If one were looking to prove the old adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” they need only point to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Facing overwhelming odds that led many military experts to believe the war would end in days, Ukraine has held firm and turned the tide. In fact, depending on whose intelligence and information you read, the Ukrainian military could have a kill ratio as staggeringly high as five-to-one, or seven-to-one. That means there is one Ukrainian casualty for every five to seven Russian casualties.
What do necessity and invention have to do with this incredible perseverance in the face of superior military might? Practically everything, since the Ukrainian military’s ability to innovate to meet their requirements has been key to their continued success and survival.
Knowing that any future fight will invariably be against similar peer and near-peer adversaries with capabilities on par with our own, it’s imperative for the U.S. Department of War (DoW) to learn everything possible from what we’ve witnessed in Ukraine. This includes some of the innovative ways the Ukrainian military has adapted its doctrine and approach to achieve success against a larger, more sophisticated, and better-equipped military force.
Here are four essential lessons that we should take away from the conflict in Ukraine:
You Can’t Win by Outspending the Adversary
When Russia invaded Ukraine, it came with a much larger military force with incredibly sophisticated weapons systems. It would have been impossible for Ukraine to develop and manufacture multi-billion-dollar, exquisite weapons systems with similar capabilities at scale and in a timely fashion. Instead, the Ukrainian military pivoted away from small numbers of incredibly capable, exquisite systems towards smaller, less expensive, attritable weapons systems that could be manufactured and pressed into service quickly to defend their country.
Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have become a force multiplier for the Ukrainian military, and the results have been impressive. Today, 80 to 90 percent of Russian casualties on the battlefield are the result of drone strikes, with Ukrainian forces recording 819,737 video-confirmed drone hits in 2025.
The ability to hold exceedingly expensive weapons systems at risk with drones that are a fraction of the cost, and that can be manufactured in much shorter timeframes, is turning Cold War-era military doctrine on its head.
These attritable drones span a wide range of cost and capability. On the low end are short-range First-Person View (FPV) strike drones that can cost as little as $1,500 each, and longer-range strike drones that run approximately $55,000 each. On the high end, the roughly $250,000 naval drones Ukraine has used to sink Russian warships worth more than $100M combined – ships that take upwards of ten years to build – still cost a fraction of the price of the ships they’ve destroyed.
When weapons this inexpensive can destroy assets this valuable, larger and better-funded militaries can no longer win by simply outspending and out-manufacturing their opponents.
That’s not to say that the days of developing billion-dollar weapons systems are over. There will probably always be a need for large naval ships and highly capable, manned fighters. But the age of ONLY developing and manufacturing large, exquisite weapons systems is most definitely at an end. For America to win future conflicts, the DoW will need to invest in smaller, attritable systems that can be manufactured en masse.
However, it’s not enough to develop cheaper weapons systems that can be manufactured more quickly. These systems also need to be more autonomous.
EW Drives a Need for Autonomy
For much of the DoW’s Global War on Terrorism, it faced a less sophisticated adversary with limited electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. It didn’t have to worry about operating without communications networks or hiding electronic signatures. But the war in Ukraine has shown us that electronic warfare will be ever-present in any conflict against peer and near-peer adversaries.
During the war in Ukraine, communications networks have been degraded and denied. Essential position, navigation, and timing (PNT) capabilities, including GPS, have been jammed and spoofed. In fact, firsthand accounts from the battlefield report that whenever a radio signal is sent, its source is almost immediately attacked.
If UAS are going to be effective on a modern battlefield, they need to be resilient against EW capabilities. This means continuing to operate and execute the mission, even when they can’t be connected to a human operator. This is why autonomy is increasingly essential for UAS.
When UAS are autonomous, they no longer require a human to fly them or manage their sensors moment to moment. Instead, a human remains in the loop, overseeing the mission and retaining go/no-go authority over key decisions.
However, it’s important to remember that not all autonomy solutions are the same – some fail to truly deliver on the promise of distributed, collaborative operations. Others do not enable heterogeneous swarms of UAVs that work in concert to accomplish a mission, even as scenarios evolve. And that’s a problem, since the ability to have different types of drones working together, and to have drones that process data and react to changing conditions on the battlefield is increasingly important.
Shortening the Loop is Essential
When conducting military operations in constantly evolving environments, or responding to an adversary’s actions, military commanders and warfighters often follow a four-step decision-making framework. The four steps are:
- Observe – gather data and information about the situation or surroundings
- Orient – analyze that data for actionable insights
- Decide – create a plan of action
- Act – execute on the plan of action
This framework is more commonly known as the OODA Loop because the operator never stops cycling through the four steps.
Unfortunately, in the age of hypersonic effectors and drone swarms – which enable multiple attacks that come from multiple directions – the time that warfighters and commanders have to make decisions is drastically shortened. In this environment, there simply isn’t time for humans to gather data, analyze it, and identify the best plan of action from a separate, centralized location.
Rather, the OODA Loop needs to be pushed to the edge, with autonomous systems that sense, make sense, and act directly on the battlefield.
Consider a swarm of attritable systems sent to find and strike a set of mobile, defended targets moving across contested terrain. The targets don’t sit still, and the link back to a command center is jammed. There’s no time or connection to route sensor data back to a centralized location before acting. The systems have to sense the targets, make sense of them, and act at the edge. No single autonomous system can do that alone.
Ultimately, there is a difference between coordination and collaboration in autonomous unmanned systems. Systems that only coordinate follow a pre-scripted plan and can’t adapt when a target moves or a system is lost. Systems that collaborate share what each one senses and reassign targets among themselves in real time. That’s decentralized, collaborative autonomy. It lets a swarm act at the edge, at machine speed, without waiting on a network that may not be there. However, a human does remains in-the-loop throughout, able to intervene or make the ultimate go/no-go decision as necessary.
The war in Ukraine has shown the DoW what is capable with drone swarms and other advanced military tactics. In this new reality, the OODA Loop needs to be shortened and moved to the edge for mission success. Orchestrated, collaborative, distributed autonomy is essential in this environment to keeping the soldier, sailor, and airman safe in the field.
Cutting Red Tape is the Key
As I stated at the beginning of this article, necessity is the mother of invention. Ukraine needed to switch tactics and begin rapidly developing and manufacturing attritable UAS and other unmanned systems to simply stay alive in the face of overwhelming pressure from a larger, better-equipped, and better-resourced invading military. That pivot and change in doctrine was necessary for their survival.
But necessity isn’t the only thing that made this massive shift possible. They weren’t working around decades of legacy systems and established doctrine.
There is a reason why the Secretary of War and Deputy Secretary of War are working so hard to reinvent and streamline the acquisition process. They recognize the need for innovation but are trying to change doctrine that has been on paper since the Second World War. And that’s the issue: existing military doctrine calls for large, exquisite systems for the mission and treats attrition as failure. There needs to be a doctrine and culture change that embraces attritable solutions en masse.
The military has also historically started from scratch with every new weapons system, but that isn’t always necessary. Our coalition allies are developing and manufacturing incredibly capable systems that would meet the DoW’s mission requirements.
Lessons Learned…
Few things are as valuable to the U.S. military as real combat experience and experimentation. The ongoing war in Ukraine has seen a smaller, more innovative, and more agile force willing to pivot away from Cold War military doctrine to compete and win against a larger, more sophisticated adversary with capabilities similar to those of the U.S. military. The DoW can gain a significant tactical advantage by taking the cue from Ukraine and shifting military doctrine to embrace proliferated autonomous systems as a force multiplier. But that’s only possible by reevaluating established doctrine and redefining how the military acquires new capabilities and weapons systems.
The author, Doug Dynes, is a Navy veteran and former national security advisor. He currently serves as the President of Palladyne Aerospace and Defense.