Ukraine’s wartime innovation is not about drones

Four years into the war, Ukraine has established itself as a driving force in defence innovation. By adapting to the Darwinian realities of contemporary warfare, Ukraine has transformed itself from a recipient of military assistance into one of the most important contributors to European security.

European efforts to deepen defence-industrial cooperation with Ukraine began in earnest in 2024 and accelerated sharply with the launch of the ‘Build with Ukraine’ programme in 2025. Designed to meet Ukraine’s wartime needs, the programme connects European capital, technology, production infrastructure and certification capacity with Ukrainian know-how, skilled personnel and system integration expertise.

A preferred model is the joint venture, through which cooperation with individual European countries helps expand production while supporting the needs of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. More broadly, bilateral partnerships, co-production, joint ventures and selective acquisitions are increasingly seen as strategic opportunities to integrate Ukrainian innovation into the European industrial base, diversify production footprints and preserve battlefield knowledge that might otherwise fade as the war changes character and demand declines.

Recent steps by Kyiv to establish a formal mechanism for the controlled export of domestically produced defence technology suggest that this shift is accelerating, and that future cooperation may increasingly involve not only product transfer, but joint production, technology exchange and the transfer of operational experience.

While increased defence-industrial collaboration with Ukraine is both timely and desirable – not least because it helps Ukraine meet its wartime needs while defending Europe’s security – bilateral frameworks remain too narrow and fragmented to significantly strengthen Europe’s long-term defence and readiness.

Ukraine’s real comparative advantage lies not merely in a set of platforms it has developed, but in the innovation ecosystem that enables those platforms to be adapted, replaced and improved faster than adversaries can respond. In modern warfare, battlefield relevance is increasingly short-lived: systems, software and tactics must be updated continuously, and the side able to compress the cycle from frontline need to technical adaptation and redeployment gains a decisive edge.

Modern warfare is therefore increasingly defined by temporal advantage: the decisive question is no longer only who has the more advanced system, but who has the ability to adapt, iterate and field change faster than the enemy. This points to two deeply strategic lessons in modern warfare: platforms do not generate capability in the absence of an adapted ecosystem, and time has become a domain of war in its own right, where the speed of adaptation and innovation confers superiority.

Ukraine’s real innovation model: speed, feedback and adaptation

Ukraine’s real advantage lies in experience, and in the speed with which that experience is turned into adaptation. The battlefield requires rapid decision-making, continuous learning and immediate implementation. Different systems must operate simultaneously, integrate seamlessly and evolve as battlefield conditions change.

This is how the process works in practice. A frontline unit encounters a new challenge, such as a novel type of electronic warfare. A drone that proved effective one day may become obsolete the next. Rather than entering a lengthy procurement or development process, operational feedback is passed directly to the teams that designed or built the system. In many cases, engineers and operators communicate through the same digital channels. Designs are modified, tested and returned to the frontline – often within days rather than months. Several iterations may be required, but under wartime conditions this rapid feedback loop is both routine and essential. This feedback loop is at the core of Ukraine’s innovation model, and it has been forged at enormous cost.

Europe tends to underestimate Russia’s capacity to adapt. The war is being fought between two competing systems of learning and adjustment. The central question is which side can absorb feedback, modify its systems and redeploy faster. The side that closes that loop more quickly gains the advantage, until the next battlefield shift resets the cycle. At present, the war is defined less by movement along the front than by a rapid contest of adaptation, in which advances in electronic warfare, fibre-optic control links and interceptor drones provoke new countermeasures within weeks.

Ukraine’s strength therefore lies not simply in producing effective systems, but in sustaining an exceptionally high rate of change. Any Ukrainian combat product that proves effective is not the result of a fixed design, but the outcome of continuous experimentation, rapid iteration and constant adjustment to the evolving realities of the battlefield.

What Europe still gets wrong: treating innovation as a platform problem

Europe’s problem is not a lack of technological talent. At a recent high-level conversation on European defence hosted by Friends of Europe, participants repeatedly returned to a different weakness: Europe still struggles to adapt its innovation cycle to the pace of modern warfare.

In Europe, innovation is still too often absorbed through long procurement cycles, rigid certification and one-off purchases of fixed products. This reflects a deeper tendency to treat innovation as a set of platforms and products rather than as a process of continuous adaptation.

That mindset carries important industrial consequences: European firms are asked to invest and scale without sufficient visibility over future demand, even as technologies evolve too quickly to justify static production models. In other words, Europe continues to buy innovation as if it were hardware while modern warfare necessitates treating innovation as an ecosystem.

The battlefield logic: why end-users sit at the centre of the ecosystem

In modern warfare, the end-user has to sit at the centre of the innovation ecosystem because the battlefield evolves faster than formal procurement cycles can respond. The operator is the first to see when a system stops working, why it fails and what needs to change. If that knowledge does not flow directly back into design and production, adaptation comes too late and capability begins to erode.

In the European model, the end-user typically stands at the end of the chain. A requirement, or an idea for a new product or the adaptation of an existing one, moves through a long bureaucratic process before being translated into formal specifications and sent out to tender. By the time a finished product or platform arrives, the battlefield may already have changed.

The Ukrainian model works differently. The process begins with a concrete operational challenge identified at unit level and communicated directly to the producer. The system is adapted, tested quickly in the field and exposed to real conditions and real failures. Feedback returns immediately and the cycle begins again. Only if and when the modified system solves the problem and proves effective on the battlefield is it scaled widely.

You can have the best hardware on the market, but if it is not adapted in real-time, if the update cycle takes months or years, if there is no fast feedback from the front, that can turn the drone into an expensive and ineffective toy.

Bilateral agreements and joint ventures remain important for transferring products, investment, expertise and manufacturing capacity. However, they are insufficient on their own to transfer the organisational logic that makes Ukrainian defence innovation effective. Ukraine’s wartime innovation ecosystem cannot be fully absorbed through fragmented bilateralism alone, because what Europe needs to learn is not only what Ukraine produces, but how it learns, adapts and delivers change under pressure.

If Europe wants to benefit fully from Ukraine’s military innovation, it must move beyond treating Ukrainian innovation as a catalogue of platforms and engage with it as a dynamic ecosystem. The question is therefore not whether to cooperate with Ukraine, but whether Europe’s current forms of cooperation are capable of learning from the way Ukraine fights, adapts and innovates.

Joint ventures, co-production and direct purchases remain necessary first steps. But Europe must also absorb the underlying principles that make these capabilities effective: direct contact between operators and engineers, rapid feedback loops, faster iteration, more flexible procurement, shorter certification cycles and demand signals that are predictable but adaptable.

The real test is therefore institutional. Can Europe build a defence system that learns and adjusts at the speed modern warfare now demands? If not, it risks continuing to produce high-quality and expensive systems that become outdated before they can deliver their full operational value.

Ukraine did not choose this model. It was forged under the pressures of war and at a cost that cannot be measured in financial terms. Europe now has an opportunity to learn from Ukraine’s experience before it is forced to pay a similar price for its own security.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.