Four years into its war of survival, Ukraine continues to do what most observers assumed impossible: hold off a vastly numerically and militarily superior Russian war machine. The sheer surprise is what makes the Ukrainian joke funny—that Russia went from the second most powerful army in the world to the second most powerful army in Ukraine.
The reflexive explanation for this turn of events (at least in Washington and Brussels) is Western aid. In the initial days of the invasion this was certainly true, and Western aid is still an important component in the mix. But to spend any time on the ground in Ukraine is to see something very different at work: What sustains the fight is not Lockheed contracts or Pentagon planning cycles—it is Ukraine’s messy, decentralized, almost anarchic culture of grassroots innovation.
I walked into a hub of this innovation culture recently: a Soviet-era blockhouse in a provincial Ukrainian town. Inside, it had been gutted and jammed with 3D printers, laptops, soldering irons, disassembled drones, and software consoles. Engineers in their twenties crowd around improvised workstations, debating code fixes and wiring up prototypes. To outside eyes it would look like a hacker convention with bad lighting and worse furniture. In fact, it was just one of many of ad hoc laboratories scattered across Ukraine, each pumping out battlefield-ready inventions faster than a Pentagon task force can schedule its first joint interagency planning meeting.
Dispersal is part of Ukraine’s secret sauce. Instead of concentrating research in gleaming, vulnerable facilities, Ukrainians cultivate it in the overlooked corners of civilian life—an abandoned classroom here, a defunct hotel there. Russian reconnaissance can’t distinguish these facilities from the background clutter—when innovation is spread across these small hubs, there is no single target to cripple. Not exactly rocket science, but a lesson we might take better note of.
Equally important is what these hubs are not: They are not strictly beholden to the Ministry of Defense and they don’t wait for approval signatures or procurement chains. If a frontline unit messages back (usually through a personal connection) that it needs sturdier fin mounts for dropped munitions, an engineer hacks out a prototype that same day. Failures are shrugged off; successes are copied instantly. A $500 drone iteration can be built, tested, lost, and rebuilt in less time than it takes a Western contractor to file a compliance report.
The US model, it will come as no shock, is vast, centralized, and slow by comparison. Programs that swallow billions and take decades are, I fear, designed as much to keep appropriators happy as to win wars. The F-35, which is no doubt a damn cool machine, is now entering its fourth decade of design rollout, and has rung up billions upon billions in development costs. It still struggles with basic readiness, and by the time it reaches full maturity, the battlefield may look nothing like what its designers imagined. Meanwhile, Ukrainian coders armed with open-source software and Telegram chats are pushing out effective AI first-person-view drone targeting systems in a matter of weeks that could, very realistically, wipe squadrons of F-35s off the ramp.
Yes, I’m aware it’s easy to be a critic, and I don’t mean to be unfair. The procurement system for exquisite American weapons systems is impressive and employs a great deal of remarkable talent. Yet the same could be said of the Russian procurement system. It would be foolish to give up our entire military-industrial apparatus, but if we trivialize the enormity of the small, cheap, autonomous, attritable revolution, we do so at our peril.
As an acquisitions program manager years ago, I remember the Air Force presenting Boeing with a million dollars to study which prime contractor would do the avionics upgrade to the E-3 AWACS. A million dollars later (chump change, by the way), Boeing determined that Boeing was probably best suited to take on the half-a-billion-dollar program. A million dollars in Ukraine right now could potentially be mobilized to take out another 10 percent of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Ukraine’s success relies on a culture of evolutionary iteration. The most striking innovations are generally jury-rigged modifications of existing tech—rarely is something developed from the ground up. For example, defused Russian mines are refashioned into custom drone payloads. Loitering munitions are cobbled together from scavenged casings and 3D-printed shells. It’s dangerous, improvised, and yet astonishingly effective. By dispersing munitions production and tech deployment down to the unit level, Ukraine has made it almost impossible for Russia to decapitate its supply chain with single strikes.
All of their comparative success rests on digital fluency. Ukraine’s young engineers grew up in a country that built its economy on IT outsourcing. GitLab repositories and encrypted chats are natural extensions of their workspaces. The result is a military-industrial culture that behaves less like Raytheon and more like a hacker collective—and the stakes are measured not in stock price but in survival.
The contrast with the West should be humbling. For all its vaunted resources, the American defense establishment has become a lumbering cartel—part bureaucracy, part corporate welfare program—incapable of moving at the pace of actual conflict. The lesson from Ukraine is that freedom, dispersal, and entrepreneurial improvisation can out-innovate trillion-dollar procurement cycles. Yes, nothing concentrates national attention like an existential threat, and no doubt Yankee ingenuity would blossom if and when such a scenario unfolded for the United States. But it would be the better part of hubris to believe that technical advantage is ours by right.
The future of warfare will look less like a Pentagon PowerPoint deck and more like the inside of that dingy building I visited in Ukraine—3D printers humming, code scrolling, and young engineers cobbling together survival with zip ties, caffeine, and ingenuity. In short, the future belongs not to the military-industrial complex, but to smart and dedicated people free to improvise where they need to.
Dr. Paul Schwennesen is director of Global Strategy Decisions Group and a defense analyst for Geopolitical Intelligence Services. He recently returned from an eighth mission to the Ukrainian front lines. He was awarded the Verhkhovna Rada medal by Ukraine’s parliament for “Merit to the Ukrainian People,” and coordinates ongoing training and equipment programs there.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: armyinform.com.ua
