Militärische Lehren aus dem Ukraine-Krieg

[Quintus Fabius]

Über diverse Probleme der Ukraine die man oft nicht so auf dem Schirm hat:

https://warontherocks.com/2025/08/ukrain...ation-war/

Extreme Dezentralisierung und weitgehend dezentralisierte Beschaffung - auch und insbesondere im Kontext mit der Korruption in der Ukraine: In Auszügen in Bezug auf die Kernaussagen der einzelnen Unterartikel:

Decentralization Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

With the start of the active phase of the war, the state procurement system was effectively paralyzed. One could argue at length with government officials that the system was not paralyzed — but I personally had to buy helmets, vehicles, etc. for friends during the first week of combat. In the second week, I had to procure underwear and socks for an entire battalion near Kyiv. This batch was delivered via commercial mail — Nova Poshta —to the closest non-occupied branch, and the battalion picked it up a week later.

Viewed holistically, something very unusual occurred: due to the paralysis of the state procurement system, military units were allowed to procure everything they needed themselves. At the same time, various charitable foundations and private donors became active players in military procurement, supplying uniforms, food, and weapons directly to units. To meet the demand, volunteers began creating ad hoc information technology procurement systems when the war was only four months old.

All this led to total de-bureaucratization and partial de-corruption of procurement, producing a very interesting phenomenon: Military units and charitable foundations became more stable and predictable customers than the state. As a result, some technology companies producing drones grew within these ecosystems, reinvesting earnings into development — following the example of Ukrspecsystems in 2014 and 2015, which originally raised funds for drones via PeopleProject and became market leaders by 2021.

Sounds like a success story? Probably, yes — but by 2025, this system revealed major systemic problems: Military units began procuring equipment independently with minimal oversight, and corruption spread down to the unit level as a result.

Such decentralization could make it more difficult for the state to focus resources on promising developments or to ensure integration among military products acquired by different units. I’m not even touching on real costs, potential savings from scale, or interoperability between systems.

In all military conflicts, competition takes place not just on the battlefield but also in logistics systems. And the procurement system that actually developed in Ukraine addressed very different problems than those facing the U.S. in competition with China and Russia. A decentralized system may turn out to be far less effective than centralized procurement systems — and Russia is already demonstrating this on the battlefield in 2025.

Zoo of Tech Platforms Are Not Scalable

Since 2022, Ukraine’s decentralized procurement system sparked a surge in small defense businesses. Thousands of companies began producing drones, components, software, and providing services for the front lines. This movement became massive — it was hard to ignore. It truly bolstered Ukraine’s combat capacity at a critical moment. But in terms of quality and sustainability, it’s increasingly being compared to China’s “Great Leap Forward” in the 1950s, when the Communist Party encouraged citizens to smelt steel in backyard furnaces.

In 2024, the Ministry of Digital Transformation officially proposed that people assemble drones at home. After a wave of criticism, the idea was scrapped, but its public launch became a troubling marker of the decision‑making quality.

By 2025, it became clear that only 20 to 40 percent of first-person view remote-controlled drones actually reached their targets. As a result, the true cost of destroying a single tank was far higher than the advertised $500 price tag per drone.

The core issue was a lack of both government expertise and engineering capacity. Developing such systems requires deep knowledge in software, electronics, and systems architecture — yet most newly formed companies were little more than “assembly workshops,” lacking the technical depth to go beyond basic assembly. As a result, Ukraine failed to respond effectively to emerging threats: specifically, short-range fiber-optic drones and long-range drones with autonomous navigation.

The Ukrainian model, on the other hand, produced a zoo of solutions — fragmented, often incompatible systems without standards or architecture. This zoo cannot be scaled. Already inside Ukraine, discussions are underway about what to do: the system is losing competitiveness and is hard to develop further. Yes, some criticism comes from large industry players seeking to push small companies — those working directly with the military — out of the market. But these critics have a systemic point: Small teams rarely achieve the kind of complex systems engineering or high-volume serial production needed for advanced weapons. Ukraine’s wartime experience, unfortunately, has so far borne this out.

To be sure, production decentralization played a crucial role in the early phase of the war. Without it, much would not have been possible. That experience is valuable. But as the conflict wore on and quality demands rose, it became increasingly apparent that more centralized, structured approaches tend to outperform decentralized ones by providing not only results but also predictability.

A Strategic Illusion?

By early 2022, the only talent pool remotely related to engineering consisted of professionals from the software as a service, financial technology, and entertainment information technology sectors — those who had worked for export pre-war and were part of the startup community that knew how to organize grants, pitches, and small funds. When the war began, they turned to what they knew best: Within a few months after February 24, defense startup events, competitions, and accelerators began to appear.

But there was no systematic research, no analysis of the enemy’s technological development, and no articulation of the actual needs of the front. There was no strategy. Most of the funded solutions turned out to be experiments without context — shots in the dark.

For low-complexity tasks — where hundreds of simple solutions need to be quickly produced — such a model may be useful. But in long-term systemic competition — China and Russia versus the West — the startup-based model doesn’t scale, because its goal is rapid prototyping and problem-solving, not scalability.

The Ukrainian experience revealed something important: you need infrastructure that allows for rapid development, testing, and iteration of a product within a single loop — specifically, with testing conducted directly on the battlefield. But that’s more a conclusion about the importance of engineering and manufacturing discipline — not a case for adopting the startup approach as the core framework for capability development.

The main challenge isn’t to build such a loop during conflict. The conflict will force it to happen. The challenge is how to make it sustainable in peacetime, when there’s no urgency, but there is competition for talent, attention, and resources.

The Limits of Agility

The war in Ukraine has undeniably exposed deep systemic problems in military production across the United States and Western Europe, while also clearly highlighting the technological development trajectories of China and Russia. These two countries are emerging as the primary benchmark players in future non-nuclear conflicts — with a focus on system coherence, scalability, and technological maturity.

In contrast, at the outset of the war, Ukraine had a degraded defense ecosystem. The state sector was focused on internal reforms and maintaining export contracts inherited from Soviet times, while a private defense sector barely existed. The only model that could be rapidly deployed was a decentralized supply system, based on small manufacturers, low-tech solutions, and grassroots startup community initiatives.

This improvised system did indeed provide significant support during the early years of the war. It mobilized thousands of teams, enabled rapid response, and supported the front line. But its limitations were obvious. A lack of strategic planning, fragmented solutions, an inability to scale, and a weak engineering base resulted in the model reaching its limit by 2024-2025. The result was a zoo of technological platforms — uncoordinated, unintegrated, and often ineffective under conditions of modern electronic warfare.

Ukraine’s defense startup ecosystem cannot be seen as a strategic alternative to mature state systems. It falls short when it comes to mass production, architectural compatibility, export viability, and resilience. It is suitable for short-term mobilization — but not for systemic competition.

In such a strategic landscape, the decisive factor may not be the sheer number of startups or low-cost drones, but rather a nation’s capacity to develop deeply integrated, scalable, and resilient defense ecosystems. While the Ukrainian experience offers valuable lessons — especially in terms of agility and mobilization — it should be adopted with care. Transplanting that model wholesale, without accounting for the structural differences in Western defense institutions and industrial bases, could actually undermine the effectiveness of Western strategies in the long run.