The quiet war: What Ukraine taught me about modern conflict
Instead of booms and explosions, war had become a softer hum and buzz
This First Person article is the experience of Justin Smith, a Canadian veteran who lives in Ukraine. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
When people picture war, they likely think of noise — explosions, gunfire and the kind of chaos that fills the air with smoke and fear. But the war I’ve lived around for the past few years is often silent. It hums instead of roars. It moves through screens and signals, through the mechanical buzz of drones and the low thrum of generators keeping laptops and radios alive.
The chaos now is quieter — and in some ways, harder to see.
I often think about how disconnected many people have become from the reality of war, how easy it is to imagine as something loud and far away. But the truth is, war today looks a lot like the world we all live in: digital, networked, quiet and constantly adapting.
Long before I came to Ukraine, I learned the language of war in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF).
During my years of service, Canada was still active in overseas operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the training culture reflected it. Even without deploying, soldiers like myself lived inside a mindset of constant readiness and learned to manage fear through repetition. It was a world where every problem had a plan, a procedure and a chain of command ready to respond.
That experience shaped my understanding of soldiering, but it also gave me a false sense of predictability.
I left the CAF in August 2014 with mixed feelings. Everything in the army had a structure and a purpose, and to find myself outside that left me feeling unsure.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, that sense of purpose returned to me sharply. The feeling that I might still be useful somewhere in the world was a deciding motivator for me to move to Kyiv.
When I arrived in April 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion had thrown order out the window. I joined HUR (the Ukrainian military intelligence unit designated for foreign-trained specialists), serving through 2022 and 2023 in a number of active combat zones, including Bakhmut and Kupyansk. During that time I personally flew drones in combat and trained and mentored other operators.
In the CAF, there was always a solution waiting for every problem. Here in Ukraine, we have to be that solution. There’s no manual, no backup plan, no perfect system to fall back on. You learn to adapt, to improvise and to overcome.
Drone warfare was evolving by the week. New technologies appeared, new tactics emerged, and with them, new consequences. Much of my early work felt like being both student and soldier — learning, experimenting and adapting in real time. I watched technology develop from improvised garage projects to field-ready systems within months, and I became part of that evolution.
Operating drones in combat changed how I understood war itself.
In training, distance protected you from consequence; mistakes were graded, not fatal.
But when I first looked through a drone’s camera and saw the landscape shift beneath it, war became unsettlingly intimate. I could see the details of a life one moment and its absence the next. The same focus and discipline applied, but now every decision — every movement of the camera or adjustment of the flight path — carried a human cost.
In Ukraine, adaptation has become its own form of resilience. Soldiers weld broken drones back together, turn shattered parts into something that flies again and share battery packs and cigarettes in the same gesture. The work here becomes a rhythm of small urgencies. Batteries die, signal drops a call, simple repairs to a light. Beneath the routine sits the knowledge that every flicker on a video stream is a real person, a real threat or a real friend. It wears on you in ways you don’t fully notice until you step back.
Cafés near the front sell coffee and offer power bank rentals because a soldier’s lifeline is now measured in watts as much as calories. When a drone is lost, the operator doesn’t just mark it as destroyed equipment; my peers and I acknowledge it like a missing comrade.
Modern war is a paradox. It’s high-tech and deeply human. It’s made of data and dirt, code and courage. It’s fought by people who charge batteries more often than rifles and understand that survival sometimes depends on Wi-Fi as much as water.
Since leaving front-line service, I’ve remained in Ukraine working on defence-technology integration and training.
When people back home ask what it feels like to live in a war zone, my honest answer is that it’s not always fear — it’s fatigue. It’s the slow wearing down of certainty, the way small inconveniences grow into symbols of endurance. You stop worrying about the big dangers and start dreading the little ones — the power cut that wipes out a day’s work, the missed message that could mean a friend’s gone silent.
What unsettles me most isn’t how much technology has changed war, but how quickly people adapt to it. Ukrainians have turned survival into an art form. I've seen them fix, rebuild and repurpose faster than destruction can keep up. A blown-out building becomes a drone workshop. A software engineer becomes a unit’s tech lead overnight. This pace of improvisation feels almost alien to me as a Canadian, where rules and regulations set the rhythm of progress back home.
But beneath the drone’s hum and the algorithm’s logic, there’s still that same fragile heartbeat that has always defined conflict — the will to endure. Technology might change how battles are fought, but not why they matter. I see it in the soldier who shares his charger with a stranger, in the café owner who keeps her espresso machine running through blackouts, in the medic who still treats every wound by hand.
The quiet chaos of this war has taught me that courage isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s the person who keeps working when the power dies or who laughs in the dark because they’ve already survived worse. In the end, what endures isn’t the noise of conflict, but the quiet persistence that keeps people moving forward.
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