Ukraine’s New Look Defense Industrial Base

My colleagues Charles Dainoff and Geoff Williams and I have a new article at Foreign Policy, on Ukraine’s approach to a post-modern defense industrial base:

In this fifth year of the war, small industrial workshops develop and produce drone designs, which are then shipped to the front lines and reworked extensively by local technicians before they are deployed in combat. The lessons learned are then fed back into industry to produce the next wave of drones. This approach, although costly in terms of time and duplicated effort, has generated an exponential rate of innovation at the front.

The remarkable new “front-brew” process is born of necessity; Ukraine needs the cycle of substantial drone rework at the front to generate and maintain any tactical success. While some innovations are coming from remote labs, most are developed in close proximity to the front line. Both iterative improvements by Ukrainian forces and tit-for-tat cycles of measure and countermeasure against Russian innovation have led to update cycles of as little as three weeks. In this environment, older models rapidly become useless.

Is this kind of rapid local adjustment the future of infantry warfare, or are there factors unique to Ukraine that will constrain its spread? If it is a sign of things to come, will the effect on military procurement and practice be revolutionary? Will this model spread on its own, can it be exported, or does it represent either a dead end or a stage of development in a process that will eventually resume historical trends?

The Russia-Ukraine conflict shows a particularly intense version of an arms race microclimate, but across the world, many of the same patterns are emerging. In Sudan, both the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces are using increasingly sophisticated drones against each other. The conflict in Myanmar shows two sides rapidly adjusting their technologies to maintain an advantage. While India and Pakistan have only engaged in limited skirmishing, both are working hard to innovate aggressively.

See also this account of German manufacturing support for Ukrainian drones:

For all Helsing’s whiz-bang A.I., it is possible that the proliferation of defense tech start-ups could confound investors, or even turn them off. “Defense tech, because of all the interest, has become a very noisy place,” Scherf said. “There are a lot of new players, and that makes it hard to read for investors, the public, and governments.”

But few believe the demand for unmanned warfare will subside any time soon. And in Helsing’s drone factory, the outline of the next potential conflict in Europe is already taking shape. In a large storage room, dozens of boxes are stacked several feet high, many containing drones awaiting shipment, not to Ukraine, but to a battle-ready German brigade stationed in Lithuania, near the Belarus border. Germany’s parliament this week approved a €220 million military contract for Helsing to develop a broad range of A.I. systems.

Ballooning military spending might be good for investors, but it could signal tough times for the world. “A lot of it hangs on the thinking that we are on course for a larger conflict in Europe,” Blanchard said. “You don’t grow your arms industry because you are expecting a generation of peace.”

Photo Credit: By Lycksele-Nord – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133244180