In recent weeks, Ukraine has drawn attention for strikes on prestige Russian targets such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Crimea, along with reports of sporadic battlefield gains. While the war remains far from decided, these developments offer a moment to examine one of the fundamental reasons driving Ukraine’s battlefield resilience: fast, agile, and adaptive defense procurement.
The changing character of warfare which is driven by what looks to be a new Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) comparable in scale to the transformation brought about by advancements in C4I, PGMs, and other technologies during the Cold War, presents the U.S. with an opportunity to learn from Ukraine’s battle-tested approach to rapid and effective procurement. Doing so is essential to ensuring the foundations of effective and efficient warfighting in an ever-changing strategic environment.
During the Cold War, the U.S. gained an operational and technological advantage over the Soviet Union by adapting its defense industrial base (DIB) and military capabilities to the changing nature of warfare. This occurred despite the fact that Soviet military theorists had, in many respects, preceded their American counterparts in developing the conceptual foundations of what they termed the Military-Technical Revolution. Today, the U.S. faces a small number of capable adversaries in an environment that demands not only mass but also agility, adaptability, and the ability to innovate in real time.
As Ukraine has demonstrated, military advantage stems not only from what a force possesses but also how quickly it can learn and adapt. If the U.S. cannot demonstrate a similar level of institutional agility within its DIB and acquisition system, its ability to generate and sustain military effectiveness could face serious constraints. The challenge is therefore not merely one of producing more capabilities, but of creating a procurement system capable of identifying, acquiring, fielding, and iterating those capabilities at the speed required by modern warfare.
In this respect, the progress made by Ukraine over 4 years of a full-scale invasion provide valuable lessons and opportunities to American policymakers. R&D processes that once took up to 20 years are now being completed in a matter of weeks, complex systems like Ukraine’s Sea baby uncrewed surface vessel (USV) have been developed and fielded in a few months, while major acquisition programs in the U.S. typically take more than 12 years to deliver an initial operational capability. The U.S. Navy’s own Mark 48 torpedo illustrates the point: it was conceived in 1956 but did not become operational until 1972.
Prior to the start of the war Ukrainian defense procurement was characterized by corrupt bureaucracy and centralization. Ukraine’s entire defense industry was owned by the state under the Ukroboronprom conglomerate. The procurement system in the U.S. suffers similar bureaucratic delays, although they arise from layered requirements, budgeting, and acquisition processes rather than one centralized bureaucracy. The negative effects of these bureaucracies are evident in both countries. In Ukraine, we saw the failure to establish domestic ammunition production following the 2014 invasion despite agreement on its necessity. In the U.S. similar bureaucratic failures were revealed by the warehousing of 10,000 Integrated Visual Augmentation System Headsets following 8 years and multiple acquisition efforts. The estimated cost of the 10-year purchase of the headsets is $22 billion dollars.
Before the war, Ukrainian General Staff would set requirements for weapons and equipment, defining the operational need and necessary R&D. These requirements were formalized into a single document that guided all defense procurement in a 3-year period called the State Defense Order (DOZ). In the U.S., procurement architecture is more distributed through multiple stages, analyses and assessments, but each stage adds review layers that result in requirement finalization alone taking well over 2 years. Although the procurement systems differ substantially, both historically have struggled to convert requirements into delivered capabilities. In the U.S. system, this manifests as delays and cost overruns starting at the requirements stage, while Ukraine’s main challenges emerged later in the process.
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Barna Peterfi is the Research Director of Yorktown Institute.
