My name is Juny. I'm Uruguayan by birth, and for nearly two years I served as a member of the Ukrainian Special Forces, fighting on the front line from early 2023 through the end of 2024. I was wounded six times. The third, fourth and fifth time, it was an FPV drone, one of them put shrapnel in my leg.
My combat experience is exactly why I’m now working with AVS (Applied Virtual Simulation,) and helping to bring awareness to the already huge training requirement to better prepare infantry to defend themselves from lethal drones. I can’t stress how important it is that we work fast in this domain. What I lived through is no longer unique to Ukraine, and the window to prepare is shorter than most people think.
On the Ukrainian front, you never operate alone under the sky. At any given moment there are 20 to 40 drones above you, friendly and enemy, and often nobody can tell you which is which. You learn to read the sound of an FPV's motor the way a sailor reads the wind. The first and most effective defense is to take cover and not be seen. However, cover can be hard to find. When an operator spots a target and commits to a strike, the engine pitch changes. That sound means you have seconds, not minutes.
You locate the drone by sound first, then by sight. You communicate clearly and calmly. At distance, assault rifles can be used to already put pressure on the enemy FPV operator and potentially get an early, but unlikely, shot on target.
And if you are the pre-designated team member with an appropriate shotgun with custom anti-drone ammunition, you wait. You track. You don't rush the shot. You wait for the drone to commit to its attack run, and that's when you engage. The fundamentals sound straightforward when you describe them. Executing them under real pressure, for the first time, is a completely different matter.
I can speak to this from personal experience. On one operation, my team was moving through a two-kilometer tree line when we crossed paths with a Ukrainian unit coming out of the same area. For a moment, several of us were clustered together in the same stretch of ground. That clustering was enough for a Russian thermal drone operator to spot us and send in an FPV.
I heard it before I saw it. I had a rifle, not a shotgun. I turned, scanned left and right, and realized there was no cover anywhere within reach. Every tree in that stretch had been taken down by artillery. So, I crouched, acquired the drone as best as I could, and started shooting. I let off 25 rounds, fired at the drone flying in a straight line towards me. It did nothing. As it turned out, it wasn't targeting me directly. It went for the Ukrainians behind me, fell between us, and the shrapnel from the explosion caught me in the lower leg. In the context of what could have happened, that was a relatively good outcome. It doesn't always go that way.
At AVS, Horizon Guardian is built around a learning that the last few years of the war in Ukraine has taught us: kinetic energy is the most reliable way to defeat a kamikaze FPV. Modern combat drones are either tethered via fiber-optic cables or run firmware that lets them hop across multiple frequencies, up to six in some cases. A jammer that requires you to point directly at the drone and hold a lock on a single frequency is fighting a version of this technology that no longer really exists on the front line. The drones have evolved past it.
A shotgun doesn't care about software. It cares about geometry and timing. We now use shotguns because the cone shape spread of projectiles means you don't need to be a marksman to achieve a hit. What you need is composure and patience, the discipline to wait for the drone to commit before you pull the trigger. Under real stress, with something flying directly at you, that discipline is hard-won. It has to be trained.
One of the things that surprised me most when I left Ukraine and started doing this work was how little counter-drone training exists in most militaries. There's awareness that drones are a threat. There's far less understanding of what that actually means at the individual soldier level, what the protocols are, how to communicate under contact, what to do when you don't have cover and the drone is already inbound.
I’ve had conversations about this at the ITEC event with soldiers and commanders from several different countries, and the gap is consistent. But FPV drones costing under $150 to build are already being used by insurgent groups in the Congo, the Middle East, Myanmar, and beyond. The M23 rebel group used an FPV to destroy a Uruguayan vehicle in the Congo, killing two soldiers. This technology is not staying in Ukraine.
There's a practical problem facing anyone who wants to train for this right now: in many countries, drones are still treated as aircraft for airspace regulation purposes, which makes flying them over live-fire ranges a slow and complicated process. The regulations are catching up, but they haven't caught up yet. In the meantime, soldiers need to be trained.
There’s also the cost factor. “The cost of [having] drones to shoot is unrealistic — at least $1,000 a pop. And when we’re talking 36 students a class, we can’t keep up with that cost,” – a quote from JCU staff member Richard Stairs from Counter-UAS university located at Fort Sill in the US.
Simulation gets around all of that. No airspace paperwork, no range restrictions. You step in, pick up a physical replica of a firearm, put on a headset, and engage virtual drones in a scenario built on real-world experience. The muscle memory, the communication habits, the decision-making under pressure. All of it transfers.
The reason we use Varjo specifically is simple. Apart from the security benefits of the Varjo XR-4 Secure Edition, a major factor is that FPV drones are small. Five inches across, typically. At 150 meters on a lower-resolution headset, you're looking for something you can barely see. With the XR-4, you can actually see the drone clearly at realistic engagement distances, which means you're training the real skill rather than a simplified version of it. That's not a detail. It's the whole point.
We've also integrated with OBRIY, a Ukrainian-developed FPV simulation system, which allows a live human pilot to fly against a live human defender in real time. Nothing scripted, no predictable flight paths. Just one person trying to hit another person, and the defender trying to stop them. That adversarial dynamic is what real training needs to include, and it's something that's genuinely difficult to replicate in any other way.
We spend a lot of time in the defense world talking about risk mitigation. It's one of those phrases that gets used constantly. But simulation is risk mitigation in the most literal sense. It's inexpensive, requires no specialized infrastructure, and directly prepares soldiers for a threat that is already present in conflicts around the world and growing.
I didn't get into this work because I thought it would be a good business opportunity. I got into it because I was on the front line, I watched people who weren't prepared come face to face with something they'd never trained for, and I thought there had to be a better way to change that. Horizon Guardian is one tool in the toolkit to answer that problem.
Learn more about Horizon Guardian by AVS here.