The Salesman in the Oval Office

Mark Rutte brought a whiteboard to Washington. A German general had already set the date.

by Thomas S. Karat | Jul 3, 2026 | 

On June 24, in the Oval Office, the secretary general of NATO stood up from his chair, walked over to a pair of presentation boards, and began a sales pitch. Mark Rutte had brought charts. He pointed at the first one and gave it a brand name. He called it the “Trump Trillion,” the extra money Europeans and Canadians have poured into defense since Donald Trump first took office in 2017 – $1.2 trillion all told, with more than $250 billion of it in the past two years alone. Then he turned to the president and delivered the line a salesman saves for the close. “This,” he said, pointing at the boards, “is your evidence.”

It is worth pausing on the spectacle. A man who governed the Netherlands for fourteen years, the longest-serving prime minister in his country’s history, was doing flip-chart duty in another man’s house, naming the product after the customer the way you name a hospital wing after the donor who paid for it. This is the same Mark Rutte who, at last year’s summit, called Trump “daddy.” The performance in June was of a piece: gratitude as theater, flattery as policy. “For me,” he told the room, “you are first of all the leader of the free world.”

There was something the charts did not show, and the German military had already put it in writing. On its own website, the Bundeswehr states that it assumes Russia could be capable of a large-scale attack on NATO territory from 2029. This is not loose talk from a podium; it is the premise of Germany’s first comprehensive military defense concept, a document that for the first time translates the country’s National Security Strategy into concrete operational planning. The country’s highest-ranking soldier, Chief of Defence General Carsten Breuer, lays out a three-tier timeline around the date: ready to “fight tonight” now, grown by 2029 to withstand a major assault, and able by 2039 to deter one outright. “It has never been this serious,” he says. The head of the German army, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, has put the same year more bluntly, telling reporters at an air show in Berlin that “2029 is not a German timeline” but NATO-agreed intelligence, on which all 32 members concur, and that Russia might move sooner. “We must be ready to fight.”

So this is the arithmetic an American taxpayer is being asked to fund. While the secretary general was in Washington congratulating the president on a trillion dollars, the German military was telling the public that the money buys a conventional war on the European continent inside of four years. The charts and the countdown belong to the same project. One is the invoice; the other is what it pays for. It is a strange way to celebrate. Rutte presented as a triumph the same rearmament that the alliance’s own commanders treat as preparation for a war they expect within four years.

The date itself deserves more scrutiny than it gets. It is not the product of an intercepted Russian war plan. It is an extrapolation – a projection of Russian rearmament trajectories, troop counts, and tank production, run forward and rounded to a year. That a forecast can be assembled does not make it a prophecy, and a Russia grinding through its fifth year in Ukraine, having taken more than a million casualties to move the front a few miles, is not obviously a Russia poised to overrun nuclear-armed NATO. But the number works, and it works precisely because it is frightening. A date does what an argument cannot: it forecloses debate and starts a clock.

The consensus is also less unanimous than the word implies. At that same Berlin air show, NATO’s own Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the American general Alexus Grynkewich, told reporters he had “watched the intelligence very closely” and reached the opposite conclusion: Russia, he said, is not looking for a conflict with the alliance, because it understands that NATO is a defensive bloc with decisive asymmetric advantages. The man responsible for actually fighting the war the German generals are dating does not appear to believe it is coming. That disagreement, between the alliance’s top commander and the capital doing the loudest warning, is the part the whiteboard leaves off.

Rutte reached for history in the Oval Office, and he reached badly. The trillion-dollar surge, he told Trump, achieved “something which since Eisenhower has not been achieved” – Europeans equalizing their defense spending with the United States. It is hard to imagine a more self-defeating name to invoke. Dwight Eisenhower’s most enduring words were not about getting allies to spend more. They were a warning. In his farewell address from this same White House in 1961, the general who had commanded the largest war machine in history told Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

That is the irony at the center of the whole performance. The “Trump Trillion” is the unwarranted influence Eisenhower named, rebranded as an achievement and propped on an easel. Rutte even itemized the spoils: by his own count at the boards, the spending has created roughly 112,000 jobs in American defense plants, with a $300 billion order backlog already on the books. He offered these numbers as good news, and for the contractors they are. A war economy is, among other things, a jobs program – and it was being sold to a president who likes his name on buildings by a man who had just put it on the war.

To understand how Rutte became one of Europe’s most enthusiastic evangelist for rearmament, it helps to remember what he did when the politics ran the other way. In April 2011, Prime Minister Mark Rutte took an axe to his own country’s military. His government cut 12,000 jobs from the Dutch armed forces – more than one in six uniformed personnel – sold off nineteen F-16s, scrapped seventeen transport helicopters and a fleet of minehunters, and decommissioned every last one of the Netherlands’ sixty tanks. The army that emerged was hollowed out to the point where, by 2016, Dutch defense spending had fallen to 1.17 percent of GDP, well below even the European average.

This is the man now touring Western capitals to demand that all of Europe rearm to five percent of GDP for a war with Russia. The contradiction is not hypocrisy for its own sake; it is the tell. When austerity was the fashion and the budget needed balancing, Rutte found the Russian threat invisible enough to gut his own army. Now that rearmament is the fashion, he finds the same threat existential enough to reorder the entire continent’s economy around it.

This conviction tracks the career, not the intelligence. A man who scrapped his nation’s last tank does not, fifteen years later, rediscover the Russian menace by reading a new cable. He rediscovers it because a larger chair came open.

And the larger chair was a gift. The record of how Rutte got the job of NATO secretary general is not hidden in a back room; the principals narrated it themselves. At their first Oval Office meeting after Trump’s reelection, the president recalled the appointment: “We had to support him, and we supported him as soon as I heard the name.” Rutte, for his part, addressed the president as “dear Donald” and credited him personally with the European spending surge. A hawkish posture, a record of Atlanticist loyalty, a willingness to flatter – and then the most powerful military office on the continent. One need not allege a secret transaction to see the shape of the thing. The services were rendered in public, and so was the reward.

There is a blunt word for a public official who performs gratitude this lavishly for a foreign patron while steering his own continent toward a war, and readers can supply it themselves. What can be said without embellishment is that a war between Russia and Europe serves no Dutch interest anyone has been able to articulate. The man pushing hardest for the confrontation is the same one who decided, when it suited his budget, that the Netherlands scarcely needed an army at all. Whoever he is now serving, it is not the country he used to run.

Here is where the spectacle turns from farce to something colder, and where it should matter most to Americans. While Rutte thanked Trump for securing Europe’s defense, Trump’s own Pentagon was quietly dismantling it. On June 12 – the day after the German general set his 2029 date, twelve days before the whiteboard – the New York Times reported that the United States plans to sharply reduce the aircraft and warships it makes available to NATO in Europe: the number of F-16 and F-15E fighter jets cut from roughly 150 to 100, maritime reconnaissance aircraft cut from 26 to 15, all eight aerial refueling tankers withdrawn, and a missile submarine, an aircraft carrier, several warships, and a bomber task force reassigned to other theaters.

The Pentagon’s own European commander put the policy bluntly, calling the alliance’s reliance on American forces an “unhealthy codependence” that “needs to change, and it will change.” Read the two events side by side. The man being credited in the Oval Office with Europe’s security is, in the same fortnight, documented withdrawing it. Rutte is locking Europe into a war economy and a war date at the precise moment the guarantor he is flattering heads for the exits. The Europeans get the bill, the militarized society, and the 2029 countdown. The Americans whose president’s name is on the chart are quietly packing up the carriers.

That is the trap, and it is worth naming for what it is. An American is being asked to watch a foreign official flatter the president into branding a continental war machine, and to feel good about the jobs it creates, while the American military walks away from the obligation to defend the place that machine is being built to fight over. The “Trump Trillion” is not a gift to the United States. It is a European war economy with an American label, sold by a man who gutted his own army when it was convenient and rediscovered the Russian threat at the exact moment a bigger office opened up.

Eisenhower told Americans, from that same room, to stay alert to exactly this: the slow capture of a free society by the machinery of permanent war, and the men who profit from calling it security. Sixty-five years later, a Dutch politician stood in the Oval Office, pointed at a chart, and thanked another president for ignoring him. The applause in Washington was real. So is the date the generals have circled. Somebody should ask who pays when the clock runs out – and why the country whose name is on the war is already heading for the door.

Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.

Globalization isn’t dead, just ‘transformed,’ says IMF chief economist

AFP

June 26, 2026

Image by © AFP/File STR


While the global economy has faced shocks and trade turmoil, globalization is not dead — it is simply being “transformed,” the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist told AFP Friday in an exclusive interview.

The world’s lender of last resort will release an update to its World Economic Outlook on July 8, with all eyes on whether — or how far — it revises down growth estimates from its April update due to the economic fallout of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

By then, however, Chief Economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas will have moved on after completing a four-and-a-half year tenure that saw the IMF grapple with the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Washington’s upending of global trade through tariffs and the recent war on Iran.

Reflecting on a tumultuous time for the world economy, Gourinchas remains confident that recent upheaval in global trade caused by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs are not necessarily ending globalization — just adjusting certain bilateral relationships.

“Well, it’s certainly not dead,” he told AFP in his office at the IMF’s headquarters in Washington, pointing to solid global trade-to-GDP ratios.

“We haven’t experienced de-globalization,” he said. “We have experienced (that) it’s being transformed.”

IMF Chief Economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas believes that globalization is not dead — it is simply being “transformed” – Copyright AFP SAUL LOEB

Gourinchas, a 57-year-old Frenchman, said the latest movements should be seen mainly as “a desire to reduce the bilateral level of trade between the US and China. I don’t think that is something that is a mystery for anyone.”

Since returning to office for a second term, Trump has targeted US friends and foes alike with punishing tariffs, saying he intends to rebase manufacturing to the homeland and to address what he terms unfair trade practices.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer have described globalization as having taken economic integration too far, causing economic pain for American households while benefiting those abroad.

For Gourinchas, however, the latest trade turmoil — which has seen major US trading partners retaliate with tariffs of their own — has provided opportunities, too.

“Other actors have stepped in,” he said. “The supply chains have adapted, the Mexico’s, the Vietnam’s of the world have stepped in… the connector countries that have been able to grow on the back of this.”

Still, it depends on how far Washington and other advanced economies push this fragmentation of the global economy, he said.

“If the strategy is not just to disengage from China, but it’s to disengage more globally — which I don’t think it is, by the way — I don’t think it’s sustainable,” he said.

He is skeptical, too, on whether the drive to move industries to the United States will end up boosting employment, saying it is “very, very hard” to see that happening. New factories in advanced economies are expected to rely heavily on technology and employ fewer workers.

– ‘Middle-income trap’ –

For the world’s emerging market countries, there is another challenge in a fragmenting world economy: What will drive their own growth, if not demand from larger economies?

The last decade has seen growth in developing countries stall, with the World Bank’s Chief Economist Indermit Gill referring to it as a “lost decade” for many.

Gourinchas said that emerging economies had shown remarkable resilience through the shocks of the last five years, mainly due to greater supply-chain integration — but that resilience was not infinite.

“There is this concern about potentially having a middle-income trap for many emerging market economies,” he said, pointing to limited sources of growth in a world where advanced economies were turning inwards.

Since the 1990s, China has been seen as a shining example to be emulated by developing nations — an economy that capitalized on cost disparities to create an export-oriented growth model that it rode to vast success.

But in a world where advanced economies are potentially “closing up,” while China continues to provide cut-throat competition on manufacturing costs, can any of these emerging economies use the same path Beijing did?

“That leaves a very narrow space for them to actually enter into an export-led growth model, which has been the recipe for development and success for many, many countries,” Gourinchas said.

“A country like India, for instance, is very unsure whether it can follow in the footsteps of China,” he said.

After the IMF, Gourinchas will be headed back to a career in academia at the University of California, Berkeley.

In Idaho, the next generation of US nuclear reactors nears reality

AFP
June 28, 2026

Startup Antares became the first company to run a new-design nuclear reactor in the US in nearly 50 years – Copyright AFP Josh Edelson

A new generation of small nuclear reactors is up and running — or nearly so — in the United States, in what backers are calling a turning point for the industry.

The milestone, made possible by billions in private and government funding, was on display in the middle of the Idaho desert, where a cluster of drab hangars might otherwise go unnoticed.

But the presence of heavily armed soldiers, security checkpoints, and signs warning of radioactivity are anything but ordinary.

It was here, at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), that startup Antares on June 4 became the first company to run a new-design nuclear reactor in the US in nearly 50 years.

“This is the first real moment in this new nuclear renaissance,” said Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares.

Aalo Atomics, another participant in the program launched in 2025 under President Donald Trump, is set to do the same in the coming days — also here in Idaho, just hours before a presidential target date: July 4 and the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Meanwhile, on June 18, another startup, Valar Atomics, hit the same milestone in Utah, reaching what is known as criticality — the point at which a reactor can sustain its own nuclear chain reaction.

After developing more than 50 reactor prototypes — including the world’s first to feed electricity into the grid, in 1951 — INL had pressed pause following accidents at Three Mile Island in the US and Chernobyl in current day Ukraine.

Then came the war in Ukraine, followed by the AI boom — putting the energy sector under severe strain and leading both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to revive civilian nuclear power.



– ‘Simpler’ –



Billions of dollars in both private and public funding have already been mobilized to develop these small modular reactors (SMRs) — compact enough that one was transported to the site towed by a pickup truck.

SMRs promise cheaper, faster-to-build nuclear power that can go almost anywhere — from remote military bases to power-hungry data centers. But they have yet to be proven at commercial scale, and some analysts doubt they can compete on cost with wind and solar.

Beyond financial support, the government has put INL’s facilities and staff — who have accumulated nearly 80 years of experience — at the disposal of the selected companies.

The new reactors also use different technology from conventional plants, ruling out the kind of cascading disasters seen at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and allowing for far simpler, cheaper construction.

“The whole plant can get simpler. We don’t need to have several feet thick of concrete and steel line containment,” said Yasir Arafat, President and CTO of Aalo Atomics.



– ‘Golden age’ –



Even as the pace has sharply accelerated, Tori Shivanandan, President and COO of Radiant Nuclear, does not want regulatory shortcuts.

The team at the lab, “they hold the line, and we want them to, because ultimately, if we don’t make safe products, we’ll never sell reactors,” she said.

Reaching criticality is not the same as being ready for commercial use.

The reactor designs — whose prototypes operate under a special government waiver — still need to be cleared by the US nuclear regulator, the NRC.

But Energy Secretary Chris Wright, speaking to AFP at a “celebration of the golden age of nuclear energy” in Idaho Falls, was bullish on the timeline.

“We’ll have hundreds by the end of the decade. In fact, our aggressive goal is we will have some of these reactors producing electricity for beneficial use next year,” he said.

If all goes according to plan, Radiant’s first SMRs will go to US military sites, as will Antares’s, while Aalo is targeting data centers.

Nuclear power is also positioning itself as a tool for American influence abroad, with China the only other country operating an SMR.

“Every country I go to asks about the next-generation American nuclear technology. I say…it’s happening right now,” Wright said.

“This will be a massive American export a decade from now,” he added.

Op-Ed: Military AI is reinventing war at the expense of all previous theories and many sacred cows

Paul Wallis
June 27, 2026

DIGITAL JOURNAL

A Ukrainian serviceman of an air reconnaissance squad of the 45th Brigade carries a Leleka reconnaissance UAV after its landing at a position in Donetsk region – Copyright AFP Genya SAVILOV

If you give someone a weapon nobody knows quite how to use, nobody can be sure what’s going to happen. A raging torrent of military AI news is reshaping everything from logistics to intelligence to basic tactics daily. It’s turning strategy into a multidimensional universe in its spare time.

Certainties have become gaping holes in strategy. AI can be trained in operational modes that make old-style strategies redundant. These changes create new vulnerabilities requiring innovative countermeasures. Technologies may have to be designed from scratch.

The scale and scope of strategic targeting are also now much wider, making defence that much harder. A single coordinated AI strike could and will target infrastructure, communications, economic networks and put an entire country out of business in a few hours.

Mass production of AI weapons and agents adds further dimensions. These systems are coming online fast, and at the operational level, they work. Ukraine is using various AI-enabled systems very effectively. Even at this early stage, a search of “Ukraine AI warfare” generates vast amounts of related information.

“Asymmetric warfare” is one thing, but military AI is a whole new type of asymmetry. In asymmetric warfare, the capabilities of forces differ significantly. With military AI, those capabilities can change overnight.
Military AI in sandbox mode

There are few things less popular with the world’s military than saying warfare is simply becoming a video game. From the AI perspective, however, it can’t really be anything else.

Gamers in the meantime are finding out the daunting fact of how effective upgraded AI can be in gaming scenarios. In one notable case, the AI not only deployed competently in strict best practice defensive positions but was also able to counterattack. That outcome is textbook good tactics. The after action report in that game was downright gruesome. Even at the sim level, this long-established game suddenly became a very tricky affair, and the highly experienced human player lost.

The sandbox analogy for military AI is perhaps too appropriate. That makes it even more dangerous. You can test scenarios. You can model operations. You can add elements to your combat force and your tactics. You can force asymmetry on your opponent.

This generation of military AI is a mix of both coexisting conventional systems and autonomous units. It’s barely the beginning of the beginning. AI is driving a top-to-bottom redesign of conventional systems while new platforms create new capabilities. The number of new degrees of difficulty is exploding.
Military AI at the geopolitical level

If grunt-level AI is becoming so much tougher, at the geopolitical level, it’s more like 5-dimensional chess. The China vs US dichotomy is a case in point. Even the rules of AI governance are under a type of top-level scrutiny that those rules can barely meet.

With this situation come a range of operational realities. China’s current visible military AI profile seems to be mirroring the US, but only to a point. At a recent unveiling of robotic military tech, the familiar robot dogs, drones, and UAVs were highly visible. Also visible were “robot soldiers”, the much predicted and barely adequately described antithesis of human warfare.

At the moment they look more like updated Terra Cotta Warriors, but they could well be a factor in real operations. That’s also a form of sabre-rattling, and it’s making a deep impression geopolitically. You can almost hear the budget calculations scrambling to adjust to unknown threat levels.
The first casualty of AI war is the old military industrial complex theory

This level of military AI is really just camera fodder at the moment, but it’s readying the geopolitical market for massive changes. It’s also reshaping the industrial base, down to the component level. The military industrial complexes of old are becoming fully automated industrial complexes.

The problem for the military industrial complexes is that the old industrial certainties are gone, and they won’t be coming back. AI may be a gamechanger, but they’ll have to guess which games they’re playing.

That means:

Forget the old super-expensive tech scenarios. The Ukraine war has shown how fatal expensive targets are. This is no longer “measure vs countermeasure”. It’s about survivability.

A seventh-generation air capacity will be essential, and soon. The sixth-generation fighters are already under stress from incoming AI capabilities. UAVs may be the only option, and combat effectiveness is the only criterion.

Land warfare will never be the same. Imagine AI deploying minefields, loitering munitions making areas uninhabitable, AI-guided bullets, and more. Old tech is very unlikely to be able to manage situations it was never designed for. Ammo types are likely to be the first on the scrapheap as the military tech evolves.

Naval warfare needs to evolve, fast. Big targets and ridiculously long lead times to production are deathtraps for modern navies. There are simply too many problems with the old methods.

Military intelligence now includes everything and everywhere. Remember that drones used to be toys. Now, they’re essential military hardware. Everything is their target. Cyberespionage and AI agents are redefining and redirecting military intelligence on an exponential scale across whole sectors. Any form of tech that can be adapted to military use is now an intelligence issue.

Modern military logistics can’t use ponderous supply chains. Ukraine has shown that onsite capacity is critical for maintaining and supporting combat capabilities. Russia has shown that these supply formats are obsolete and completely unworkable. The sedate pace of military supply can’t work. Modern combat needs support to deliver ASAP.
The perspective of those on the receiving end has also changed

Nothing is AI-proof. Control of military AI is a true guessing game. Autonomous AI may make decisions that aren’t under the effective control of military organizations. There may or may not be Off switches for these types of AI.

AI may also not have any connection with the rules of war. Does AI take prisoners? Probably not. Definitely not, if it doesn’t know how. Will AI respect civilian targets? Maybe, but how, and can anyone be sure it will?

What about collateral damage? It was a big issue, and now it’s inevitable. Higher lethality will apply indiscriminately, despite any efforts otherwise. How do you tell an AI not to bomb a specific target when it’s on seek-and-destroy missions?

Typically in modern wars, civilian casualties are much higher than military. The realities of AI warfare are much more dangerous. Let’s stop being smug about dollars and focus on survival.

____________________________________________________

Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.

 Moldova’s Push To Limit Gagauz Autonomy Risks Destabilizing Southeastern Europe – Analysis

Location of Gagauzia in Moldova

July 3, 2026 
By Paul Goble

Key Takeaways

Moldova is seeking to restrict further the autonomy of Gagauzia, its Christian Turkic region, ahead of a July 7 Constitutional Court ruling that would strip the region of its remaining self-governance rights under the 1994 accord, including control over its own elections.

Chisinau frames this crackdown as necessary because Gagauz leaders have grown closer to Moscow. This move risks backfiring on Chisinau by slowing Moldova’s European Union accession process, strengthening arguments for union with Romania, and hardening Gagauz demands for independence under the 1994 framework.

Moldova’s internal affairs appear likely to escalate into a wider crisis, potentially sparking tensions in eastern Europe and even leading to a military clash between Russia and Romania, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member state.

Analysis

A seemingly internal dispute over election procedures in Moldova has the potential to destabilize southeastern Europe. This development could complicate Western support for Ukraine amid Russia’s war and contribute to a broader escalation of tensions between Moscow and the West. The dispute over the status of Gagauzia, officially the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia, is unfolding as the Moldovan government seeks to further restrict the autonomy of the country’s Christian Turkic region by requiring all electoral candidates to be vetted by the central government. While such vetting is already in place in other regions, this move would eliminate one of the last remaining powers granted to the Gagauz people under the 1994 agreement that ended a civil war and preserved Moldova’s territorial integrity (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 29).

Chisinau argues that this step is necessary because Gagauz leaders have increasingly aligned themselves with Moscow rather than local interests, with Russia historically using Gagauzia and Transnistria as instruments to keep Moldova within its sphere of influence (see EDM, March 20, 21, September 7, 2024). The European Union has also reported that these recent developments are coming to a head, with Moldova’s Constitutional Court expected to issue a ruling on July 7, which is likely to support the central government’s position (Council of the European Union, June 15).

Chisinau’s moves are already having consequences. Moldova’s application to open European Union accession talks, already slowed by Hungary, may face further delays due to developments involving Gagauzia (Politico Europe, June 23). The European Union was among the most enthusiastic supporters of the 1994 accord between Chisinau and Gagauzia, later enshrined in Moldovan law and widely celebrated as a model for the peaceful resolution of ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet space. To the extent that Chisinau’s actions effectively void that accord and raise the possibility that violence contained may now reappear, other European countries may be less enthusiastic about admitting Moldova, particularly given the European Union’s emphasis on regional policies. That reaction, in turn, has already prompted some Moldovan officials to declare that they will pursue what they call “Plan B” by seeking EU membership through union with Romania (Euractiv, June 2). In that event, the Gagauz would likely seek independence.


Moldova’s government has sufficient police powers to suppress Gagauz protests in the short term, absent outside intervention. Using these powers could further alienate EU member states and increase the likelihood of union with Romania, effectively integrating present-day Moldova into the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) framework. That prospect would almost certainly prompt Moscow to act quickly to avoid facing another fait accompli to its west, potentially triggering a military conflict between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and NATO and EU member country Romania. Some Russian commentators have already suggested the possibility of such a reaction (Rhythm of Eurasia, June 30).

The course of events cannot be predicted with certainty, but there is little doubt that such a scenario would deepen divisions within the West and further intensify the crisis in relations between Moscow and the West that has unfolded since Putin invaded Ukraine. If Putin seeks to attack a NATO member state, the deteriorating relationship between Chisinau and the Gagauz could make Moldova a flashpoint, even though Russia does not share a common border with the country.


The possibility that these developments could unfold in the near future is suggested by comments made during a June 29 session of the People’s Assembly of Gagauzia. Although the Assembly’s term in office ended last year amid disputes over the election, its members have continued to meet independently. Participants suggested that Chisinau’s recent actions regarding Gagauzia’s autonomous status constitute the complete cancellation of the terms of the 1994 agreement that the Moldovan government passed into law. The agreement gave the Gagauz many rights, including control over their own elections and the right to declare independence should Moldova ever decide to unite with Romania (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 29).

With few exceptions, that arrangement remained in place until 2020, when current Moldovan President Maia Sandu, committed to breaking with Moscow and siding with the West, came to power and began rolling back the provisions of the 1994 accord. In the view of many Gagauz, Sandu has already eliminated most of the rights guaranteed under that agreement, except control over their own elections, and there are now concerns that even this remaining power may be taken away.

The day before the assembly meeting, Moldova’s president infuriated people of the region by declaring that the Gagauz “do not have genuine autonomy” because decisions are not being made independently but rather “by someone in Moscow.” Sandu further stated that the current arrangement was invented in the Kremlin and that it must stop. Until the Gagauz “listen less to Moscow,” she said, “elections [in Gagauzia] will continue to be postponed” (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 29).

Participants at the Gagauz meeting responded by asserting that they are a distinct people and that all provisions of the 1994 accord must be upheld, including the right to autonomy in governing its own elections. They also warned that continued pressure from Chisinau would have serious consequences for Moldova’s future. According to Valery Yanioglo, former deputy chairman of the Gagauz Executive Committee and a participant at the meeting, “the central authorities must understand that the greater the pressure they put on the autonomous region, the stronger will be the desire of our people to resolve issues independently” (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 29). Such language suggests that an increasing number of Gagauz are considering independence not only as a right, recognized by the Moldovan government, but also as a possible option sooner if the central authorities continue their current drive to assert full control over the autonomy.


There is still time for compromise. The Moldovan Supreme Court could issue a decision granting the Gagauz some of their demands, Chisinau could offer concessions, and European actors could display greater understanding of the security pressures Chisinau faces from Russia. This would help avert a situation in which Russian actions involving Gagauzia derail the opening of EU accession talks. The clock is ticking, and the window for compromise is narrowing compared to the past (see EDM, February 29, 2024). This is particularly the case as the stakes remain high and Putin stands ready to exploit the situation (Rhythm of Eurasia, June 30).

This article was published by The Jamestown Foundation


About Paul Goble
Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com .
View all posts by Paul Goble →

Moldova’s prime minister resigns after corruption scandal at air traffic control company

Alexandru Munteanu haș been prime minister for just eight months. / gov.mdFacebookTwitterLinkedIn

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By Iulian Ernst in Bucharest July 3, 2026

Moldovan Prime Minister Alexandru Munteanu announced his resignation on July 3, saying he could no longer carry out his mandate "in accordance with my principles and convictions", less than a year after taking office.

Munteanu steps down as Moldova prepares European Union accession negotiations amid growing political tensions and heightened scrutiny of the government's anti-corruption agenda.

"I accepted the offer to become prime minister with great responsibility and the firm belief that I could bring about positive change. When I realised that I could no longer fulfil my mandate in accordance with my principles and convictions, I decided to step down," Munteanu said, according to Deschide.md.

Under Moldova's constitution, the cabinet will continue to serve in a caretaker capacity with limited powers until a new government is sworn in.

President Maia Sandu said, at a brief press conference after Munteanu's resignation, that she expected to nominate a new prime minister within one to three weeks.

Munteanu did not disclose the reasons behind his decision. However, local media have reported unconfirmed disagreements between the prime minister and President Sandu over proposals for a broader overhaul of the management of state-owned companies and public institutions.

The resignation comes days after a corruption scandal involving state-owned air navigation company MoldATSA, where investigations uncovered irregular appointments and remuneration, including the hiring of Sandu's cousin, Anastasia Taburceanu. The affair has fuelled criticism of the government's governance practices and renewed scrutiny of Sandu's influence over appointments to senior public positions.

Sandu denied that tensions with Munteanu had prompted his resignation. "There were no contradictions. Both I and Mr. Munteanu work with integrity and honesty," she said. "This week I had several discussions with the prime minister about the reforms that have sparked numerous debates in society. There were no tense discussions at all."

She also dismissed reports of a late-night meeting preceding the resignation, saying a planned discussion had not taken place because Parliament Speaker Igor Grosu was unavailable.

Munteanu thanked ministers, civil servants and government staff for their work and said he would continue serving Moldova regardless of whether he remained in public office.

"I believe that duty to the country is not related to the position, but to the commitment we maintain," he said.

Munteanu, a businessman with previous activities in Ukraine, became prime minister on November 1, 2025, after the pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) won the parliamentary elections. 

POST MODERN PRESS GANG

Russia Struggles To Recruit For Ukraine War And Now Resorts To Forcing Men Into Service

July 3, 2026 
By RFE RL

(RFE/RL) — One Russian woman sobbed hysterically as the group of men sat calmly in the darkness of a white minivan; another yelled at a soldier in camouflage fatigues as he slammed the van’s door. Another wept and made the sign of a cross at one of the men: “Lyosha! I love you!”

“Guys, tell me, did everyone sign the contract? Was it voluntary?” a woman who filmed the June 17 incident in Penza, a regional capital of a half million southeast of Moscow, asked the men. “Were you forced to do it?”

As the minivan moved to drive away, another woman stood in front of it, trying to stop it.

According to witnesses and relatives with whom RFE/RL spoke, the men had been detained a day earlier, taken off the streets, forcibly moved to a military recruitment office, and forced to sign contracts that would result in them being sent to fight in Ukraine.


“Of course, all of this looks like illegal coercion. My father had no intention of going to war; we discussed this with him,” one woman said. “I see no explanation for this, other than threats, violence, or pressure.”

Like all the people RFE/RL spoke to, she asked not to be named, or to use a pseudonym, to avoid prosecution by authorities.

In Russia’s all-out war, now in its fifth year, Ukrainian forces have fought Russian troops to a virtual stalemate, with Moscow struggling to eke out substantive battlefield gains.

The cost to both sides is eye-watering; Russia has suffered nearly 500,000 war dead, according to British intelligence and other Western estimates, and the tally of wounded is at least twice that.

While both sides have struggled to replace casualties, Russia has had more success, using generous financial incentives, as well as coercion and threats.

This year, however, has seen an inflection point, experts say.

There are growing rumors that the Kremlin may seek to call a second mass mobilization possibly as early as this fall, something that was a tectonic shock for Russian society the first time it happened, in September 2022.

In the meantime, recruiters appear to be increasingly relying on forcible methods of getting men to agree — or submit — to fighting in Ukraine. In Penza, residents said police have moved from detaining men on city streets, and started going door-to-door.

Lyudmila, a resident of the town of Kamenka, west of Penza, said she spent several days outside the main Penza recruiting office trying unsuccessfully to locate her son who, she said, had been abducted off the street.

“This is outrageous. People are basically being kidnapped. Something needs to be done, but I don’t know what,” she said.

Two days after the video was published on the social network VK, law enforcement authorities called the reports of men being forced to sign contracts “untrue.” The video was later taken down by VK.

In Ukraine, It’s Called ‘Busification’

In Ukraine, the practice of grabbing potential military-eligible men off the streets, and hauling them to recruiting offices, is hugely controversial. Ukrainian call the practice “busification” — the word “bus” referring to the vans that officials prowl the streets in, searching for draft-dodgers and other military-age men.

With the exception of President Vladimir Putin’s September 2022 mobilization decree — which largely targeted military reservists — authorities have been able to avoid ordering mandatory service — like a full nationwide draft.

Officials have used a mix of federal and regional budget payments, and other incentives, to persuade hundreds of thousands of men to voluntarily sign contracts to fight in Ukraine. The flood of money has had an outsized impact in more rural, poorer regions of Russia.

Officials have also bent the rules on sending conscripts to fight, something largely prohibited under the law. Recruiters have cajoled and coerced conscripts into signing contracts just months into their first year of mandatory service.

In one example, a conscript sent to a military camp on the Pacific island of Sakhalin reported an officer ordering soldiers on punitive marches to get them to sign — or even forging signatures on volunteer contracts.

Authorities have also relied on prison inmates to fight, dangling the offer of a pardon to convicts to agree to be sent to the front. And they’ve targeted foreign migrant workers, offering an expedited route to Russian citizenship if they agree to fight.

This year, Ukrainian drone attacks have been close to keeping pace with Russia’s recruitment pipeline, experts said, and that has forced Russian recruiters to increase wages and bonuses for new volunteers.

And, as in the case in Penza, prompted them to use more physical methods.
Another woman in Penza, Margarita, said her son had been detained and taken to the enlistment center without any documents. They processed paperwork to send him to Ukraine in an hour, she said.

“He managed to call me up and quietly said, ‘They’re taking me to Ukraine,’” she told RFE/RL. “You could tell he’d already resigned himself to going.

“’I shouted: ‘Why did you sign it?’” she said. “He replied: ‘I had to.’ I’m sure he was beaten. He wasn’t planning to go to the war.”

‘People Are Being Snatched Right Off The Streets’

Rights activists claim that the practice of detaining men arbitrarily and forcing them to sign contracts to fight is showing up in other regions aside from Penza.

Authorities detain men under the pretext of checking identification, said Valery, a lawyer who provides legal counsel to soldiers. The goal is to see if they’re wanted for desertion or if they’re migrants who recently received Russian citizenship but haven’t registered with their local recruiting office.

“People are being snatched right off the streets,” he said. “Previously it was mostly drunken passersby who were targeted, now they’re picking up men of any age and in any condition.”

“It’s now widespread throughout the country,” he said.

In the Pacific port city of Vladivostok, 26-year-old Yaroslav Kubov was detained on June 9 as he returned home from a friend’s birthday party. Kubov’s relative Igor said two men wearing civilian clothes invited him for a beer, and after he declined, they grabbed him and drove him out of town.

Kubov was beaten and yelled at, and authorities issued him a new passport and military ID card and sent him to Rostov-on-Don, a southern city that serves as a military transit point to nearby Ukraine, where Igor said he contacted relatives five days later.

He had no reason to want to fight in Ukraine; he was not in need of money, Igor told RFE/RL, adding that he and other relatives have been filing appeals with military police and prosecutors.

“If he doesn’t escape, there’ll be no way to get him out legally,” Igor said.

Artyom Nikolayev, another Penza resident, said his 53-year-old relative was detained while returning home late from work, and was forced to sign a contract. He said he and his family spent three weeks searching for him before he contacted them from Rostov-on-Don.

“He’s in shock, of course, and we’re all in shock here. It’s simply dangerous for men to walk the streets in Penza right now,” he told RFE/RL. “Doesn’t matter if you’re elderly, sober, or have documents; anyone can be grabbed.”

‘Like A Cow To Slaughter’

Arina, a resident of Spassk, a town northwest of Penza, said her neighbor Sergei’s door was broken down on June 19 by authorities looking for him.

“They yelled at him to ‘show his documents, right now.’ He refused, so they kicked the door down” and took him to a waiting minivan, she told RFE/RL. “I don’t know where he is now.”

“This isn’t just happening in Penza. Traffic police and bailiff vans are driving around,” she said. “Now it’s not just the streets that are dangerous; soon we’ll have to hide at home to avoid being broken into.”

Arina said another relative in the village of Kamenka argued with police and court bailiffs who claimed he was in arrears for a loan. When authorities sought to forcibly take him away, the man’s children held onto him, and his wife tried to keep him from being dragged off.

“They wrenched his arm, kicked off the children, and dragged him out of the house.

Once he was in the car, she managed to hand over copies of the loan documents, she said. “But they clearly didn’t care. The goal was to get him to the recruitment office. Like a cow to slaughter.”

There have been similar stories for several years, said Artyom Klyga, a lawyer with the nongovernmental organization Conscientious Objectors, but they have attracted outsize attention in Penza due to scope of the detention raids, and the outcry from relatives.

“Often you don’t need to beat or torture a person. It’s enough to just intimidate them with the potential consequences for themselves or their families,” Klyga told RFE/RL. “People are under intense psychological pressure and make decisions out of fear.”


About RFE RL
RFE/RL journalists report the news in 21 countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established.
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Ukraine’s Drone War: The Rise Of Machine-Speed Adaptive Hyperwar – Analysis

A Ukrainian soldier prepares to launch a combat drone. (Photo: gov.ua)

July 3, 2026
 Hudson Institute
By Can Kasapoğlu

Key Takeaways

As unmanned systems, combat data, and human command have fused into kill chains that operate at unprecedented speed, drone warfare in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has evolved from a narrow contest of platforms to a battle fought at machine speed and dictated by algorithms.

Constant surveillance and precision lethality have altered the traditional military philosophies of maneuver and attrition, while combat drones have enabled lean formations to achieve outsized operational effects relative to their personnel strengths.

The exponential growth of the internet of battlefield things has turned combat data into a sovereign strategic asset. Ukraine’s corpus of battlefield data constitutes an unparalleled operational dataset, primed for its Western allies’ use in training artificial intelligence–driven battle networks and next-generation autonomous systems.

From Drone Warfare to AI-Augmented Battle Networks

After more than four years of war, Ukraine has become more than a battlefield. The country is now a proving ground for the future of warfare.

While various drone systems—across the air, land, and maritime domains—increasingly dominate the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, describing the conflict as mere drone warfare would oversimplify the true transformations that the war has wrought. The core shifts taking place in the Ukrainian battlespace are in concepts of operations (CONOPS): the rise of smart battle networks, augmented by artificial intelligence, that integrate robotic weapons, combat data, electronic warfare, sensors, software, and human command. For the United States and its allies in NATO, understanding the war in Ukraine is now a prerequisite for sound defense planning and military relevance in future conflicts.

This report addresses two main developments emerging from Ukraine. The first of these is how the conflict there exemplifies the evolving maneuver–attrition calculus of the digital age. The Russia-Ukraine War has accelerated and clarified the role that attrition plays in warfare. Maneuver, the hallmark of conflicts past, remains important but increasingly depends upon attrition—the systematic degradation of enemy sensors, fires, electronic warfare capabilities, logistics, and command networks.

The second development this report explores is the evolution of robotic warfare. A new paradigm for drone warfare is emerging from Ukraine, one that transcends the binary question of whether robotic platforms and weapon systems are to remain supporting capabilities or become primary actors in conflict. Instead, the commanders of Kyiv’s Unmanned Systems Forces increasingly view drone warfare as a scalable mechanism for force generation and destruction of a hostile force.

In this paradigm, unmanned systems do not replace soldiers. Instead, they change the calculus of traditional manpower considerations. Ukraine cannot match Russia in a classic force-on-force ratio. But Kyiv can use robotic military assets, artificial intelligence, and data to generate combat power, extend its battlefield reach, and steadily attrit the Russian war machine. The drone, therefore, is no longer merely one tool in Ukraine’s approach to the conflict, but is quickly becoming a key capability around which a wider defense-technological ecosystem and strategy are being constructed.


These developments are forging a new form of armed conflict: hyperwar, a term formulated in a 2017 article from the US Naval Institute years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Hyperwar is the combination of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, sensors, and software that compresses the OODA cycle (observe, orient, decide, act), a four-step decision-making model for military strategy, to machine speed.

Hyperwar recalibrates the role of humans in decision-making. It rapidly coordinates sensor-shooter networks across time and space, and enables forces to detect, decide, strike, assess, and disperse more quickly than an adversary can respond. At the tactical, operational, and strategic levels, hyperwar turns concurrency into combat power. Hyperwar brings the advantage to the side that can process information, command forces, and execute kinetic action at superior velocity and scale.

For the United States and its NATO allies, winning wars in the coming decades will require more than buying or producing drones. Instead, victory will require developing the battle networks, combat data processing systems, industrial capacity, electromagnetic-spectrum resilience, and adaptive institutions and doctrines needed to fight at the OODA rate that the war in Ukraine is normalizing.

This report first delves into the parameters shaping maneuver and attrition in the Russia-Ukraine War. It then discusses the emerging military and mathematical modeling principles of force generation in the age of robotic warfare, and follows with a customized assessment of the role that combat data now plays in warfare. Finally, this report assesses what the West will need to do to keep its technological and military superiority in the era of protracted wars and unforeseen conflicts.

1. Attrition and Maneuver in the Age of Machine Speed

The US Army Large-Scale Combat Operations Series is a set of books published by the Army University Press that explores Cold War great-power competition, post-9/11 asymmetric warfare, and the evolving realities of combat. The books detail how combined-arms maneuver has historically rested on the assumption that if a fighting force concentrates armor, infantry, engineers, artillery, and fires at a decisive time and place, it can surprise an enemy, break its cohesion, and defeat it. This philosophy of warfare has always emphasized the value of achieving superiority over an adversary in rapid attrition and positioning in a short, decisive span of time.

The war in Ukraine has exposed three ways in which this model of warfare is incompatible with the emerging patterns of modern combat. First, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), space-based communications, and digital and electronic sensors have increased battlefield transparency and made surprise much harder to achieve. Maneuvering forces are spotted more quickly, tracked more persistently, and anticipated earlier.


Second, while fighting forces can still physically mass, they risk being destroyed before they reach combat. Improvements in precision at scale mean that support units and command posts are vulnerable to long-range strikes in ways they have never been before.

Third, a maneuvering force faces constant pressure once it commits to a fight. Close combat consumes fuel, ammunition, vehicles, medical resources, and other measures of a force’s depth. Resupply becomes a constant challenge, and defenders often find that attacking supply lines is easier than attacking frontline troops. This dynamic all but kills a unit’s momentum.

By mid-2025, Russia and Ukraine had adapted to these new patterns in different ways. Russia increasingly uses drones to identify Ukrainian electronic-warfare sites, radars, command posts, UAV pilots, artillery, and fortified positions. Russian forces then strike these assets with artillery, multiple-launch rocket systems, cheap Molniya drones, fiber-optic first-person-view (FPV) drones, and glide bombs.

Russia also commonly infiltrates two-to-five-man groups near Ukrainian positions. These teams then probe, disrupt Ukrainian resupply chains, expose Kyiv’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets, and open seams for buggies, motorcycles, infantry, and occasionally armor. Hudson Institute field tours to wartime Ukraine were briefed on and tracked what Ukrainian interlocutors described as “human safaris” behind the front lines: Russian forces training their drone pilots by using Ukrainian civilians in Kherson as live targets.

Ukraine, especially since 2023, has focused on what it could control: drones. In 2024, Kyiv rapidly expanded its use of bomber UAVs, FPV drones, loitering munitions, and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). Ukrainian forces then invested further in drone pilot training and frontline command-and-control infrastructure. Kyiv thus switched gears from an army of dronesto a wall of drones, imposing an attrition belt of approximately 20 miles along its front lines.


As a result, drone-denied areas have arisen along the line of contact. These grey zones now extend deeper into the battlespace, posing severe risks to main battle tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, logistics platforms, and even small-infantry teams’ movements. Ukrainian reporting and battlefield footage indicate that a de facto no-man’s-land now extends for roughly six miles on either side of the front lines. This grey zone buzzes with drones.

Under near-constant observation and attack, both Russia’s and Ukraine’s armies now use smaller, more dispersed, and more mobile tactics. A trench line still remains, but it has been overlaid by an aerial hunting ground. While this wall of drones has grown to be effective for Ukraine, it also reveals a weakness: for Kyiv, drones make up for shortages in artillery, armor, airpower, and manpower.

Unmanned ground vehicles have also become important in combat operations. Over the past two years, Ukraine has pushed UGVs from battlefield improvisation into mass fielding. What began as intermittent experimentation now involves thousands of platforms moving ammunition, water, fuel, mines, sensors, and wounded soldiers under fire. Some UGVs serve as expendable assault robots, carrying explosive charges into Russian positions.

The Ukrainian General Staff has claimed that robotic ground platforms can reduce human casualties by up to 30 percent. Kyiv’s forces, therefore, use UGVs for three overlapping missions: fire support, engineering, and logistics. The vehicles account for 90 percent of Ukraine’s military activity in heavily contested areas such as Pokrovsk. Kyiv also uses UGVs for evacuation, one of the most dangerous missions on the battlefield.

Across these missions, Ukraine’s leadership believes that UGVs can make up for the country’s manpower shortages. Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov aims to delegate 100 percent of Ukraine’s frontline logistics efforts to ground robots. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has announced that the country’s military will receive 50,000 UGVs in 2026.

These changes in the character of warfare extend to the skies, too. The conflict in Ukraine has exposed the limits of modern ground-based air defense (GBAD) against UAVs. Both Russian and Ukrainian GBAD systems can counter manned aircraft, but struggle with unmanned aerial vehicles. Ukrainian attack drones have repeatedly penetrated Russia’s air defenses, striking sensitive targets in depth, including in Moscow.

In these attacks, Ukraine initially used Soviet-vintage platforms such as the Tu-141 Strizh and the higher-end UJ-26 Bober. Now, Kyiv is using indigenous UAVs and missiles manufactured by the Ukrainian company Fire Point. Moscow’s ongoing difficulties in countering drone and missile threats suggest that Russia’s air defense architecture is deeply vulnerable.

In June 2026, Ukraine appears to have launched one of its largest drone attacks on Russia since the start of the full-scale war. In these strikes, Kyiv hit Russia’s oil refineries, including several in Moscow, and disrupted hundreds of civilian flights in the process. The strikes sent black smoke over Russia’s capital city and triggered reports of so-called black rain in nearby districts. For many Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Ukraine’s long-range strikes are making the conflict visible at home for the first time.


This marks a key development in Ukraine’s political warfare efforts. Since 2022, the Kremlin has tried to shield Russia’s major urban centers from the conflict’s human and material costs. Drone footage spreading across Russian social media is weakening that insulation and exposing the reach of Ukraine’s strike capabilities.

Weapons manufactured by Fire Point formed the backbone of the main strike package Ukraine used in its latest Moscow attacks, supported by decoys and other drone types. The significance of these drones lies not only in their range but also in their scale. Mass launches can saturate Russian air defenses, force the Kremlin to reposition systems toward the capital, and leave other areas more exposed. The reported unit cost of these UAVs—up to $60,000 per principal Fire Point drone variant—also marks a favorable cost-imposition logic for Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign.

In addition to targeting Moscow, drones now play an integral role in the Ukrainian military’s campaign to put pressure on occupied Crimea. Consecutive salvos have already triggered a massive fuel crisis on the peninsula, threatening the occupying Russian forces as the territory faces mounting economic strains. Ukrainian strikes on fuel trucks, depots, and transport nodes have added friction to Russia’s energy logistics efforts in Crimea.

Nonetheless, Russia is also resorting to robotic deep strikes. It has leveraged Iran-designed Shahed-series one-way attack drones, which Moscow has adapted to form its Geran-series drones, to conduct attacks similar to Ukraine’s.

In May 2026, Russia attacked Ukrainian cities with a record high of more than 8,000 drones and decoys of the Shahed-Geran baseline. In contrast, May 2025 saw only half of that volume. Moreover, imagery intelligence suggests that Russia is enhancing its Shahed drone production sites, with new facilities mushrooming across the Russian Federation. North Korean workers have likely played a role in boosting Russia’s Shahed-Geran drone supply chains as well.

Russia uses these Shahed-Geran drones to supplement, and in part to substitute for, traditional cruise and ballistic missile strikes. By launching massed drone salvos at critical Ukrainian infrastructure, Moscow seeks to exhaust Kyiv’s limited supply of Western-supplied air defense interceptors.

The cost calculus favors Russia. A single Shahed-131 or Shahed-136 drone costs only $20,000 to $30,000. In contrast, Western interceptors cost anywhere from $450,000 for the IRIS-T (InfraRed Imaging System Tail/Thrust Vector Controlled) to around $3.7 million for the highest-end PAC-3 (Patriot Advanced Capability-3) missile. Even when considering higher procurement costs, the cost-exchange ratio clearly benefits Moscow. Existing NATO air defenses are much less effective against massed, low-cost, expendable drones when forced by the mathematics of warfare to use only a few expensive interceptors against these new weapons.

Together, Russian Shahed drone salvos and Ukrainian deep strikes have shown how the difference between cruise missiles and one-way attack drones is narrowing. Cruise missiles carry heavier payloads and fly at faster speeds, but drones offer their own strengths: loitering, searching, and striking at a lower cost. As unmanned systems demonstrate a breakthrough in autonomy, payload capacity, endurance, and onboard power, military commanders may see cruise missiles and drones as points on a single continuum, and choose their weapon based on the needs of the mission.


Yet it is in the maritime domain, especially in Black Sea naval warfare, that Ukrainian and Russian innovations have brought the most striking changes to modern combat. Ukrainian unmanned surface vessels (USVs) have showcased how a small, improvised force can reshape maritime fighting. As of 2026, the Ukrainian military, with the help of the nation’s agile and innovative defense technological and industrial base, has destroyed or damaged roughly 30 percent of the naval forces centered around Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Ukraine’s achievements in the maritime domain were born not of choice, but of wartime necessity and severe operational constraints. By March 2022, Russia’s onslaught had nearly eliminated Ukraine’s navy. This left Kyiv uniquely vulnerable to two maritime threats: an amphibious ground assault on the Black Sea city of Odesa or a blockade of its seaborne trade. Both vulnerabilities were of great strategic import. Grain exports accounted for 41 percent of Ukraine’s trade revenue in 2021, and most of these shipments transited ports in the Odesa region.

Ukraine’s military and defense industry moved quickly to address these vulnerabilities. Ukraine’s first publicly reported USV attack came on October 29, 2022, only eight months after Russia’s full-scale invasion began. Kyiv then launched a USV-centered sea-denial campaign that forced Russian warships into a defensive posture, limiting their ability to blockade trade or support forces ashore.

The USVs that Ukraine launched were not high-end naval platforms, but small vessels built around a simple combat package including a camera, a satellite link, and an explosive charge in the bow. These USVs’ exact specifications differed, but a clear industrial logic drove their production. These were systems that could be produced in a garage, workshop, or small factory rather than in a major shipyard.

The decisive enabler for these makeshift vessels was not the hull. Instead, communications drove the vehicles’ success. High-bandwidth, two-way satellite links, including systems such as Starlink, allowed Ukrainian operators to steer and target their USVs throughout a mission. This innovation kept humans inside the kill chain and gave Ukraine a practical advantage. Its human operators could now adapt to changing tactical conditions, make judgment calls, and enter combat more quickly than a fully autonomous system could be developed and certified.

Ukraine’s method of meeting its maritime challenges demonstrated further innovations. The country’s decision-makers did not build miniature capital ships, pursue full autonomy, or conduct operational maneuvers against decisive points. Instead, Kyiv used USVs for attrition like a high-tech variant of World War II–era U-boat wolfpacks: strike where possible, impose cumulative damage on the enemy, and use satellite links to keep onshore operators in control. These USVs allowed Ukraine to conduct minimum viable warfare as it fielded imperfect but usable systems quickly and learned in combat rather than at test sites or in program reviews. The strategy prevented strategic failure despite an inability to solve for every countermeasure.

Geography has helped Kyiv attain its maritime ambitions. The Black Sea spans only about 630 nautical miles. A drone can make it from Odesa to the Crimean city of Sevastopol in under 12 hours at 15 knots and in about five hours at 30 knots. A Sea Baby, a multipurpose USV developed for maritime use by the Security Service of Ukraine, can make the journey in under four hours at 50 knots.


But Russia has also taken advantage of the region’s geography. The 4,100-foot average depth of the Black Sea allows Russian Improved Kilo-class submarines armed with Kalibr cruise missiles to operate in its waters. Moscow began its full-scale invasion with a blockade, harassment operations, land-attack cruise missiles, and numerous amphibious advantages over Ukraine.

To counter Russia, Ukraine initially relied on Neptune missiles with a range of some 160 nautical miles that could cover only the northwest quadrant of the sea. But within five months, Kyiv had begun sea denial. Kyiv’s list of high-profile strikes soon began to grow. On October 29, 2022, Ukrainian USVs damaged at least two Russian ships in Sevastopol. On November 18 of that same year, Ukraine struck Novorossiysk, 420 nautical miles from Odesa.

On March 22, 2023, Ukrainian USVs and aerial drones hit Sevastopol again. On May 24 of the same year, Ukrainian USVs hit the Ivan Khurs, a Russian intelligence platform, at sea. Then, in July 2023, two Sea Baby USVs struck the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to Russia; each Sea Baby was 20 feet in length, ranged 540 nautical miles, reached 49 knots, and carried a nearly one-ton payload. Today, Ukraine’s robotic naval capabilities have successfully denied freedom of movement to the Russian Navy in the Black Sea.

The war in Ukraine has not sounded the death knell for maneuver, attrition, air defense, or naval power. Instead, the conflict has shown that these traditional components of warfare now operate under new conditions. Drones, artificial intelligence, the proliferation of battlefield data, and advances in algorithmic targeting are compressing the speed of combat. Maneuver and attrition still matter. But both are increasingly conducted at tempos that exceed the traditional human rhythm of planning, movement, detection, and strike.

Humans remain central to the contest for Ukraine, but their role in warfare is changing. In some missions, humans stay inside the kill chain; in others, they supervise, authorize, or intervene only at critical points. This shift is visible across land, air, and sea, and it increasingly depends on space-based communications and cyberspace.
2. Robotic Weapons as Force-Generation and Force-Destruction Actors

The war in Ukraine is in transition due to the proliferation of sensors, precision fires, logistics exposure, and the emergence of a drone-filled battlespace. Gradually, drones have become the primary killer.

Estimates for 2025 suggest that unmanned aerial systems are responsible for 70–80 percent of Russian and Ukrainian personnel casualties, including both killed and wounded. This same trend manifests in equipment losses. In 2024, FPV strikes and drone-dropped munitions accounted for about 40 percent of the war’s combat-damaged vehicles. By early 2025, that figure had reportedly reached 60–70 percent. In April 2026, Ukrainian combat formations reportedly seized a Russian position using only unmanned aerial and ground vehicles. This operation exposed not a single Ukrainian infantryman to the customary perils of combat.


Yet questions that have long animated futurist thinking about war persist. Who will man and hold the line: robots, humans, or human-machine teams? What is the best way to calculate the optimum minimum limits of combat deployment? How can planners make data meaningful when fighting wars, and calculate optimal force-on-force and force-to-space ratios? These questions, now as ever, revolve around efforts to “win the math” before winning the fight.

Grasping the role that drones play in force-generation efforts requires some understanding of the math of military science. A set of principles known as Lanchester’s laws, developed in 1916 by Frederick Lanchester, has long given modern warfare a powerful but narrow set of mathematical formulas to model combat attrition. These guidelines calculate how forces deplete over time based on the number of troops and their relative effectiveness. Lanchester’s laws, though perhaps obscure to the layman, have been foundational to military operations for the last century.

Lanchester’s laws treat attrition as a relationship between two opposing force pools, with each side’s losses driven by the other side’s strength and governed by a fixed effectiveness coefficient. Yet while these principles were long useful for thinking about static engagements, trench warfare, and artillery duels, they rested on assumptions that made attrition largely deterministic: homogeneous forces, fixed effectiveness coefficients, constant rates of fire, continuous engagement, and little allowance for spatial variation such as terrain, dispersion, maneuver, or localized force concentration. Lanchester’s laws allowed little room for contingent variables like suppression, friction, and problems of target acquisition, and took little account of command behavior, morale, adaptation, and other human factors in war.

Andrew Ilachinski’s 1996 study for the Center for Naval Analyses addressed these limitations at the conceptual level. A theoretical physicist specializing in mathematical and computer modeling, Ilchanski argued that Lanchester’s laws and other similar models work only under narrow conditions. Real warfare, in his view, can be more accurately understood as a complex adaptive system: a nonlinear, decentralized contest among semi-autonomous agents adapting to a changing environment.

More than the Lanchester-inspired attrition models of the twentieth century, Ilchanski’s vision fits the Ukrainian battlespace, dominated as it is by drone-driven engagements and hyperwar trends. In Ukraine, a drone’s combat value is not fixed, but varies based on operator skill, the extent of electronic-warfare pressure, and other variables like software, target exposure, sensor density, terrain, communications resilience, and countermeasure cycles. The value of a drone depends on the same local adaptations and interactions that Ilachinski used to describe complex combat.

Another critical parameter is right-sizing the force. Field reports assessing the war in Ukraine suggest that the combat-deployed manpower in the conflict can be extremely thin by historical standards. Ukrainian fighting positions are often spaced 50 meters apart and held by fire teams of two or three personnel, producing roughly 32 fighting positions per mile. With two or three soldiers per position, just 64–96 soldiers per mile can hold an immediate forward line.

Ukraine uses depth to partly offset this low density across the front lines. Rather than concentrating manpower along a single line, Ukrainian units distribute combat power across a deeper defensive system. An infantry company, a core working unit of 60 to 200 soldiers, may be spread across roughly 1.9 miles of depth. A battalion, a larger military unit composed of three to five companies, may occupy roughly 4.3 miles of depth. Depending on a unit’s capabilities, offensive engagements can extend roughly 6.2–9.3 miles beyond that unit’s position. This arrangement prioritizes the attrition of an enemy beyond the line of sight, using dispersed positions, sensors, drones, artillery, and other fires rather than dense infantry concentrations on the forward edge.


Yet Russia is also adapting to these same battlefield dynamics. The war in Ukraine has pushed Moscow away from a slower, more centralized model built around larger and more expensive systems, and has forced Russian planners to employ cheaper attritable platforms, faster development cycles, and a wider use of volunteer and startup networks.

The most important result of these innovations is an enormous change in scale. The drone war in Ukraine is no longer about producing boutique systems but about modifying rapidly, providing battlefield feedback, massing forces, and developing the ability to update one’s systems as one’s adversary adapts. The core drone-warfare lesson of the conflict, therefore, is not that fully robotic combat has arrived, but that inexpensive, updateable, and attritable mass under human command is here to stay.

While the Russia-Ukraine War has showcased how machines at various levels of autonomy can relieve traditional combat formations, militaries have similarly diluted force concentration in previous wars. Since 1800, the force-to-space ratio in defensive warfare has constantly evolved, and has often changed sharply. In the Napoleonic Wars, it was normal for an army to position 20,000 combat troops per mile, including reserves. The Duke of Wellington’s three-mile front at the Battle of Waterloo reflected this ratio. Two days earlier, Wellington’s Prussian counterpart, Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, had tried to hold seven miles at Ligny with 12,000 men per mile, and had been defeated by a slightly smaller force.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 essentially retained this 12,000-men-per-mile standard, though battles such as Gravelotte showed the rising defensive power of improved firearms. The Second Boer War, waged in South Africa from 1899 to 1902, marked a major drop in the force-to-space ratio. Boer forces, using magazine rifles and strong marksmanship, often held defensive fronts with only 600–800 men per mile. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, some battles were waged with about 8,000 men per mile.

World War I pushed this ratio lower. In 1915 Germany held the Western Front, which ran about 450 miles, with roughly 90 divisions: one division per five miles, or approximately 3,500 men per mile. The Second World War pushed the force-to-space ratio even lower still. In May 1940, French and British forces defended a 400-mile western front with 111 divisions, or one division per 3.5 miles. By the middle of the Cold War, military planners estimated that a mobile division could cover 25 miles as a tactical minimum. Ten such divisions would have been needed to cover the mountains facing Soviet forces from the Baltic Sea to Bohemia.

In its current fight against Russia, Ukraine faces undeniable manpower problems, despite the historical evolution of the force-to-space ratio in favor of smaller fighting forces. The Ukrainian military’s recent contract, designed to use financial incentives to attract volunteers ages 18 through 24, has not produced enough recruits. Mobilization problems, infantry casualties, absent-without-leave cases, and pressure to transfer soldiers from weaker brigades to elite units continue to widen disparities inside Ukraine’s fighting force.

Because strong units improve and attract better personnel while weak units degrade and expose their sectors, in 2025 Kyiv reorganized its ground forces around 18 army corps with standardized orders of battle, replacing ad hoc command structures that had drawn criticism. Roughly comparable in scale to large NATO divisions, these corps have begun to show results in stronger formations, including the 1st and 2nd Corps of the National Guard and the 3rd Army Corps.


To further address its manpower shortages, Kyiv is leaning harder on machines—and on the personnel that manage them. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces have grown to an estimated size of 20,000 soldiers. Every Ukrainian maneuver brigade now fields at least one dedicated drone company or battalion, while Ukraine’s battalions often retain platoon-sized drone elements. Dedicated UGV units generated in 2025 now support resupply to the zero-line, casualty evacuation, reconnaissance, and even assault tasks.

Yet while Ukraine’s innovation ecosystem remains strong, scaling remains difficult for Kyiv. Non-governmental organizations still fill the gaps left by insufficient state support. By allowing its indigenous unmanned-systems firms to export their products, Ukraine’s government is trying to diversify its funding sources and turn battlefield innovations into industrial capacity.

As part of Kyiv’s effort to compensate for its manpower shortages, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has developed the Drone Line program. This initiative aims to reduce infantry exposure by using unmanned systems and smaller complements of troops to hold terrain. The program is designed to establish a lethal belt, roughly six to nine miles deep from the line of contact, where Russian assault groups, vehicles, logistics elements, and staging areas can be detected and hit before they reach Ukrainian defensive positions.

Ukraine cannot afford to trade infantrymen for every trench, tree line, and ruined settlement at the same rate as Russia. Drone Line, therefore, functions as a manpower-economizing system. Sensors conduct some forward observation tasks. FPV and bomber drones reduce the need for exposed direct-fire engagements. Persistent aerial coverage allows thinner infantry screens to monitor wider sectors.

But Russia is also ramping up its high-tech edge. Analysis of Russia’s Rubicon drone unit shows that Moscow is no longer treating robotic warfare as an improvised wartime adaptation, but is institutionalizing drone combat. Established in August 2024 under Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, Rubicon was designed to centralize unmanned systems research, procurement, training, tactical development, and combat employment. The unit’s detachments have served as elite drone-strike formations, reinforcing priority sectors, shortening the sensor-to-shooter cycle, and spreading new tactics across conventional units. Rubicon has expanded from about 1,450 personnel in 2025 to roughly 5,000 by spring 2026, with an authorized strength of 9,000. That growth has produced combat effects, especially through FPV teams, ISR drones, loitering munitions, electronic warfare, and counter-UAV technologies.

Rubicon’s effect on Russia’s drone warfare efforts has reverberated into the country’s design of new weapon systems. In 2025, Defense Intelligence of Ukraine released technical details on a new Russian strike drone, the V2U,employed along the Sumy axis. The system’s significance lies in its guidance logic rather than its airframe. The V2U appears designed to pick targets using onboard artificial intelligence, moving part of the kill chain—the process of identifying and attacking a target—from a human operator to a machine. The drone’s computing core reportedly relies on a Chinese Leetop A203 minicomputer and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin module that provide the drone with the processing power for autonomous target recognition and navigation.


Despite these advances, the drone war unfolding in Ukraine does not yet involve fully autonomous combat. Artificial intelligence is entering thebattlefield, but mostly—for now—via limited functionality, including assisted navigation, target-recognition and target-lock features, terminal guidance, and pre-analyzed information for operators. Notwithstanding exceptions such as the V2U, drone systems are mostly keeping humans in the loop; in most cases a human operator is still flying or supervising a drone, while AI interprets a data feed, identifies objects, or supports a final attack sequence.

The conflict in Ukraine is evolving toward human-directed warfare with increasingly layered machine assistance. The human factor—a term that until recently only appeared in theoretical writings—will most likely stay in military mathematical modeling for decades to come. But the linear character of Lanchester’s laws and their modern derivatives will almost certainly be replaced by more complex and non-linear methodologies.

Finally, NATO nations will have to do more than just manufacture more drones to catch up. Chinese dominance in flight controllers, motors, sensors, thermal optics, battery cells, rare-earth inputs, neodymium magnets, and germanium may lead to a major wartime vulnerability for the alliance.

In many segments, Western drone production depends on Chinese-controlled supply chains. Beijing controls 80–90 percent of the global drone market and leads in critical minerals, raw materials, batteries, sensors, and other components. This poses a strategic risk for the US and Europe. Expert writings even describe drones as “flying smartphones,” built from advanced electronics, and China excels in making and assembling these parts. Drones with American or European parts are much more expensive than those with Chinese components. Ukraine’s conflict shows this reliance. Nearly all unmanned systems use materials or components from Chinese factories. For example, 90 percent of global neodymium-iron-boron magnet production is in China. The country also handles about two-thirds of the global production of lithium and over 70 percent of the production of graphite anode material. Drones rely on complex semiconductors and sensors produced in specialized Chinese facilities that would take years to build elsewhere.

Overall, as the Euro-Atlantic alliance boosts its robotic edge, it will have to secure supply chains that Beijing currently dominates.
3. Capitalizing on the Accumulation of Combat Data in Ukraine

Drone warfare is turning the battlespace into a dense web of sensors, in which every aircraft, loitering munition, ground robot, jammer, and targeting cell produces operational data at scale. Smart battle networks and the emerging internet of battlefield things do not merely connect platforms; they generate, classify, transmit, and exploit combat information while under fire. In Ukraine, this data flow has become a warfighting resource in its own right, and is shaping how forces detect, decide, strike, adapt, and train the next generation of AI-enabled military systems.


The modern battlespace is taking shape in Ukraine through the transformative power of algorithmic warfare. This concept rests on three major driving forces: computing power, data, and the cloud. For example, if a Ukrainian defense company—such as the country’s Wild Hornets firm with its STING interceptor-drone—is developing a robotic system to combat Shahed or Gerbera drones, it does not need generic battlefield imagery. Instead, Ukraine’s defense firms need thousands of labeled real-world examples from multiple angles to ensure that the drones they produce can recognize targets. The datasets that Ukraine is collecting provide exactly this level of granularity.

This data-driven innovation is not confined to drone defense, but also extends to conventional warfare. Target acquisition, artillery adjustment, electronic warfare, and maneuver planning all benefit from continuously updated, combat-validated datasets. Russian military planners routinely modify their platforms with cages, improvised armor, and camouflage. These innovations degrade the performance of Ukrainian models trained on static inputs. Ukraine’s actively updated datasets reflect these iterative Russian modifications, and ensure that Kyiv’s systems are trained on current conditions.

For Ukraine, advances in processing are enabling machine learning, while the country’s vast datasets and scalable cloud infrastructure are compressing decision cycles and expanding warfighting performance. Scale has also been a decisive factor: global data production has surged from roughly 4.4 zettabytes in 2013 to around 180 zettabytes by 2025.[1]

Much of this production remains unstructured and includes video, imagery, and sensor feeds. Modern AI can process both structured and unstructured inputs, and can extract patterns at speed, but benefits from high-quality inputs as much as from large quantities of inputs. Data, therefore, must be cleaned and verified since poor inputs distort a machine’s judgment. The upper hand lies with those who can refine and exploit data more quickly. This is why battlefield inputs harvested from real armed conflicts remain invaluable to building battle networks and algorithmic-warfare CONOPS.

Additionally, in the wars of the twenty-first century, data is no longer merely a supporting input—it is the terrain over which combat is waged. Recent conflicts in the Middle East have made this reality explicit. On March 1, 2026, Iranian Shahed drones struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the United Arab Emirates, while debris from a parallel strike damaged another in Bahrain. The physical damage from these strikes was limited, but the disruption was alarming; financial systems, enterprise networks, and consumer services were affected across the region.

The incident illumines a structural shift now taking root across the world. Cloud infrastructure is no longer insulated from kinetic warfare; modern defense systems run on the cloud, after all. Both the United States’ Maven Smart System, developed by Palantir Technologies, and Ukraine’s Delta battlefield management system rely on cloud architecture. Under the Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability framework, firms like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle underpin key military functions.

Ukraine, moreover, now combat-deploys hundreds of various drone types, and deploys hundreds of thousands of drones each month. The country’s Delta system has scaled up with new modules and has now become the integration layer that makes Ukraine’s digital ecosystem governable. Delta supports drone deconfliction, friend-or-foe identification, live video with AI analysis, secure messaging, and feeds from ISR drones.


These developments demonstrate how the boundaries between civilian digital infrastructure and algorithmic military capabilities have blurred rapidly. Iran’s strikes against data centers, therefore, set a precedent that cannot be undone: what has been demonstrated in one theater will likely be studied and replicated in others.

At the same time, the rise of autonomous systems is elevating combat data to a decisive input in drone warfare. Ukraine has accumulated one of the most valuable data clusters in the history of warfare: a large, annotated corpus of real-time battlefield imagery and sensor information. These datasets enable highly specialized model training for recognition, targeting, and adaptation under dynamic conditions. Real-world data flows compress learning curves and expose systems to broad variability.

Ukraine’s defense technology sector is approaching new horizons. In early 2026, Kyiv made a historic decision to share its military-grade data with Ukraine’s strategic partners to train artificial intelligence models. Beyond routine cooperation, Kyiv’s move to share its hard-earned battlefield knowledge reflects years of cumulative combat operations against the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, from sensor feeds, strike patterns, and electronic warfare signatures to adaptation cycles forged under pressure. NATO should seize the momentum of this historic development and institutionalize the flow of Ukrainian combat data, which is now a strategic asset rather than a mere byproduct of war.
4. Machine-Speed CONOPS and the West’s Challenges in Adaptive Warfare

Drone operations from the war in Ukraine have already spilled over into several of NATO’s European member states, offering a glimpse of the future threat environment the continent may face.

In September 2025, a large strike group of Russian Gerbera-series drones entered Polish airspace. Poland and several of its NATO allies scrambled one of the highest-end defensive packages available to confront the threat. Italian airborne early warning and control aircraft, German Patriot air- and missile-defense systems, Polish F-16s, Dutch fifth-generation F-35s, and a Belgian A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport were all deployed to detect, track, and engage the drones. While the allies could handle the probing incident, it highlighted the economic asymmetry of robotic warfare.

A Gerbera drone does not cost more than $10,000 per unit, less than one F-35 flight hour, and much less than the pricy beyond-visual-range AMRAAM (Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile) that aircraft carries. The defense-economics asymmetry between Russia’s probing salvo and NATO’s response demonstrated how kinetic success does not always translate into sustainable air- and missile-defense architectures—or into sustainable kill rates against saturation salvos from expendable kamikaze drones. Ukrainian combat data would further illustrate this imbalance.


Ukrainian drones have also occasionally strayed off their intended path. In May 2026, two suspected Ukrainian drones crossed from Russia into Latvia and crashed there. One drone exploded at an oil storage facility in the Latvian city of Rezekne, damaging four empty tanks about 25 miles from the Russian border. Latvian authorities issued drone alerts, closed schools in several border areas, and called in NATO Baltic Air Policing aircraft.

One year after the Russian incursion into Poland, the incident in Latvia illustrated how the Baltic states are dealing with the effects of the Russia-Ukraine War. Russia is reportedly spoofing the Global Positioning System (GPS) to redirect Ukrainian drones away from their targets and into NATO airspace. This turns Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign into pressure on NATO’s eastern frontier: spoofing does not destroy the drone, but deceives navigation systems by feeding a drone false coordinates and pushing it onto a new route. From Kaliningrad and other Baltic sites, Russian electronic warfare systems can create airspace incidents while keeping questions of attribution unclear.

NATO’s Eastern European members, particularly the Baltic states, now face a serious challenge. Inexpensive, hard-to-detect drones can cross borders, trigger alerts, disrupt civilian life, and force responses, all without major battlefield effects. Scrambling fighter jets may demonstrate allied resolve, but it is a mainly symbolic response. A disposable drone, on the other hand, can consume flight hours, fuel, maintenance, commanders’ attention, and expensive weapons.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania should take concrete steps to address this vulnerability. Expert writings suggest that these countries could lead NATO in developing layered detection, integrating sensors, enhancing passive surveillance and acoustic systems, improving electronic warfare indicators, and advancing intelligence fusion.

Yet the warning signs for the alliance are coming not only from hostile or rogue drones, but also from Ukraine’s performance in NATO’s own military drills. Hedgehog 2025, a major NATO military exercise held in May of that year in Estonia, exposed severe vulnerabilities for allied forces facing modern drone warfare.

The exercise brought together more than 16,000 troops from 12 NATO countries and placed them alongside Ukrainian drone specialists, including operators temporarily drawn from the frontlines. The exercise posed a scenario built around a dense battlespace saturated with various classes of unmanned systems. In that simulated environment, a mechanized force of several thousand troops, including elements linked to a British brigade and an Estonian division, attempted to conduct an attack.

The problem the exercise exposed was not one of courage or mass, but of exposure. The allied force moved as if the battlefield were still partially opaque, while Ukrainian drone operators treated it as transparent. Using Delta, Ukraine’s battlefield-management system, the operators fused real-time intelligence, AI-enabled data analysis, target identification, and strike coordination into a compressed kill chain.

The results of Hedgehog 2025 exposed serious vulnerabilities in NATO’s preparedness to conduct and confront drone warfare. According to accounts of the exercise, in roughly half a day a Ukrainian team of around 10 soldiers was able to notionally destroy 17 armored vehicles and conduct 30 additional strikes. Hedgehog 2025 demonstrated that high-intensity drone combat is not a marginal technical problem but a tactical revolution. Formations that cannot disperse, hide, deceive, move, and strike under persistent aerial observation will be found, fixed, and destroyed before their mass can become combat power.


Drills and tests in the maritime domain have yielded similar results. Ukraine’s robotic warfare deterrent has proven intimidating, and has sent a clear combat-readiness alarm to Kyiv’s NATO partners. Conducted in the littoral waters off Troia and Sesimbra, Portugal, the exercise Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems (REPMUS) / Dynamic Messenger (DYMS) 2025 highlighted how quickly the maritime battlespace is changing.

The exercise combined REPMUS, the world’s premier event for maritime robotics and unmanned technologies, with DYMS, the latest iteration of NATO’s Operational Experimentation series. The Portuguese Navy hosted and co-organized the exercise with Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM) and Allied Command Transformation. The joint effort combined strategic transformation with operational testing.

The detection and tracking of multi-domain unmanned vehicles and vessels were central to the exercise, and two standing NATO maritime groups played important roles in the drills. Allied naval units rehearsed defensive operations against UAVs and USVs attacking from the air and the sea. The maritime exercise underscored the urgency NATO planners face in bringing unmanned systems into a connected operational environment, and showed that maritime unmanned systems are no longer a mere experimental annex to naval operations.

MARCOM, the Portuguese Navy, and the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Centre supported this effort. But just as it did in Hedgehog 2025, Ukraine also played a consequential role in the exercise. For the first time in a military exercise in the history of NATO, Ukraine’s navy led and coordinated the Opposing Force (OPFOR) during REPMUS/DYMS 2025. This formalized Ukraine’s growing role in NATO exercises—and also brought Black Sea combat realism into the alliance’s maritime experimentation cycle. The Ukrainian-led OPFOR helped accelerate interoperability, technology adoption, and allied readiness, and reinforced the exercise’s broader purpose.

The lessons of REPMUS/DYMS 2025 were uncomfortable for the NATO alliance. Acting as the Red team, which traditionally plays the role of an adversary in a military exercise, the Ukrainian-led multinational force reportedly included units from the United States, Great Britain, Spain, and other allied nations. The Ukraine-led Red team competed against a Blue team led by NATO allies in scenarios involving port defense and convoy protection.

After the exercise, Ukrainian participants stated that all five scenariosconducted during the proceedings ended in victory for the OPFOR. In one convoy scenario, the Red team reportedly scored enough simulated hits on an allied frigate that the ship would have been destroyed in actual combat. Ukrainian forces in the exercise also reportedly used several versions of the Magura V7 naval drone, born from the Black Sea campaign against Russia’s fleet.

Beyond the lessons of these NATO military exercises, Ukraine’s drone war has foregrounded a less glamorous but equally important question: Can the alliance generate, control, and sustain attritable mass at scale? Most NATO systems are still operated through a one-to-one model: one operator, one platform. Ukraine is already an exception to this modus operandi in both scale and adaptation.


In 2024, the Ukrainian private technology firm Swarmer secured nearly $3 million from a consortium of foreign investors, one of the largest individual transactions in the defense sector since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. In March 2026, Swarmer’s shares surged nearly 1,000 percent across the first three trading sessions following its initial public offering, one of the most striking debut performances in defense technology markets in recent memory.

The stock surge is not the story, however. Swarmer is not a dronemanufacturer and is not tied to any single platform, supplier, or hardware cycle. The firm operates, instead, at the interface layer. Swarmer develops software for autonomy, coordination, and decision-making that allows large numbers of low-cost unmanned systems to function as a single, resilient force. More critically, Swarmer’s capabilities are not validated in controlled environments, but are tested under real operational conditions where performance is subject to threats in real time.

As autonomy and swarming become more central to combat operations, modern robotic warfare, as Swarmer’s success illustrates, is increasingly revolving around software. AI-enabled kill chains fuse sensor feeds, support target acquisition, deconflict drones, and help determine when and how to strike. To maintain their decades-long defense-technological superiority, the United States and its NATO allies would be well-served to improve their operator-drone ratio, augment their swarming drone warfare technologies, and heed the lessons in adaptive warfare that the war in Ukraine has revealed.
Conclusion: Learning the Right Lessons from Ukraine’s Drone War

Ukraine had little time to prepare for a massive invasion by one of the world’s largest militaries. It has survived in part because it adapted quickly—with FPV drones, USVs, interceptor drones, new command-and-control methods, new tactics, and technology partners from the private sector. For the United States and its NATO allies, the warning from Ukraine is plain: the next war will punish slow procurement, heavy bureaucracy, and failures of imagination before the first major battle is decided.

At this stage, the West’s adaptation challenges are not only operational but also industrial. NATO-aligned procurement remains too platform-centric and treats innovation as something that happens when a new system is bought, rather than as a continuous process of component-level adaptation.

NATO-aligned systems remain strongest in long-cycle programs where development can stretch over 10 to 20 years, and upgrades often require major program changes. Ukraine, in contrast, shows that battlefield relevance increasingly depends on success in fast-cycle zones: civilian components and military adaptations that can change in weeks. NATO needs fewer closed systems and more open architectures that create room for competition, experimentation, and subsystem-level upgrades that can happen before battlefield innovations grow even more exponentially.


A 2025 article from the Modern War Institute at West Point warns against drawing the wrong lessons from drone warfare in Ukraine. The authors’ central point is not that drones have made maneuver obsolete, but that they have made maneuver more difficult to conduct, more visible, and more dependent on counter-drone adaptations.

The article also emphasizes that militaries do not absorb new technologies in a vacuum, but adopt them through existing doctrine, cultures, training systems, organizational habits, and preferred ways of war. Russia’s use of FPV drones, loitering munitions, and reconnaissance UAVs fits an attrition-centered model by strengthening the link between surveillance and fires. But Moscow’s success does not mean that every military should copy this drone-saturated approach.

Ukraine’s own achievements have shown that drones can slow, expose, and punish enemy maneuver. The task before modern militaries is to adapt quickly enough to make effective maneuver possible once again. Perceptive military assessments, in line with the conclusions from the Modern War Institute article, have warned that NATO must not mistake drones for conventional firepower. The conflict in Ukraine has highlighted the tacticalutility of FPV drones, loitering munitions, and one-way attack systems—but has also exposed their limitations.

These limitations are many. Russia has developed a highly capable counter-UAV ecosystem using electronic warfare, short-range air defense, vehicle hardening, netting, jammers, and drone-defense training for infantry units. Ukraine’s increased dependence on drones, moreover, reflects its shortages in manpower, ammunition, and legacy systems, and shows that drones cannot yet fully replace artillery, armor, airpower, or long-range fires.

NATO, therefore, would be at a disadvantage if it prioritized amassing drone quantity over rebuilding its stocks of traditional firepower. Ukraine’s drone revolution rests on cheap systems, modular design, rapid adaptations, and mass consumption, but this model remains heavily dependent on Chinese components and materials.

Simultaneously, the West should strengthen its own counter-drone capacities as a prerequisite for any future action invoking the Article 5 collective-defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty. Russian forces already deploy drones in certain segments on a larger scale than Ukraine, and are advancing the integration of drones, loitering munitions, UAV-based ISR, electronic warfare, and continuous artillery fire. Russia’s Rubicon drone unit exemplifies this development.

Many NATO member states lack such integration. As such, industrial integration among Washington, European capitals, and Kyiv is paramount. In March 2026, Ukraine conducted roughly 70 percent of its Shahed interceptions with indigenous drone-hunting drones. NATO, for now, cannot match the Ukrainian military in the quantity or quality of its interceptor drones, nor in its UGV-centric frontline logistics, FPV-operator training, or deep-strike drone capabilities.

In 2025, the estimated value of Ukraine’s defense technology market reached roughly $6.8 billion. While this market’s overall growth remains constrained by limited domestic procurement financing, its high-end segments—drone production, unmanned systems, and electronic warfare—are expanding rapidly due to innovations under combat conditions.


But scaling beyond Ukraine will require structural enablers, including sustained capital, NATO-compatible certification, and integration into allied procurement systems. Without these enablers, growth will likely plateau; with them, Ukraine could transition from a wartime innovator to a core node in the transatlantic defense-industrial base.

NATO has already made promising moves in the direction of integration. NATO Allied Command Transformation is working to digest Ukrainian battlefield experience and boost allied capabilities. The NATO Communications and Information Agency, in cooperation with Google Cloud, has invested in secure cloud infrastructure to support analysis, training, and classified workloads at the Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland.

These measures, however, are early steps rather than end moves. The United States and its NATO allies have a long way to go to digest the key insights and correct lessons from the war in Ukraine.

Endnotes:

A zettabyte is a unit of digital storage; one zettabyte is enough space to store approximately 250 billion DVDs.

About the author: 

Can Kasapoğlu is a nonresident senior fellow at Hudson Institute. His work at Hudson focuses on political-military affairs in the Middle East, North Africa, and former Soviet regions. He specializes in open-source defense intelligence, geopolitical assessments, international weapons market trends, as well as emerging defense technologies and related concepts of operations.

Source: This article was published by the Hudson Institute

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