Yuri Kobzar22:30, 06.06.25

After more than three years of maximum exertion, Russia is even further from victory than it was at the beginning of the invasion.

Despite its obvious advantage in all types of military resources , Russia has still not been able to defeat Ukraine in a full-scale war. One of the main reasons for this is the impressive adaptability of the Ukrainians, who find a clever trick against every Russian crowbar, writes journalist Christian Caryl, who has long specialized in Russian topics, on the pages of Foreign Policy .

He notes that in the fall of 2022, Russia began its campaign of regular attacks by kamikaze drones called “Shahed”. The Ukrainian Armed Forces had problems detecting them using conventional methods: the drones were flying too low, hiding between folds in the terrain where radars could not see them.

“Two Ukrainian engineers quickly found a solution. Today, the country is covered with a network of 9,500 microphones mounted on two-meter poles. The microphones, connected to mobile phones, track the “Shaheds” by sound and send this data to a central system,” writes Keril.

Each pole and microphone costs less than $500, he said, making the entire network, known as Sky Fortress, cheaper than a pair of Patriot missiles.

This ability of the Ukrainians to find cheap but effective asymmetric solutions to counter a much more powerful aggressor explains why one should not be too surprised by the success of Operation Spider Web.

“This inequality has forced Ukrainians to be creative, to bypass traditional bureaucracy and empower soldiers and entrepreneurs to find unorthodox solutions that quickly meet battlefield needs. Since it largely ignores the traditional military hierarchy and its slow top-down processes, one might call Ukraine’s new philosophy “flat warfare,” the journalist writes.

Caryl believes that the “flat war” is a deliberate strategy in Kyiv, not just a reaction to the country’s plight. He believes that this philosophy is a reflection of Ukraine’s recent political history, in which the country has gradually abandoned Soviet centralism in favor of modern decentralization.

“One of the most striking features of the new philosophy is its emphasis on cost-effectiveness,” Caryl writes, noting that in Operation Spider Web, the Ukrainians used drones costing a few hundred dollars to destroy aircraft worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

The journalist emphasizes that the effectiveness of Ukrainian defense is based on the fact that many of the most important military decisions are made not by the President’s Office or the General Staff, but at the brigade level. For example, brigades have the authority to independently recruit personnel and independently determine their tasks, depending on the qualifications of these people. The brigades themselves contact weapons manufacturers and even independently manufacture drones or components for them on their own equipment.

This shrinking distance between soldiers and weapons manufacturers is having unexpected results. “Few militaries in the world would have the audacity to field a missile-armed naval drone of the type that shot down two Russian fighter jets over the Black Sea last month,” Caryl writes excitedly.

The journalist also recalls other bold decisions by Ukrainians, such as significant advances in the use of artificial intelligence in warfare.

“Ukraine’s advantage is not in the individual technologies it has deployed, but in its ability to consistently outpace Russia in the innovation cycle,” Joyce Hackme, deputy director of the international security program at the British think tank Chatham House, recently said. The author of the publication agrees, adding that speed has become a weapon for the Ukrainians.

The journalist noted that smart people in the US have already begun to partially imitate the specific warfare strategy that the Ukrainians have armed themselves with. For example, the Pentagon launched the Replicator program, the purpose of which is to produce many cheap drones in direct cooperation with private companies. According to Keril, this program was definitely created based on the experience of Ukraine. As well as the US Army’s “Accelerating Acquisitions and Implementation of Innovative Technologies” program, which is designed to stimulate military innovation by bypassing standard procurement procedures.

(C)UNIAN 2025