Contemporary conflicts are characterized by a rapid compression of technological innovation timelines, challenging traditional frameworks in defense procurement, industrial production and operational doctrine. The widespread deployment of low-cost unmanned systems, the integration of edge AI and the use of commercial technologies are driving structural changes in high-intensity warfare.
In this interview with World Geostrategic Insights, Ukrainian servicemember Ivan Lubarsky, whose work focuses on modern warfare, defense innovation and national security, examines the operational and economic asymmetries emerging on the modern battlefield.
Drawing on military experience and a background in strategic management, market research and consulting, he addresses the bottlenecks preventing traditional defense industries from adopting continuous iteration cycles, structural vulnerabilities within dual-use supply chains, and the doctrinal changes driven by cost-exchange imbalances in air defense. The discussion examines how these pressures are changing defense technology development, military adaptation and the relationship between industrial capacity and operational requirements.
Ivan Lubarsky is a Ukrainian servicemember with prior executive experience in market research and consulting. His professional background combines military service, strategic thinking and experience in research-driven business management. His areas of expertise include modern warfare, national security, strategic management and defense innovation, with particular attention on how battlefield experience can inform military capability development, operational adaptation and strategic decision-making.
Q1 – In your analysis, you have frequently highlighted the contrast between traditional Western defense procurement timelines and the rapid hardware/software iteration cycles observed on the modern battlefield. From an operational standpoint, what are the primary structural bottlenecks preventing Western defense industries from adopting a continuous, agile iteration model?
A1 – The main problem is the mismatch between the pace of modern warfare and the Western defense industry’s procurement and production model. This systemic failure stems from three primary bottlenecks:
Slow procurement cycles. Requirements are often set years before equipment reaches the troops. By then, battlefield tactics, technologies and countermeasures may have changed. Feedback from the front needs to shape development and upgrades much faster.
The UK’s “2026 Defence Investment Plan” offers a useful example. It commits over £5 billion to drones and leaves some spending for 2030–2035 unallocated, allowing future decisions to reflect technological developments. This creates room to adapt investment priorities instead of locking the entire force into today’s assumptions.
Misaligned economic incentives. Defense programs often reward technical sophistication and compliance with specifications more than affordability, production speed and scalability.
Rheinmetall’s CEO dismissed Ukrainian drone production as essentially LEGO assembly. In a separate case, The Atlantic reported that Raytheon and Lockheed Martin were concerned Ukraine might eventually produce Patriot interceptors faster and cheaper than US production lines. A Republican official cited by the magazine attributed the companies’ reservations to fears of future competition. If accurate, this illustrates how commercial interests can conflict with the wider need for affordable, scalable weapons production.
Dependence on manufacturers. Closed architectures, restricted access to technical data and proprietary software can make upgrades and integration of new components slow and expensive.
The core issue is about metrics – how success is measured. In a war of attrition, performance alone is insufficient. Cost, production volume, repairability and adaptation speed determine how much combat capability can be sustained over time. Advanced systems have their place, but complexity must justify its cost.
Q2 – The ability to translate immediate frontline requirements into upgraded, deployable capabilities within weeks is unprecedented. How can military organizations institutionalize these rapid feedback loops without compromising the necessary quality assurance, safety standards, and interoperability protocols?
А2 – The key is to make rapid adaptation part of the development and procurement process, rather than an improvised response to battlefield problems.
Military organizations need direct, permanent links between frontline users, engineers and decision-makers. Reports on system performance, changing enemy tactics and field modifications must feed directly into development priorities. The goal is to turn operational feedback into concrete engineering tasks, not just collect lessons learned.
Development and testing must also happen in shorter cycles. Companies should deliver incremental upgrades, test them under operational conditions and feed the results back to engineering teams. Ukraine’s experience with drones and electronic warfare systems demonstrates the need for continuous iteration.
Speed, however, cannot mean bypassing validation. The approval process should reflect the risk of each change. Software updates and replaceable modules may allow faster testing than modifications affecting weapons safety or system reliability. Open interfaces, modular architectures and interoperability testing can help prevent local improvements from creating wider system failures.
This requires clear responsibility for setting upgrade priorities, readily available testing capacity and procurement arrangements that support frequent, incremental changes. These conditions allow military organizations to accelerate field-driven development while maintaining appropriate validation and safety standards.
Q3 – Modern conflicts have underscored a severe cost-exchange asymmetry, where sophisticated, multi-million-dollar air defense assets are routinely deployed to intercept low-cost, mass-produced attritable drones. What paradigm shifts are required in C-UAS doctrine to achieve both economic sustainability and operational scalability?
А3 – The core shift is from treating air defense primarily as an interception problem to managing the cost, scale and sustainability of defense against repeated attacks.
Using a multi-million-dollar interceptor against a drone costing tens of thousands of dollars may be justified when protecting a critical asset. It becomes unsustainable when this is the default response to mass attacks. The reported use of Patriot interceptors against Iranian Shahed drones illustrates this dilemma, although the right response depends on the threat and the asset being protected.
C-UAS doctrine needs a layered approach. Electronic warfare, guns, lower-cost interceptor drones and other affordable systems should handle threats they can reliably defeat. High-end surface-to-air missiles should remain available for targets that demand their capabilities. No single solution can cover every threat, and electronic warfare alone cannot defeat every drone.
The economic calculation must also account for production capacity, interceptor stockpiles, reload rates and the ability to sustain defense through repeated attacks. A system that works in a single engagement may fail economically over weeks of attrition.
Rather than aiming for cheap interceptions across the board, the strategy must focus on preventing the adversary from exploiting cost differentials to exhaust defensive capacity.
Q4 – As electronic warfare (EW) environments become increasingly dense and contested, autonomous guidance systems are evolving to bypass traditional jamming. In this context, how should defense planners balance the development of kinetic interception methods versus non-kinetic, directed-energy, or cyber-centric C-UAS solutions?
А4 – Countering these threats requires a layered defense with overlapping effects, rather than reliance on any single technology. Different countermeasures should cover some of the same threats, so that bypassing one does not leave a gap in the defense.
Electronic warfare remains valuable, but its effectiveness depends on the drone’s guidance and control architecture. Fiber-optic drones bypass radio-frequency jamming, while autonomous navigation can reduce reliance on external signals. As adversaries adapt, counter-UAS systems must combine electronic attack with physical interception.
Kinetic systems remain essential against drones that cannot be reliably disrupted electronically. However, ammunition costs and limited stocks make them difficult to scale against mass attacks. High-energy lasers and high-power microwave weapons offer additional options, potentially reducing the marginal cost of interception. Their practical use still depends on line of sight, weather, power supply and system availability.
Cyber operations may disrupt vulnerable control networks or supporting infrastructure, but they cannot be treated as a dependable response to every autonomous platform.
The priority is to integrate these capabilities so their effects partially overlap. Electronic attack may disrupt a target, while kinetic or directed-energy systems remain available if disruption fails. No single countermeasure should be the sole line of defense against a threat that can adapt or bypass it.
Q5 – The widespread militarization of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies—ranging from civilian drones to commercial satellite communications—has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for asymmetric capabilities. To what extent does the reliance on dual-use commercial supply chains introduce systemic vulnerabilities, particularly regarding geopolitically contested electronic components?
A5 – Commercial technology has lowered the cost and time needed to develop military capabilities. But it has also made battlefield production dependent on global supply chains that military organizations do not control.
Ukraine’s drone industry illustrates this trade-off. Commercial motors, batteries, cameras and electronic components have enabled rapid, large-scale production. Yet dependence on Chinese suppliers creates exposure to export controls, supply disruptions and competition for scarce components. Recent restrictions have shown how quickly geopolitical decisions can affect access to critical parts.
The vulnerability extends beyond direct imports. Components can pass through intermediaries and third countries, making their origin and end use harder to track. Russia’s continued access to foreign microelectronics in weapons used against Ukraine demonstrates the limits of export controls in complex commercial supply chains.
Instead of abandoning COTS technology or attempting total domestic manufacturing, defense planners must focus on identifying critical dependencies, diversifying suppliers, and building reserves of hard-to-replace parts. Localizing production remains necessary where disruption would directly threaten combat capability. For the most sensitive components, trusted supply arrangements and greater visibility across the supply chain are essential.
The strategic objective is to retain the speed and affordability of commercial innovation without allowing a single supplier or geopolitical decision to constrain sustained military production.
Q6 – Looking at the current operational realities, we are witnessing an unprecedented transition toward decentralized, edge-AI-driven autonomous swarms and cognitive electronic warfare capable of real-time frequency hopping. Given these rapid shifts, how can defense innovators ensure that frontline modifications remain resilient against AI-generated countermeasures, and what does this mean for human-in-the-loop doctrine?
A6 – The starting point is that adaptation is a continuous process. Modern warfare is becoming a race between opposing technological cycles. Every new capability creates incentives for the adversary to develop countermeasures. Any prolonged pause gives the adversary time to catch up, exploit vulnerabilities and erode the advantage.
Frontline modifications therefore need to be tested against realistic adversarial conditions, including electronic attack, spoofed sensor inputs and degraded communications. Developers need continuous feedback from operational use, rapid software updates and modular architectures that allow changes without destabilizing the entire system. Systems also require predictable fallback behavior when their data becomes unreliable or communications fail.
These requirements also change the human-in-the-loop model. Requiring operator approval for every machine-level action may become impractical when engagements unfold faster than humans can respond. A more workable approach is bounded autonomy: humans define mission objectives, operating limits and engagement rules, while systems execute authorized tasks within those boundaries. Operators retain the ability to intervene, suspend operations or revoke that authority when conditions change.
The aim is to preserve meaningful human authority while allowing systems and organizations to adapt continuously. Adaptation must remain part of routine operations, testing and procurement. In this race, a capability that stops evolving becomes a capability the adversary can learn to defeat.
Q7 – Looking ahead toward the next decade of defense technology, which emerging commercial sectors (e.g., edge computing, autonomous mobility, or decentralized logistics) do you anticipate will have the most profound disruptive impact on conventional military doctrines?
A7 – I see four commercial sectors that could reshape military doctrine over the next decade.
The first is AI, software and edge computing. These technologies can help forces process battlefield data, coordinate crewed and uncrewed systems, and make decisions when communications are disrupted. They could change how units conduct reconnaissance, allocate fires and maintain command under electronic attack.
The second is commercial robotics and autonomous systems, backed by scalable manufacturing. Drones and ground robots can perform reconnaissance, logistics, mine clearance and selected strike missions. Their military value depends on affordability, production volume and how quickly designs can be modified to counter enemy tactics. This challenges force structures built around small numbers of expensive platforms.
The third is telecommunications and decentralized logistics. Resilient networks can keep units connected when central infrastructure fails. Distributed manufacturing, additive manufacturing and more flexible supply chains can also shorten the time needed to replace equipment and critical components. This shifts planning toward forces that can operate and sustain themselves with less dependence on centralized infrastructure.
The fourth is energy technology. Advances in energy storage, microgrids and small nuclear reactors could change how military forces generate and sustain power. Microreactors are moving through prototype testing and demonstration programs, including projects backed by the US Department of Energy and the US Army. Their potential military applications include resilient power for bases, command facilities and other energy-intensive infrastructure. Mobile deployment in operational areas will remain more demanding, given safety, fuel, transport and maintenance requirements. Over time, more reliable power could also support distributed sensors, autonomous systems and other equipment with high energy consumption.
These sectors will have their greatest military effect when integrated. AI needs reliable data and power; autonomous platforms need communications, maintenance and resupply. Their battlefield value depends on how well these elements work together under attack.
One obstacle remains: much of Western society still treats a major war as a distant possibility. Many Ukrainians held a similar view in January 2022. Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed the cost of underestimating the threat, while Western defense production and adaptation have struggled to keep pace with battlefield demands.
Western governments, armed forces and industry need to shorten the path from operational lessons to doctrine, procurement, training and production. Ukraine offers years of experience against a capable adversary in high-intensity warfare. That experience should inform concrete changes in how Western forces prepare, equip and sustain themselves. Delays in applying these lessons carry direct costs for readiness, deterrence and lives.
Ivan Lubarsky – Ukrainian servicemember.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Government of Ukraine, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, or any other state institution.