Photo Credit: Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Melvin J. Gonzalvo // U.S. Department of War
The Pentagon Needs its Own Drone Strategy, Not Ukraine’s
Ukraine’s rapid drone innovation has become the defining military lesson of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Much of the discussion in the United States has focused on how to replicate Ukraine’s wartime innovation ecosystem, where decentralized experimentation and constant battlefield feedback have produced new capabilities at remarkable speed. But attempting to imitate Ukraine’s drone development and production without asking how innovations have been successfully institutionalized could be detrimental to U.S. modernization efforts.
Russia’s top-down absorption, standardization, and scaling of battlefield innovations is actually the innovation model more compatible with America’s mature defense industrial base, rather than Ukraine’s eclectic bottom-up wartime ecosystem. While the Russian model is more applicable to the U.S., it remains incomplete. The central challenge for the U.S. is creating a persistent peacetime feedback loop that continuously generates operational data to refine procurement, experimentation, and doctrine as technology and threats evolve.
Ukraine’s innovation model is not directly transferable to the U.S. because its situation, scale, and existing defense industrial base are entirely different. Ukraine’s success relies on existential pressure, decentralized authority, and constant frontline testing, operating in rapid feedback-to-production loops. This system encourages innovation, but also creates logistical complexity, redundant platforms, and limits benefits from economies of scale. Simply allowing for decentralized organizations and units to independently procure their own systems would be inefficient and insufficient to replicate Ukraine’s environment.
Russia’s Center for Advanced Unmanned Technologies, or Rubicon unit, illustrates how battlefield innovation can be rapidly institutionalized. Designed to combine combat operations, equipment testing, instructor training, and doctrinal development in a single organization, Rubicon evaluates promising battlefield innovations and standardizes what works. Russia’s standardization of its drone production around a limited number of models offers advantages over Ukraine’s decentralized system, which employs “dozens if not hundreds of different models.” While Russia has failed to break the broader stalemate in the war, this cannot be attributed to any particular technological failure, nor success. It is unfair to assess any system by its intangible effect on the war as a whole; however, there are examples where Russia’s approach has led to success.
After its organization in 2024, Rubicon quickly impacted the battlefield. Rubicon units affecting Ukrainian supply lines in Kursk contributed to Ukraine’s withdrawal, and its lessons have kept Russian tech at pace with Ukraine’s, sometimes gaining the upper hand. Rubicon’s model represents how the U.S. could similarly take valuable experience and innovation, and rapidly transfer it to the entire force. The challenge for the U.S. is creating a peacetime equivalent of that feedback loop.
Both sides of the Russo-Ukrainian War demonstrate that effective innovation rests on a continuous feedback loop from the front, but that loop requires a peacetime substitute for experience in combat. To address the challenge of innovation in low cost–consumable–unmanned systems, the U.S. needs data and experience that can guide innovation. The Department of War’s newer Drone Dominance Program (DDP) addresses many of these concerns.
DDP procures small consumable drones through “Gauntlet” competitions that test systems against realistic mission scenarios rather than evaluating them on technical requirements alone. DDP narrows the competitive field before committing to scale, creating a mechanism for diffusing successful approaches throughout the force once a competition concludes, similar to the logic of Rubicon, but as a procurement competition. However, as doctrine will primarily be adjusted after units are armed and gain experience with new systems in a “learn by doing” approach, this system risks preparing for a war like the Russo-Ukrainian war, rather than a significantly different future war. The U.S.’s current solution still lacks a more fundamental part of the cycle: a recurring process that generates and revises mission requirements as threats evolve. The outcome of contests like DDP gauntlets should be the main inspiration for innovation in technology and doctrine, rather than testing vendors against preset requirements.
A major power would not adopt asymmetric guerrilla tactics as a core military strategy, as they are generally incompatible with its mission and fail to capitalize on its comparative advantages. The same logic applies to drone development and production. Ukraine and Russia have each leveraged their own asymmetric advantages in the drone domain. In assessing what applies to its systems, the U.S. should consider which actor’s asymmetric advantages most resemble its own. The U.S. is mostly moving in the right direction with DDP’s Rubicon-style model of institutionalizing innovation, but still needs a mechanism to generate and revise mission requirements as threats evolve, so doctrine and procurement can continuously inform each other.
