The tendency to laud Ukraine’s rapid development of defence technology is well established. Many articles on the subject pay homage to the remarkable evolution from a 2022 base of virtually nothing to a 2025 rate of advance and output envied by many nations.

While most of Ukraine’s heavy equipment (aircraft, artillery, air defence) was from existing stocks or donated, much of the (often novel) mid-level tactical support capability has been home-grown. This has been particularly – but not only – true of the ubiquitous UAS segment.. Continues below

This analysis article originally appeared in August's Decisive Edge Air Warfare Newsletter.

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This is a feat of staggering proportions. Government-industry-military relations have been streamlined, small business and innovation have been brought to the fore, processes such as 3D printing have been used as a baseline, standardisation – “plug-and-play” – has become default, the operator-developer feedback loop has shortened. The list goes on.

By comparison, the “West” still fails to take heed: government is too slow and risk-averse, procurement too bureaucratic, industry too hidebound and the military too stovepiped. Ukraine is a case of the necessity of survival creating an open and creative canvas.

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Kyiv has certainly maximised military-industrial effectiveness in a way that NATO never really has. To quote the late Williamson Murray, Ukraine has: “… derived maximum combat power from the resources physically and politically available”. Plenty of nations in similar circumstances have succumbed because they could not adapt politically, industrially or militarily.

However, mean-spirited as it may sound, this all comes with a few caveats. While not a “strength”, the absence of an entrenched defence-government relationship – in the face of such a concerted attack – was not without merit: far fewer stakeholders, less established bureaucrats and zero time to debate the problem. Political district voting and influence was not important.

Secondly, the immediate need was for new weapons and systems to fight what was – essentially – a familiar battle. Russian forces threw forward waves of men and machines with little apparent thought or planning. Ukraine needed the modern equivalent of the bazooka, trench mortar, infantry-artillery comms and rapid ISR; all capabilities that have existed for decades.

Finally, no attempt was made – rightly – to divert resources towards the production of new armoured vehicles or combat aircraft.

None of the above is meant to belittle what Ukraine has achieved or pretend it faced anything other than a fight for survival. However the conflict may end, that the country prevailed for so long against such an opponent is a testament to both courage and creativity.

But the limiting factors outlined above are worth assessing in the face of cries that the West should follow the Ukrainian example. As with many complex subjects, this idea is not wholly wrong, but circumstances are very different and the argument is far from simple.

“Beware ‘drone-tastic’ thinking”, UK Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin recently cautioned. His remark referred to the propensity to regard the new as reverend and the previous as irrelevant. This oft-held position is simplistic and ignores the fact that “the new” very quickly becomes “the old”. So Ukraine’s transformation holds lessons for established defence-industrial powers, but the specific relevance should be approached with caution.

What basic elements did Ukraine get “right” versus an average NATO country? As noted above, Ukraine largely abandoned (or arguably never had) the traditional government-MoD-established industry map. What did exist was a legacy of the 1990s and quickly shown to be unsuitable.

In 2022, the outsourcing of basic UAVs began rapidly and utilised earlier efforts to develop dual-use systems along with some imported platforms (Mavic being the most common). New and improved domestic versions followed, initially from small concerns and increasingly from larger “hundreds-per-day” lines. Able to destroy Russian armour, parked aircraft, vessels and – if lucky – airborne assets, these became and remain a cornerstone of survival.

These UAS are simple, of limited range, payload and autonomy. This keeps costs down, but also restricts effective use. Even the Russian Army has evolved its own defences (such as ad-hoc tank protection made from chicken wire). Such a reaction against the success of the small drone is bringing about its demise as the need grows for a more capable, heavier-armed, longer-range, better EW-protected alternatives. Cost rises, ability to mass-produce declines, smaller suppliers cannot match technological requirements. Same as it ever was.

But concurrently, Ukraine also managed to develop longer-range weapons with the payload and targeting power necessary to hit Russian assets and infrastructure well behind the lines. Attacks on the Crimea bridge, sinking naval vessels by missile-armed USVs and raids on bomber bases, largely by domestic weapon systems, showed that local industry could go beyond light and basic platforms. Alongside this sits integration of local and imported C3 and sensor systems and rapid software evolution so that new, reactive iterations can be rolled out in weeks.

Here the paradigm begins to encounter stress. These UAS get increasingly heavy, more costly to develop and support, software updates more complex and operator training more involved. In their favour they retain the advantage of fighting one (relatively predictable) kind of foe on a single front. They have one job to do under fairly contained circumstances amid familiar terrain. The investment is still relatively low and platform survival relatively unimportant.

Nevertheless, UAS are growing closer to the NATO examples held up as the anathema to Ukraine’s agile procurement. The cost of a system tends to increase by the square of additional capability and complexity. It is difficult to incorporate off-the-shelf or dual-use elements. Significant testing is required, drones must work across multiple environments, infrastructure needs developing for support.

The developer, seeking to invest, needs greater funding, R&D paid for by the customer, some guarantees of through-life support budget. More planning is required. It takes specialisation. And time. This is all starting to sound depressingly familiar.

On top of the above, Ukraine’s technical and industrial performance was aided by the absence of anything causing significant dilution of effort. In the short term it could not – and therefore did not – try to develop high-end weapons beyond anything able to fight tomorrow. New artillery shells, missiles, aircraft and similar were relegated to “that would be nice, one day”.

But as Russia’s bombardment has grown, air defence has become vital. Resources devoted to tactical UAVs and similar cannot easily be rerouted to long-range air defence systems able of countering the evolved Shahed or cruise and ballistic missiles launched in their hundreds. Ukraine may well restart substantial air defence development, but the opportunity cost (in, for example, FPV drones) cannot be hoped away and in the short and medium term it depends largely on outside help.

So what are the flaws in “traditional” procurement that can best be addressed by the Ukrainian experience? The World Wars also saw “the West” make similar leaps towards rapid evolution, innovative supply, higher-risk design and massive personnel usage. It can and has been done.

But "larger budgets for costlier weapons" is not simple ineptitude. NATO nations need extremely effective systems to fight myriad, complex conflicts rather than face T-72s and massed conscript infantry. They are expected to have the latest in air defence, EW, cyber and everything in between. Such output of higher-end weapons needs time, money and guarantee of support. Certainly more so than a 3D-printed FPV drone with a life expectancy of a few minutes.

But, as Ukraine has shown, willingness to consider new methods is a concrete and valuable lesson. US and European defence procurement planners will not – because they cannot – mirror Ukraine’s approach to tactical system evolution, admirable though the latter might be. Ukraine’s Darwinist experience does not easily carry over to deeper and muddier waters. Its defence development was in some senses freewheeling capitalism where the strong – ie effective – survived.

The same cannot be said of complex combat systems, naval vessels or cyber capability, but Ukraine’s experience was closer to “the customer is always right”. Thus, if it does not work, you are out. Current contracts in the West are negotiated more along the lines of: “If it does not work, we will give you some more money concurrent with baseless threats that mean nothing because the original contract ensured your industrial survival”.

Admittedly, allotting money to sustain a wider high-tech industrial base does matter. Pork-barrel politics is an issue, together with a catastrophic lack of imagination vis-a-vis job security and shareholder value. But all is not catastrophically lost.

Big budget, “too-big-to-fail” is arguably the enemy of “good”, something very often true of the Western system. But as annoying as it is, usually only a big budget can produce complex weapon systems.

The evolution of AI, cyber, uncrewed systems and similar are arguably driving Western hands closer to Ukraine’s imposition of military-industrial effectiveness. The latter position is unlikely to be realised in countries where re-election is based on securing votes from employees of the local defence company. Nevertheless, it has possibly helped influence the evolution of the supply side of the equation.

An entrenched military-industrial complex will never operate in the manner of Ukraine’s efforts of the last three years, but it should be subject to critical oversight. You cannot develop a global satellite surveillance system from a 3D-printer cottage industry, but you can and should consider how and why your taxpayers’ money went to companies that are years late on what they claimed was a long-planned aircraft software update.

Maybe Ukraine’s takeaway for the West's defence contractors is: “Ask not what your country can do for you; but ask what you can do for your country”.

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