Innovation Alone Won’t Prepare the U.S. for the Future Battlefield

During his September 30, 2026, "State of the Force" address at Quantico, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth unveiled Project Meridian, Project Agincourt, and an Autonomous Warfare Command. Meridian focuses on technology to dominate the future battlefield, while the command aims to speed adoption and use of autonomous and robotic systems. The Secretary's actions, supported by other necessary reforms, could restore the force's lethality, but how rapidly and effectively? To fully realize its potential, the Department may need to abandon long-established pillars of its acquisition, test-and-evaluation program, and requirements systems. Current programs and practices support technological advancement, but the Secretary's objectives more closely resemble a fundamental paradigm shift.

To achieve his ambitious and laudable objectives, Secretary Hegseth should allocate parallel, expansive, and urgent resources to revolutionize systemic issues he has already identified: antiquated acquisition processes, a commercial culture that prioritizes profit over innovation, and the need to safeguard sensitive technologies. I also propose adding a concerted investment in identifying future battlefield threats and leveraging non-traditional performers to address them.

Some encouraging signs suggest that the United States is making strides. Startups and new technologies are pouring into the ecosystem. Still, these developments rest on a fundamental bias toward current American perceptions of the Department of Defense (DoD) procurement, testing, and evaluation system—for example, a bias toward finished systems versus interchangeable components. The Pentagon's main effort to address this shortfall is the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA), which prioritizes weapons and equipment with standardized interfaces so components from different manufacturers can be easily replaced or upgraded. Its November 2025 acquisition strategy aims to incorporate MOSA into all acquisition strategies. While an excellent step forward, implementing such a bold strategy requires a fundamental shift in the business models of most well-established defense firms, which focus on finished systems rather than interchangeable, modular components.

The objective should be to establish a repeatable procurement system that enables adaptation in combat and ultimately delivers a superior cost-benefit ratio compared to the current interdependent system-of-systems model, which prioritizes integrated proprietary platforms. Success hinges on seamlessly integrating development with operations and aggressively scaling proven strategies.

The United States military possesses a vast array of innovative weapons systems and technologies. However, as the ongoing war in Ukraine repeatedly demonstrates, technological superiority is transient, and the advancement-countermeasure turning radius is narrowing with each development. Dominance hinges on the ability to acquire, deploy, and update systems before the adversary develops a countermeasure, and on recognizing that the lead is ephemeral and anticipating the adversary's subsequent actions, which is crucial to maintaining a competitive edge. Agile battlefield adaptation necessitates equally responsive acquisition, procurement, and scaling.

Advanced logistics and procurement, in conjunction with associated U.S. contracting arrangements, create an acquisition cycle incompatible with such rapid field adaptation. Even the long-overdue, and commendable, reforms Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is driving are likely insufficient to support the future battlefield. As Ukraine has shown, the future lies less with well-established, overhead-heavy defense primes and more with innovative startups, labs, and academia. When asked how Ukraine overcame these challenges, one founder of the renowned Brave1 Tech Cluster responded: "None of us had any experience or preconceived notions of government or military; we simply built what we believed would be effective." This blank-slate approach proved highly successful, bringing together investors, establishing partnerships, fostering front-line-to-engineer collaboration, and fielding thousands of time-sensitive critical technologies seemingly out of thin air within a timeframe shorter than the time required to draft an American task order.

Ukraine's Brave1 technology cluster represents a paradigm shift in the acquisition process by connecting frontline requirements directly with developers, funding, combat testing, and procurement. Its marketplace enables units to select equipment from competing manufacturers, while integration with the state's procurement system streamlines payment and delivery. This creates a practical pathway to enhanced, expedited, and cost-effective capabilities: battlefield feedback improves designs, shorter procurement cycles accelerate deployment, and supplier competition helps control costs—making continuous adaptation a central aspect of the military's technology acquisition strategy.

Addressing these challenges is crucial, as American adversaries and competitors are already implementing these critical lessons. For instance, Russia developed countermeasures to U.S. weapons deployed in Ukraine within a month of their introduction on the battlefield. Furthermore, most battlefield technologies have an operational lifespan of only three to six weeks. Consequently, even the most ambitious American acquisition initiatives would encounter significant obstacles in meeting such stringent requirements. Technological advancements are outpacing even rapid acquisition in the United States.

This necessitates rapid innovation and adoption of the Ukrainian problem-payload-platform model, rather than the prevailing notion that Defense Primes prioritize resources for nonexistent or low-priority issues and subsequently market an existing capability that can, in some way, address a problem it was not designed to solve. Instead, platforms are often overengineered and carry capabilities and costs unrelated to the finite problem they are being marketed to solve. Consequently, they are orders of magnitude more.

Innovation progresses faster than the bureaucratic processes of statements of work, task orders, review, and provision of funding. By the time a project is approved, battlefield developments will likely have overtaken it. Ukraine, Russia, and increasingly China can modify and field capabilities in hours to months. For the U.S. and its allies, we celebrate if we can achieve this in a year.

Recently, I discussed with a group of German and Swiss military officials whether the West could replicate Ukraine’s ability to modify its uncrewed surface vessels to address emerging threats. The officials, in fact, expressed skepticism and exhibited amusement regarding the feasibility of Western defense establishments replicating Ukraine’s capacity to transform these vessels from vulnerable suicide boats into capable platforms capable of suppressing enemy fire and engaging in aerial combat within a matter of months.

From mid-2024 to May 2025, Ukraine expanded its uncrewed surface drones into air-defense platforms, gunboats, and FPV-drone carriers through overlapping adaptations. R-73 missiles were confirmed aboard Magura drones by June 2024, automatically aimed machine-gun turrets were installed on Sea Baby drones by December, and Ukraine reported the downing of two Russian Mi-8 helicopters with missile-armed Maguras on December 31. FPV carrier strikes ensued in January 2025, and AIM-9-equipped Maguras reportedly downed two Russian Su-30 fighters by May. These rapid adaptations effectively countered aircraft and patrol boats that targeted Ukraine's drones while extending their reach against coastal targets.

The U.S. should consider measures to emulate Ukraine's recent success in the Lyman sector of Eastern Donetsk Oblast. During Operation Vivaldi, Ukraine's Third Assault Brigade, within the Third Army Corps, demonstrated robots' potential for hazardous infantry assaults. The corps reported remotely controlled ground vehicles with grenade launchers and explosive payloads engaging Russian strongpoints, causing defenders to misinterpret them as advancing infantry. Aerial drones also helped deploy ground robots behind Russian lines, expanding their reach. These operations signal a shift toward using machines for exposed assaults on fortified positions, reducing soldiers' exposure while supporting infantry advances.

While the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit is a commendable first step, it still substantially impedes timely innovation. The measure-countermeasure cycle on the contemporary battlefield currently spans about a month, far shorter than the timeframe required to approve a single government task order, let alone a technology program. To speed progress, the Department may benefit from the Vesuvius Challenge, which exemplifies innovation at its zenith: an ambitious, quantifiable objective pursued through open collaboration, competition, and cross-disciplinary expertise. By integrating advanced imaging with artificial intelligence, participants have successfully recovered writing from ancient scrolls carbonized by Mount Vesuvius without physically unrolling them. Open data, shared tools, and milestone prizes let researchers, students, and independent contributors build on one another's breakthroughs. This accomplishment demonstrates how patient foundational research and novel external perspectives can transform seemingly insurmountable challenges into tangible progress.

A critical aspect of this approach is the agile, near-instantaneous integration of future threat analysis and data into acquisition and research programs. In Ukraine, threat reporting is dynamic and flows directly from the front lines to engineers in commercial ventures. This enables instantaneous adjustments to meet emerging battlefield needs.

Size matters; in heavily bureaucratic primes, information takes time to reach benchtop developers, and time is crucial. Three days versus two hours can mean the difference between success and failure on the battlefield, and that is one reason Ukraine has been able to field such a wide variety of tailored solutions for the specific needs of individual units and battlefield sectors. We should question how well Western advanced logistics could handle these one-off specialized acquisitions and fielding solutions.

In Ukrainian frontline innovation, there are no requirements, no statements of work, no negotiating with rice bowls between acquisition managers, just frontline support. Requirement development is a luxury. They are written on the battlefield each minute and can be obsolete by the next morning.

To realize the Secretary's vision, reforming departmental processes may require a blank slate and, for this specific effort, abandoning all existing acquisition structures to create a parallel experimental program that operates more like a startup or investment family office than a well-entrenched bureaucracy. We should take lessons learned from the Brave1 cluster and implement them jointly across the forces, with a bias toward non-traditional suppliers, rather than the much-coveted pathway of SBIRs and programs of record. We need to accept that the ideal may not meet the time and cost test, versus a cheap capability that is available now. As one colleague remarked when lamenting over the lack of satisfactory responses during a multi-million-dollar five-year contract, "What should I expect? If I am forced to go to the same trough every time, I will always get the same slop."

Josh "Bugsy" Segal, Ph.D. travels frequently to Ukraine to study battlefield innovation, is a former U.S. arms control negotiator, and a retired military planner. He currently serves as a freelance advisor to numerous Department of War senior leaders and a nonresident associate fellow for Globsec, the National Center for Narrative Intelligence, and the Homeland Defense Institute.