DAN MADDEN is national security principal at Squadra Ventures. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps, as Congressional staff, and at the RAND Corporation.
DOM VENTIMIGLIA is network principal at Squadra Ventures. He retired from the U.S. Army as a Chief Warrant Officer 5, having served most of his career in 10th Special Forces Group.
We reach the Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) operations center after a long drive in a blacked-out vehicle. We left our electronics behind and have little idea where we are. On entry, we pass through a hall lined with the names of the unit’s fallen. Both friendly and adversary drones hang from the ceiling. Contemporary Ukrainian art hangs from the walls.
Robert “Magyar” Brovdi is the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. Before the 2022 invasion he was a grain trader and collector of Carpathian fine art. He enlisted, starting as a rifle platoon commander in the Territorial Defence Forces. When his unit was sent to the Kherson region in the spring of 2022 he founded the Birds of Magyar unmanned systems unit to conduct reconnaissance and strike missions. The unit ultimately pioneered the large-scale integration of reconnaissance drones, FPV strike drones, electronic warfare, signals intelligence, and battlefield analytics into a single combat system. In Brovdi’s underground bunker, we sit beside his goldfish tank and he makes us tea while he shares his vision for Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces in the current war and beyond.
The rise of Ukraine’s USF as an independent military service has provided Ukraine with a strategic advantage on the battlefield. It has enabled the rapid organization, training, and equipping of USF to lethal effect. With fewer than 3% of Ukraine’s military personnel, the USF achieves 33% of its effects. The typical unmanned systems team in the USF is five times as lethal as a comparable team in the conventional forces. Magyar’s Birds’ teams are fifteen times as lethal.
USF’s overperformance isn’t limited to Russian adversaries. As part of the training exercise Combined Resolve in Hohenfels, Germany this spring, the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division’s 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team went up against a small unit from the Ukrainian 412th Unmanned Systems Brigade. U.S. armored units were destroyed so rapidly they had to be “re-spawned” to continue the exercise. This is typical of NATO exercises that Ukrainian small units participate in, both on land and at sea (e.g., Hedgehog 2025, REPMUS 2025, Aurora 2026).
The results of these exercises expose a larger problem for the United States. The U.S. has been treating our clear gap in unmanned systems primarily as a procurement and supply chain challenge. This is as if in 2007 the U.S. responded to the insurgency in Iraq with more MRAPs, without changes in doctrine and campaign design. The most important military lesson from Ukraine is not that unmanned systems are important. It is that militaries that learn how to organize, train, and equip for their employment will have a decisive advantage over those that do not. The U.S. focuses on adding unmanned systems into the existing force, rather than revisiting what a force designed for the employment of unmanned systems should look like. This is a force development problem, not just a procurement one.
The recently announced Autonomous Warfare Command is an extraordinary opportunity to solve for the biggest gap in how the U.S. has been approaching the adoption of unmanned systems. Not coincidentally, the effort to establish the command—Project Agincourt—is named for a battle dominated by the English longbow, resulting in a massive reordering of the combined arms mix of the era.
Pentagon leaders should carefully consider the Ukrainian experience as they pave the way for the Autonomous Warfare Command. Ukrainian USF are not simply conventional forces armed with unmanned systems. They have evolved an organizational design and culture to optimize the employment of such systems at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. This includes not only traditional staff functions, but also intensive operations research and direct, real-time coordination with industry to enhance capabilities used today and shape the ones for tomorrow. Tactics, techniques, and procedures have become increasingly sophisticated, multi-domain, and adaptive to techno-economic competition.
To unpack the significance of Ukrainian organizational innovations we describe their influence on operational art, industrial relations, implications for the global security environment, and U.S. force development.
Operational Art Redux
After destroying more than 10,000 Russian armored combat vehicles, Ukrainians are skeptical of the opportunity for decisive maneuver on the battlefield. The battlefield today has similarities with World War I trench warfare, but distributed across a 30-kilometer-deep kill zone. The front is transparent. Small tactical units seek to gain marginal, positional advantage. For the moment, defense has a structural advantage over offense.
Though maneuver has been limited, operational art is evolving. In 2023, the development of unmanned systems seemed reactive—genuinely a substitute for the scarcity of more exquisite capabilities. Now we see unmanned systems employed and developed to achieve operational effects, not simply to scale capacity for attrition warfare.
In late winter 2026, both government and industry shared that Ukraine would be scaling deep and mid-strike drones. When we came back in the spring the Ukrainian military was using mid-strike drones to isolate the front, isolate Crimea, strike Shahed staging areas, and attrit key Russian air defense assets. The Ukrainian military destroyed Russian air defense assets to open routes for deep strikes on strategic targets, with the ultimate goal of crushing Russia’s will to fight.
This strike campaign illustrates Oleksiy Honcharuk’s analysis of Ukrainian and Russian cycles of adaptation and counter-adaptation in technology and tactics, which he calls the “time domain.” Creating and exploiting sometimes ephemeral advantages was a key motivation for establishing the USF as an independent military service.
Resilience in Depth
It is not just the frontline that has become transparent. Whether through remote observation or other sources of intelligence, Ukrainian military forces and the defense industry are held at threat throughout the country. Though CUAS defenses are quite good, outside of the U.S. PAC-3 interceptor nothing in the near-term can defend a Ukrainian target against a Russian ballistic missile capable of reaching 20 times the speed of sound. Both Ukrainian military forces and industry have increasingly dispersed, concealed, and hardened their operating locations and established redundant supply chains (including hoarding critical components).
The shift to unmanned systems has decentralized the employment and production of combat power. Small teams can launch UAS that can travel 200 kilometers without the concentration of forces (and vulnerability) of a cannon artillery battery. Similarly the industrial base for the production of UAS can be much more dispersed than the manufacturing requirements for exquisite capabilities like an ATACMS.
Economics of War
The war in Ukraine has renewed American, allied, and industry appreciation of the cost imposition strategy and cost-exchange ratios. During the Cold War, Andy Marshall highlighted the importance of U.S. investment in long-range strategic bombers, not only for deterrence and tactical advantage but to drive the Soviet Union to divert funding from offensive capabilities into even more costly air defenses. In Ukraine, commanders direct operations research to determine which units and capabilities are most effective and efficient at imposing costs on their adversary. Units also have uniformed software and hardware engineers on staff to coordinate with industry based on that analysis to refine current and shape future capabilities.
Perhaps the most striking example is how Ukraine verifies kills and awards units for successful strikes. When a mission is executed, battle damage assessment (“pics or it didn’t happen”) supports the assignment of “ePoints” to the mission unit. Units can then use ePoints to acquire preferred capabilities through the Brave1 Market. Unit commanders make choices with full visibility of the battlefield performance of the different platforms available. This serves as a feedback loop for capability employment and development. This feedback loop is greatly strengthened by the ubiquity of technical talent that Ukraine drew from the private sector after the war began. Commanders can also use the feedback loop to generate outcomes by changing the value of different targets to better align with changing theater priorities.
This is an innovative approach, but the risk it that it can result in commands optimizing behavior around metrics that are tactically urgent, but no more than the sum of their parts. The single-minded pursuit of points at lower levels could distract from more ambitious maneuver objectives, or even coordination with adjacent units.
EPoints are only one mechanism for resourcing combat units. Many units conduct their own fundraising efforts to supplement the standard budget cycle, collaborating with non-profits to access donors, both domestic and international. This places a premium on commanders’ communications skills, since the combat power available to their unit depends upon it.
Unit commanders that are especially adept at accessing funding leverage those resources to directly shape industrial base support to their units. In some cases this extends to operational units conducting their own prototyping and even full-scale production near the front; Wild Hornets’ Sting interceptor is a well-known example. At times the boundary between uniformed military and industry becomes ambiguous. Call it military-civil fusion with Ukrainian characteristics.
The Coming Proliferation
Foreign observers have already begun adapting their force development plans based on the war. North Korea has deployed thousands of troops to support Russia’s war in Ukraine. Latin American cartels reportedly have sought drone training by sending volunteers to join Ukraine’s foreign legion. U.S. operations in Iran are likely accelerating this trend.
Ukraine’s foreign policy will also accelerate proliferation among partners and allies. Ukraine’s government is seeking to strengthen its international standing by turning it into a net exporter of security. The “Drone Deals” allowing Ukraine’s defense tech industry to export capabilities are a major expression of this security policy. This export initiative is clearly secondary to the successful execution of the current war with Russia. Our expectation is that it will accelerate when the war ends.
Ukrainian security force assistance will export the Ukrainian way of war and the expertise required to organize, train and equip unmanned forces. The remarkable lethality of Ukraine’s USF relative to its own conventional forces indicates how significant this era of proliferation could become for the international security landscape—and the importance of getting U.S. force development right.
Adapting and Adopting Unmanned Forces
The Department of War has been laying the foundations for scaling production of unmanned systems. DRPM Unmanned Systems is unifying requirements, resourcing, and acquisition. The Office of Strategic Capital has been aggressively deploying capital to increase industrial base capacity to produce systems, components, and critical minerals. A comparable level of effort is required in developing America’s unmanned forces.
When unmanned systems became responsible for 70% of lethal effects on the Ukrainian battlefield, many senior U.S. military leaders observed that those were the only systems available to Ukraine. Ukraine lacked the exquisite capabilities and training of U.S. forces. We’d fight a similar war completely differently. This is both true and irrelevant.
The cancellation of the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s tactical unmanned systems battalion is symptomatic of the conservative attitude, as is the apparent lack of preparation for Iranian Shaheds in the U.S. war with Iran. Unmanned systems are a new component of the modern combined arms mix. Any military ignoring this will face disaster tactically and strategically.
Unmanned forces aren’t conventional forces with unmanned systems. Simply buying drones and sourcing them to our existing formations will be inadequate, just as the provision of “penny packets” of armor to infantry divisions early in WWII was inadequate to realizing armor’s promise.
Likewise, simply copying Ukrainian practices is not a viable solution. The U.S. has different strategic priorities, competitive advantages, and operational challenges. That’s why U.S. and NATO leaders should be applauded for embracing realistic training in exercises like Combined Resolve. In Operation Epic Fury, the integration of AI into operational workflows through Maven Smart Systems increased targeting speeds by two orders of magnitude, an exciting sign of what’s possible.
Autonomous Warfare Command will play a massive role in shaping the U.S. military’s adaptation and adoption of unmanned forces, but the services will remain central to realizing the vision. SOCOM is a vital combatant command, but it is still the military services that build special operators. The Army’s Transformation in Contact, Navy’s Hedge Strategy, and Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 are examples of important work being done in the U.S. military services today. The current moment calls for a doctrinal transformation on the scale of AirLand Battle during the Cold War. Deferring transformation for readiness for the wrong kind of war would be strategic malpractice.
