How Ukraine’s military overachieves

“The bugger hive-mind is very good, but it can only concentrate on a few things at once,” he tells Ender, his successor. “All your squadrons can concentrate a keen intelligence on what they’re doing. Your disadvantage is that you will always, always be outnumbered, and after each battle your enemy will learn more about you, how to fight you, and those changes will be put into effect instantly.”

UKRAINE’S FATE AND AMERICA’S INTERESTS

A real-life buggers versus astronauts game is playing out in the battlefields of Ukraine.

The Russians, continuing the Soviets’ centralizing ideology, are the buggers. The Ukrainians, in some ways the most Western of the Slavic people, are the hodgepodge, individualistic, decentralized race in this war.

‘Front-line innovators’

Decentralization is baked into Ukrainian society. Yevhen Hlibovytsky, a scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University, said Ukraine is “a network society” built of “invisible links.”

“We have the formal hierarchy of authority, which kind of fails,” he says, nodding toward Ukraine’s current corruption scandals and its past failures of government that have led to multiple uprisings. This hierarchy is backstopped by “the volunteer networks and civil society,” which Hlibovytsky said are more robust “than anywhere in the developed world.”

Russians do it differently.

“They have a completely different system,” Hlibovytsky said. “It’s a highly centralized system.”

Ukraine’s military is intentionally decentralized. Its brigades and battalions have more autonomy than in most militaries. Typically, each receives its own budget and has considerable discretion on how to spend it.

Unlike in the Russian military (or the American one), Ukraine’s soldiers have permission to innovate.

When drone operators at the 3rd Army Corps found their off-the-shelf drones constantly jammed and could not find better versions elsewhere, they developed their own.

The 3rd Army Corps, like many units, operated its own R&D department, where the front-line drone operators went to work developing a less jammable retransmission system. The unit then tested this technology in the field, found its own manufacturer, and deployed the tech en masse. After the 3rd Army Corps showed it worked, Ukraine’s military codified the technology for broader use.

Three other units adopted this technology, but some soldiers demanded a more compact version of the drones — and the 3rd Army Corps and its manufacturers complied, modifying and shipping these smaller drones to other units.

As the Ukrainian military think tank, Snake Island, put it, “soldiers are not just end-users, but also front-line innovators driving the evolution of military technology.”

Killhouse

The 3rd Army Corps is a fruit of decentralization, innovation, and eventual scaling. Its ancestry traces back to a local militia in Mariupol, a city near Russia’s border on the Azov Sea. With Russia’s invasion of this region in 2014, the militia formed into the Azov Brigade, which soon became infamous for using neo-Nazi symbols and having ties to right-wing figures.

Ukraine’s government absorbed Azov into the military, and eventually the 3rd Assault Brigade, in a sense, spun out of Azov. The 3rd Assault Brigade had massive success early in the war, including reconquering Kherson — the only major city Ukraine has taken back from Russian occupation.

The 3rd Army Corps is a new creature, being built mid-war around the 3rd Assault Brigade.

The brigade runs its own drone workshop, which it calls Killhouse. Killhouse includes training for drone pilots both indoors and outdoors, and it has drone simulators on desktop computers. Killhouse is also a factory and a workshop. Soldiers and artisans of the 3rd Assault Brigade work to modify manufacturer-made drones, aerial- and ground-based, that they test at Killhouse and deploy into the field.

Throughout Kyiv, Dnipro, and other Ukrainian cities, you’ll see recruitment ads for individual units. You see them on the side of the highways, at bus stops, and on subway cars.

The 3rd Assault Brigade has two ads prominently featuring soldiers who are young fathers, holding their little babies. “We are here to live,” is the literal translation of the ads’ motto. The message is you owe it to your children to preserve a free Ukraine.

The individual units fundraise for themselves. One unit has a billboard in Dnipro that says, “Let the drones do the fighting,” with a QR code to donate to that unit.

“Magura” is the name of the 47th Brigade. It’s named after a pagan Slavic war goddess. Maybe because the name sounds vaguely Spanish, Magura has recruited hundreds, possibly thousands, of soldiers from Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America and Spain. Spanish is an official language of the brigade.

The decentralization affects the country’s budding military-industrial complex, which looks nothing like the U.S. arms industry, where a handful of giants dominate.

‘A double-edged sword’

Artem Zakharov is a soldier-turned drone entrepreneur in Ukraine. Out of a tiny shop, he and a handful of employees are devising software and hardware to make the transmissions between drone and operator unjammable. Ukraine’s military currently favors flying its drones tethered to the operator by fiber-optic filaments — unjammable, but with obvious downsides.

Small defense contractors such as Zakharov are all over Ukraine. Some manufacture their arms just a few miles behind the front lines.

“There’s a lot of competition, so you have to prove that you’re the best,” Zakharov said.

His plan is “selling small batches to the units, and demonstrating clear success.”

This decentralization has both advantages and disadvantages compared to Russia’s more centralized approach.

“I don’t think it’s always a blessing,” Hlibovytsky said. “Sometimes it’s a curse. You still need the hierarchy of command.”

For most of the war, Hlibovytsky said, the dynamic has been this: “Ukrainians would be better with innovations on the front line, and Ukrainians would come up with a solution, and then the Russians, within six months, would usually scale it, and Russians are much better at scaling.”

D.C., a drone instructor at Killhouse, agreed, saying, “Decentralization is a double-edged sword.” Specifically, D.C. cited the Russians’ advantage that when they discover a new best practice in this ever-changing war, they can instantly adopt that practice throughout the military, as Rackham said about the buggers, when the Russians learn, “those changes will be put into effect instantly.”

There’s another advantage to Russia’s hive-queen-and-worker-bee mindset: Russia does not mind sending massive numbers of its men to die. This has been the Russian way for dozens of wars across hundreds of years.

“They don’t care about the number of people killed,” Hlibovytsky said. “From the Ukrainian point of view, every killed Ukrainian soldier is a problem.”

Likewise, Ukraine has not been as effective as Russia in forcing its young men into combat. Millions have dodged combat by hiding or skipping town to Poland and Hungary. Not running an authoritarian state even while under martial law, Ukraine can’t prevent desertion or draft-dodging as well as Russia can.

But if decentralization is ever going to pay off in a war, it’s going to be a war like this one, where the new technologies and tactics are being learned, developed, and promulgated in the field.

“We have to learn by doing, because nobody’s done this before,” Zakharov said.

Zakharov was a sergeant when he left the military, and he tells this story of his journey: “Colonel tells me I know nothing. When I’m discharged, I think maybe I know something. Now nobody’s there to tell me I don’t know anything.”

THE COLOMBIAN WAR VETERANS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES AND LIMBS FOR UKRAINE

There are six other companies that do the sort of thing Artem does. Some have very different technology. Some swear that fiber optics is the future. Artem does not have to convince them that they are wrong. He also doesn’t necessarily need to convince some central procurement officer. He just has to try to make a product good enough that everyone will want it.

He sums it up in a very American way: “You do you. We do us. Let’s go.”