© Kirill Dorokhov
Although, this is already the present. But as long as wars exist, it will be — or rather, there will be no sleep under the conditions of modernizing combat operations. First and foremost for the military, although the civilian rear also feels the consequences of modern weaponry, which has brought about the most sophisticated way of terrorizing the psyche and nights: drones. And where else but on the frontline of the Russian-Ukrainian war do these small buzzing flyers act like damned mosquitoes on a summer night? Coming into a house in a slow maneuver exhausting from its corrosive buzzing, they strive to accurately hit the target and explode. In both cases, people pay for this with their sleep, their psyche, and their blood.
Drone never sleeps
In modern warfare, the expression "under the cover of night" no longer means under cover like before. The reason for this is the saturation of the front with hundreds of thousands of reconnaissance and strike UAVs of medium and long range. The former, equipped with thermal imagers, turn the thermal radiation of a sleeping soldier into a direct target, especially in the cold season, and help recognize even the movements of infiltrators hidden in the foliage. According to a study published in the Russian Military Medical Journal (March 2025) based on data from 5,813 wounded, drones alone became the cause of about 75% of sanitary losses in the country's troops.
But it is not only stormtroopers and the military on the frontline who are adapting to the new reality where the traditional changing of the guard and a relatively stable schedule have become part of history. Due to the constant readiness to run, abandoning equipment and positions, and hide from their omnipresent sting in dugouts, tree lines, and abandoned buildings with the last of their strength, sleep is a luxury.
The tactical denial of sleep is also implemented through the massive use of hundreds of decoy UAVs (including Ukrainian jet decoys and Russian "Gerbera" devices) and real UAVs for long-range strikes against targets both at the front, in frontline areas, and at a distance of thousands of kilometers in the rear. As a rule, such mass drone strikes are delivered precisely at night and in echelons (waves), overloading and ultimately penetrating even the densest air defense calculations, forcing operators of mobile fire groups to be in a state of high alert around the clock and sleep an average of 2 to 4 hours per day.
And even the drone operators themselves cannot afford a long sleep and rest, because they are terrorized by elite units engaged in calculating the often well-camouflaged position of the UAV operator. This means that instead of sleep you need to be on the alert to run very fast for several kilometers at any second, because a Russian KAB/UMPK with a destruction range of up to 100 km could hit the pit or ruin where you were hiding a minute ago. Or an enemy drone.
That very dream where you run sluggishly.
And you need to run fast. Prolonged sleep deprivation triggers an increase in cortisol levels — which has recently become a dumb meme—and pro-inflammatory cytokines, suppressing immunity, slowing down tissue regeneration, and causing cognitive deficits with spatial disorientation. The military's body cleverly responds to terror by compensating for the drop in overall productivity by reducing reaction speed and increasing shooting accuracy. This means that each time noticing a bird hovering in the air, as they are called at the front, or reacting lightning-fast during an assault is much harder..
Systematic deprivation, especially among mobilized personnel without military experience who are at the front continuously — since there is almost no demobilization or rotation—destroys the structure of the REM sleep phase, which processes emotional stress. This deficit increases the level of anxiety by 40–70% for the next day, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year. If you're lucky enough to live that long, of course. Therefore, many videos are circulating on the net, filmed from drone cameras, where the targets, i.e., exhausted soldiers, do not react in any way to the approaching fiber-optic death, continuing to trudge along or doze off, casting a glance of indifference and calmness at it — they know it will be the last peaceful minute of their lives before eternal sleep.
Red Bull gives you wings, because otherwise a drone will give you wings.
Attempts to compensate for the sleep deficit have caused a large-scale pharmacologization of the front. In the AFU, energy drinks have become the dominant legal stimulant, whose market in Ukraine grew by more than 50% after the start of full-scale combat operations. Energy drinks have turned into an unofficial currency and a crucial element of supply (global brands and domestic brands like "Volya" with a production speed of 16,000 cans per hour), which soldiers utilitarily prefer over water and bread in their chest rigs for making quick forced marches with a load of 40 kg after several days without sleep or in the endless and fierce defense of positions.
Energy drinks do not require boiling water that demasks positions, although their excess leads to tachycardia, hypertension, and lethal cardiac arrest. Furthermore, taking more than 3 cans a day, according to US research, paradoxically increases the risk of falling asleep on post due to a severe post-caffeine crash. In extreme cases, as a tense reflection of never-ending waves of assault, amphetamines "help" to keep a soldier from leaving a position, eliminating fear and giving an impulse, but provoking paranoia, hallucinations, and acute psychoses. But what sleep restores naturally — wounds, strength, fractures — is masked by anabolic steroids, mimicking physiological rest to continue service despite injuries.
In the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, however, stimulations are officially, though not necessarily in practice, regulated by military-medical recommendations to take a moderate stimulant of sydnocarb at 10 mg during the day and 20 mg at night every 6 hours, as well as the tranquilizer sibazon at 0.005 g at night for a course of up to 4–5 days to cope with excitation and ensure a short sleep. This chemistry is supplemented by multivitamins with herbal sedatives. Thus, with 3 hours of sleep per day, the combat capability of up to 60% of personnel is maintained for up to 9 days, because shooting accuracy is held due to a decrease in reaction speed, let's not forget. With 1.5 hours of microsleep, it stays up to 40% for 5–6 days, which leads to a cognitive deficit. In the complete absence of sleep, a unit completely loses its capacity within 2 days due to a systemic breakdown of the psyche.
However, you can't really stock up on energy drinks or other chemistry, because drones interrupt not only sleep, but also the delivery of medicines and food, the entire logistics, and even production.
The future of sleep in a war without sleep is so far only in a dream.
And yet, attempts are being made. For example, at an institutional, but not ubiquitous level in the AFU, the Combat Path Debriefing program has been introduced based on the American manual FM 7-22 (Holistic Health and Fitness). It replaces the Soviet punitive model of execution or disciplinary punishment for lack of sleep on post with a short-term withdrawal of units for rehabilitation for about a week. During this time, fighters learn techniques for normalizing sleep, psychophysiological self-regulation through tactical breathing, "Kevlar massage," and grounding. How effective this is in the conditions of a drone swarm attack, evacuation, and assault waves is hard to say.
Therefore, to combat insomnia, non-pharmacological protocols of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT-I) and the adapted Israeli protocol of emergency psychological assistance iCOVER are starting to be used, aimed at quickly overcoming stupor and panic directly in such combat. In parallel, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) and the DARPA agency (USA) are developing portable headbands for transcranial electrical stimulation (tES). Such a headband sends weak impulses during a two-hour rest, artificially stimulating delta rhythms of the brain and significantly slowing down the drop in cognitive functions during the subsequent 48-hour wakefulness. It sounds promising, but in conditions of interrupted logistics and easy detection of electronic devices, the mass production and implementation of such technologies remains questionable
Works Cited
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Department of the Army. Holistic Health and Fitness. US Army Field Manual 7-22, 2020.
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"How 2 soldiers survived 165 days trapped on Ukraine's front line." The Kyiv Independent, 11 Dec. 2025, kyivindependent.com/how-2-soldiers-survived-165-days-trapped-on-ukraines-front-line/. Accessed 7 June 2026.
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"O doli raneniy ot bespilotnikov v usloviyah pozitsionnoy voyny" ["On the share of wounds from drones in conditions of positional warfare"]. Voenno-meditsinski zhurnal [Military Medical Journal], vol. 346, no. 3, March 2025, pp. 4-11.
Toblin, Robin L., et al. "Energy Drink Consumption and Its Association with Sleep Problems and Sleepiness Among Service Members on a Combat Deployment – Afghanistan, 2010." MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 61, no. 44, 2012, pp. 895-898.
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