Western militaries are undermining Ukraine’s defence, experts say

Mundane regulatory problems in Kyiv and unimaginative institutional thinking in Europe’s militaries are holding up joint weapons production. And that is undermining Ukraine’s battlefield performance and leaving Europe’s armed forces unprepared for modern warfare.

Those are the conclusions of a new report from the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS) at King’s College London, and experts who spoke to Al Jazeera.

For two years, Kyiv has sought to scale up its weapons production by inviting Western partners to fund new production facilities in exchange for battlefield testing. Kyiv receives weapons, Western partners receive know-how.

That formula has led to at least 180 business-to-business partnerships between Ukrainian and foreign partners, but 22 percent of them are stalled, according to the report, Beyond Aid: Making Ukraine Defence Cooperation Work.

One of those stalled ventures is an artillery shell factory that German defence giant Rheinmetall announced a year ago, which should now be starting production. Yet ground has not been broken on the project, because Ukrainian authorities have delayed permits and the government then moved the factory’s site.

There are other legal and bureaucratic problems.

“The process of registering intellectual property is lengthy,” Chris Pool, a visiting fellow at the CSNS, told Al Jazeera. “Iteration cycles move so quickly, often what’s registered and protected is obsolete.”

Former CIA Director General David Petraeus recently discussed how Ukrainian drone manufacturers “can make software changes once a week as required by what the Russians are doing to counter their systems. They can make hardware changes every three or four weeks.”

That is a dizzying speed of innovation by the West’s peacetime standards.

“What happens If the product ends up with a Ukrainian brigade and that brigade then modifies it and adapts it to new developments? Who then owns the intellectual property in the improved product? Does the Ukrainian state have a stake at that point?” said Pool.

“While focusing exclusively on the Ukrainian market may be viable at the initial stage, the absence of a clear export mechanism may later constrain companies’ ability to … integrate Ukrainian-based facilities into wider international supply chains,” said the report.

The problems sometimes lie in Europe’s rigid approach to land warfare, said Pool, who has spoken to Ukrainian teams looking for Western partners.

In 2022, both Russia and Ukraine were fighting exclusively with classic battlefield artillery and heavy armour. Ukraine defeated Russia’s initial attacks with effective use of defensive weapons.

But when Ukraine went on the counteroffensive in 2023, it was unable to compete with Russian scale and production capacity, and quickly adapted.

It designed cheap, long-range drones and missiles to stanch the flow of Russian weapons and fuel to the front, and to destroy Russian refining capacity. It also began to design and build its own first-person view (FPV) drones as a form of artillery.

Ukraine reportedly invested $1bn in drone warfare in 2023, 10 times what it spent in 2022. A New York Times video analysis found that it struck as many Russian armoured vehicles in three months this year as in all of 2022.

In 2024, Ukraine produced a million FPV drones. In 2025, the production was more than 3 million. This year, Ukraine will produce an estimated 8 million – 16 for every 10 that Russia fields – achieving localised air superiority.

The new weapons came with new tactics and new command structures.

“The most important thing is decentralised command. Ukraine has implemented this more than anyone else,” said Konstantinos Grivas, who teaches advanced weapons systems at the Hellenic Military Academy.

“Units don’t wait for commands from upstairs. They harvest their own information and make their own decisions … You need very capable junior commanders,” he told Al Jazeera.

That dispersed command runs counter to classic military hierarchies and tactics.

“In the UK, there’s a certain amount of arrogance that the British army wouldn’t fight like this, and this is all very interesting, but ultimately, not relevant to us,” said Pool. The Ukrainian teams he spoke to were told, “’Couldn’t you just partner with [defence companies British Aerospace] or Babcock and then we can deal with the faces with whom we’re used to dealing,’” he said.

Ukraine has demonstrated the challenges of this approach.

In wargames dubbed Combined Resolve in August, Ukrainian drone operators destroyed a US tank brigade by simulating their tactic of dropping armour-piercing artillery directly onto tanks. They did the same to a British brigade in February.

“Faced with teams who are presenting a new technology or navigation that doesn’t rely on GPS, for example, there isn’t that curiosity to find out what’s going on and how this could be adapted to the British Army,” said Pool.

Western militaries have “not even started to shift all of the land forces units into drone infantry,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former senior adviser to Ukraine’s Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs, now a land warfare expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based think tank.

“If you actually don’t use drones as the main weapon of your infantry, they are obsolete,” he told Al Jazeera. “These people, you recruited and trained to fight with assault rifles, they will never see the enemy. They will be all killed with drones.”

Perhaps the biggest problem of all is money.

The US stopped funding Ukraine last year, and far-right leaders in France and Germany want to follow suit. The European Union is providing the bulk of Ukraine’s military and financial aid for now, but Kyiv overspent in the first half of this year to finance two counteroffensives that took back at least 870sq km of land Russia had occupied, and is impatient for more funds.

Those funds, too, are tied up in European regulations, and Ukrainians feel that with current political trends, receiving them over the long term is an increasingly precarious proposition.

“I don’t see any real chance for any positive transformations in the West,” said Danylyuk.

“Instead of actually using this miracle, which was given by God to the West, and using this Ukrainian heroism and this readiness to sacrifice themselves and the nation, it was just wasted.”