Ever-Faster Weapon Cycles

Innovation and Economics in the War in Ukraine

Its learning is evident in its ability to scale up drone production. On 7 September, Russia carried out its largest drone campaign of the war, launching 805 Iranian-designed Shahed drones and decoys against Ukraine. Ukrainian experts note that Russia has been gaining ground technologically.

Ukrainian intelligence reports that the Kremlin can now produce up to 2,700 Shahed attack drones a month. Ukraine can hardly answer by scaling up air defence by using more rocket-propelled interceptor missiles each worth millions of dollars, more than 10 times as much as their targets. Kyiv has instead been investing in drone interceptors, which have proven successful.

But scalability and training of operators remains an issue. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, told media, ‘Our shared task is to form more such crews, train more interceptor operators, and provide them with more effective weapons and radars.’

However, Russia is successfully deploying countermeasures against those drone interceptors. The technology is constantly evolving.

In a social media post, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia’s technology-pioneering Bars-Sarmat brigade, said the future of drone warfare lay in rapid cycles of going from conception to deployment. Linking frontline needs directly with engineers and production was also needed. He argued that mass and flexible systems would conserve resources and reduce troop losses. Russia has suffered well over a million casualties.

Vitaliy Goncharuk, the former chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Committee of Ukraine told me, ‘innovation is not the decisive factor.’ He added, ‘The real competition today is in scaling—the ability to produce more.’

And after learning painful lessons in the first year of the war, Russia has become much more efficient at scaling successful solutions. That’s a reason why the Kremlin appointed an economist, Andrei Belousov, as defence minister in May 2024.

Moscow is also catching up with Ukraine and, in some areas, even surpassing it, as shown by its widespread rollout of optical-fibre drones on the battlefield. Ukraine’s decentralised wartime procurement and startup ecosystem brought much-needed agility in the early years of the war, enabling units and volunteers to bypass bureaucracy, supply troops more quickly and drive innovation. But by 2025, this same model had shown limits, producing a zoo of incompatible systems.

A US Army study found that Russia’s way of war relied on mass, rapid adaptation, and economies of scale. It also noted that the Russians were accepting of high losses of manpower and equipment.

Pairing those factors together helps explain why Kyiv struggles to withstand Russia’s relentless meatgrinder assaults. Several Ukrainian soldiers I’ve spoken with in recent weeks have described feeling the growing mass of Russian drones pressing against their positions.

Lyuba Shipovich, chief executive of Dignitas Ukraine, which is a volunteer-driven nonprofit that helps the Ukrainian army with technology, told me that Kyiv’s decentralized approach was what enabled it to succeed against Moscow and to constantly deliver new and effective battlefield equipment and technology.

Wars drive great technological change. In 2022 in Ukraine, new battlefield technologies lasted in service for about seven months before being replaced. By 2023 the cycle had shrunk to five or six months, in 2024 just three to four and by early 2025 it was down to barely four to six weeks.

Ukraine still struggles with lingering problems, such as bureaucracy. ‘We invented a mobile UAV [drone] repair workshop in early 2023,’ said Shipovich. ‘It took nine months to get it certified, even though we ourselves had written the certification criteria. It was absurd. This kind of red tape delays field deployment and costs lives.’

Ukraine continues to innovate, developing an Amazon-style weapons ordering platform that is transforming frontline procurement cycles. Ukrainian drone pilots earn points for kills, with certain targets like enemy drone pilots having higher rewards.

‘Access to historical data will enable the creation of tools that can plan more effectively or act as copilots for future decision-makers,’ said Goncharuk. ‘This will help them avoid mistakes and make better use of the resources available to them.’

This approach also allows Kyiv to aggregate data to not only determine which units are more effective and learn battlefield lessons but also to gather more data to train AI models on. Russia is now attempting to emulate a similar approach.

Samuel Bendett, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told me that just three years of war had generated centuries’ worth of data from air, space, ground and cyber sources. Both sides were already using it to shape planning, wargaming, and the future of drone operations.

Technological progress, paired with smart leadership, has had a devastating impact on the Kremlin. In recent weeks, Ukraine has intensified its long-range drone strikes on Russia’s oil refineries, exposing Russia’s vulnerability due to its vast territory and overstretched air defences.

Moscow has also been forced to learn that the economics of war favour cheap drones over costly air defences, which cannot keep pace with mass drone attacks. Ukrainian leaders recognised early in the war that they needed to build their own arsenal of long-range weapons, since the West refused to provide what they needed.

The war has increasingly become a technological race. The challenge is not just keeping up with the innovation cycle. Ukraine must also forecast what technological solutions will work in the future and prepare accordingly. It can afford no missteps as it needs to stay ahead no matter what.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He wrote this report after returning from the frontline in Ukraine, where he spent time with various Ukrainian units.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).