Although many games have been used as teaching tools by armed forces around the world, they were first developed as games. UFDS revolutionizes that model by bringing a real-world military training tool to people’s home screens.

Plaksin acknowledged ethical concerns about creating a game that allows young people to realistically pretend to be piloting deadly drones, calling it a “very sensitive question,” but noted that the game is not unique in this regard.

“There are a lot of other simulators that do the same thing, and we’re not going to open anything new,” he said.

UFDS isn’t the first video game used by the military as a pseudo-recruitment tool, either.

The “America’s Army” series, launched in 2002 and developed by the US Army, is widely regarded as the first overt use of video games to drive recruitment by a national military. Although the series was not as realistic as UFDS, it served a similar purpose.

Can Russia take advantage?

Plaksin says that the Ukrainian game, at its core, is a tool for people to “get basic knowledge for drones, but at the same time we try to make it as safe as possible, not to share sensitive information.”

In order not to disclose details that the Russian military may use to train its pilots, there are significant differences between the publicly available version of the UFDS and the version used to train Ukrainian military operators at the Drone Fight Club Academy.

Those differences “are primarily about tactics,” Plaksin told CBS News. “It gives you everything you need, but it won’t give you tactics. I think that’s the main difference between the versions.”

Some of it, he said, is simply to reduce what can be, for players, the most tedious parts of drone warfare. Players may not want to spend 30 minutes flying their virtual drone to reach a target, for example. So the gameplay is deliberately more arcade-style while maintaining very realistic controls and user experience.

That means there’s “less understanding of the missions, less understanding of how to fly a long distance,” which is essential for training drone pilots.

“When you fly on the (real) drone, you see the area and you have to read the map and compare it to what you see,” Plaksin said. “In missions, it’s very important. In arcade games, it’s not important, and we don’t include it because it won’t be interesting for the players.”

UFDS is still a very niche game, with only around 50 people playing online every day. These specific military simulation games often have a small but loyal following, and rarely penetrate the wider gaming community.

But Plaksin is trying to change that, and broaden its appeal. He’s helping to organize a tournament that he hopes will encourage “the highest caliber of players” and competition between players.