Friend-or-foe identification: Ukraine marks its drones with “invasion stripes”

Hunting drones over Ukraine raises a problem of friend-or-foe identification that military history has long known. Hundreds of different models now operate in the airspace there. Where a drone comes from is often uncertain, and its purpose can no longer be clearly determined at first glance either.

No recognition guide can keep pace with the speed of development. At first, identification manuals still showed pictures of around 50 models. In a Russian drone forum, someone asked what lay behind the “mysterious stripes of insulating tape or blue adhesive tape” on Ukrainian drones. The answer came quickly: these are so-called “invasion stripes”.

A solution from 1944

Even in the Second World War, all sides fired on their own aircraft – although national insignia existed and the number of aircraft types remained comparatively manageable.

For the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, an unprecedented number of aircraft was expected in the airspace. At the same time, early IFF technology (radio-based friend/foe identification) threatened to be overloaded. On 17 May 1944, Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commander of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force, therefore approved a marking scheme that became known as “invasion stripes”.

In addition to national insignia and codes, wings and fuselage forward of the tailplane received five stripes, alternately black and white, each 46 centimetres wide. The scheme was successfully tested on 1 June 1944. Two days later, the order to paint them went to the troop transports, and on 4 June the fighter and bomber squadrons of the Allied air forces followed. After the Allies had gained air superiority over France, the stripes had disappeared completely by the end of 1944.

No technical friend-or-foe identification for tactical drones

No such uniform scheme can be seen on Ukrainian drones. There is no fixed pattern, and by no means every drone carries stripes. Some show the Ukrainian national insignia, others instead or additionally blue, occasionally yellow-and-blue stripes. The spacing between them is not fixed either.

It is therefore reasonable to assume that drone units at the front are resorting to makeshift solutions and that – unlike in 1944 – no general order has been issued. No solutions are yet known for technically identifying tens of thousands of drones in the airspace at the same time as friend or foe.