Regenerative Warfare: Electronic Contestation, Temporal Compression, and Military Advantage in Ukraine

Drawn from field research conducted in Kyiv, June to August 2026, by Charlotte Y. Santomero: interviews, technical discussions, field observations and notebook material, with secondary-source notes.

A weapon can remain physically intact and still lose much of its military value. The war in Ukraine makes this problem especially visible. Military adaptation is not new; what is different is that a capability can be lost without the weapon itself being physically destroyed. The weapon is not the capability. A drone can still fly but lose command and control. A missile can still launch but lose navigation. A radio can still transmit while its signal fails to reach the intended receiver. Electronic warfare makes this pattern especially clear because persistent electronic contestation can degrade a weapon's effectiveness without physically destroying the weapon itself.

What Ukraine reveals is regenerative warfare: an environment in which a military must repeatedly restore capabilities as the enemy degrades their effectiveness. There is a key difference between adaptation and regeneration. Adaptation is a response to an operational problem; regeneration occurs when effective capability is restored. Regenerative warfare therefore does not happen once but unfolds continuously. A military's capacity to regenerate becomes a source of military advantage.

Drawing on original field research in Ukraine, this paper traces repeated regeneration across navigation, connectivity, and control. It then examines the organizational problem of turning local adaptations into wider military capabilities. Finally, it considers temporal compression: the shortening of the period between restored effectiveness and the adversary's next successful countermeasure. Together, these processes show why military advantage depends not only on possessing effective capabilities, but on the ability to restore them as the enemy adapts.

Part IThe Argument

01Introduction

Much of the discussion of the war in Ukraine focuses on drones. Drones are visible, relatively simple to understand, and responsible for much of the footage through which outsiders see the war. As a result, they have become the clearest symbol of technological change on the battlefield. But focusing on the drone itself obscures a more important question: what makes the drone work?

A drone has to navigate, communicate, identify targets, or otherwise remain connected to command. The physical platform is therefore only one part of the military capability. If these functions fail, the drone can remain physically intact while losing much of its military value. Here lies the basic distinction between a weapon and a military capability.

Electronic warfare makes this distinction unusually clear. Although EW is not the only cause of adaptation on the battlefield, it provides a useful empirical lens because it directly attacks the functions on which many modern systems depend. A jammer does not have to destroy a drone if it can sever its control link. A missile becomes unreliable if it loses navigation. An operator cannot control a system without a usable communications link. Across the Ukrainian battlefield, jamming, spoofing, interception, and direction finding exploit the electronic dependencies that connect platforms to their military purpose. Persistent electronic contestation therefore creates constant pressure to adapt, particularly in navigation, connectivity, and control.

Military adaptation is not new. Armies have always changed tactics, techniques, and technologies in response to combat. The question here is different: what happens when the adaptation itself is quickly countered? A capability works, the enemy develops a countermeasure, the force adapts, and the enemy responds again. When this cycle requires military forces to repeatedly restore capabilities that adversary adaptation has made less effective, this paper calls the condition regenerative warfare.

Electronic contestation makes this cycle possible to follow. EW reduces the usefulness of a capability without necessarily destroying the weapon itself. Forces adapt to restore the lost function. The enemy responds to that adaptation. The cycle repeats. As these cycles accelerate, the period during which an advantage remains effective can become shorter. This paper calls that process temporal compression.

Temporal compression makes the capacity to regenerate more important. If a capability remains effective for years, the speed at which it can be restored matters less. If an adversary can reduce its effectiveness within months or weeks, the ability to restore that capability becomes more consequential. Under these conditions, regenerative capacity becomes an increasingly important source of military advantage.

The war in Ukraine shows that persistent electronic contestation creates repeated cycles in which military capabilities are degraded, adapted, restored, and countered again. As these cycles accelerate, the useful life of battlefield advantage contracts. Under these conditions, military advantage depends increasingly not only on possessing superior capabilities, but on regenerating effective capability faster than the enemy can make it obsolete.

02Regenerative Warfare

Regenerative warfare can be explained simply by running through the cycle of capability and obsolescence. At first, a capability works. Then the enemy finds a countermeasure that reduces its effectiveness. The force changes how the function is performed, effectiveness returns, the enemy responds, and the cycle starts again. Regenerative warfare is distinct from adaptation because adaptation focuses on the change, whereas regenerative warfare encompasses the cycle through which military capability is restored. This allows the analysis to focus on functions rather than specific equipment. If a particular technology ceases to be useful, the military requirement can still remain and may be restored through an alternative solution.

The concept of regenerative warfare does not describe all warfare, nor does it imply that all military capabilities are being continuously rebuilt. It describes a condition in which repeated adversarial adaptation makes the restoration of important capabilities a normal part of military operations. If a capability becomes ineffective because of enemy countermeasures, the underlying military function may still be required and must either be restored or its loss accepted. This process can be followed through three functions: navigation, connectivity, and control.

Navigation is the need to know where you are and where you are going. A drone or missile might originally rely on satellite positioning, but if access to that information becomes unreliable, the function is still needed. It can therefore be fulfilled in other ways, such as inertial navigation, visual navigation, or terminal guidance. Although the original technological configuration changes, the capability is regenerated.

Connectivity is not simply the need for a radio link. The core requirement is the movement of information and the exercise of control. Radio links can be vulnerable to detection and jamming. To counter this, a force can change frequencies or use frequency hopping. Problems such as range can be addressed with repeaters, while connectivity can also be established outside the original radio architecture through satellite communication, mesh networks, or fiber-optic cables. All of these are examples of connectivity being reestablished. The function remains necessary, while the architecture used to perform it changes.

Control is the third function through which regenerative warfare can be seen. Control relies partly on the communication and navigation functions described above, but it also raises the question of agency: who or what performs the required task when continuous external human control becomes unreliable? Some functions can be moved entirely onto the platform through closed-loop systems, while others can be automated or preprogrammed. Once again, the military requirement persists even as the technical division of labor changes.

The difference between regenerative warfare and a single episode of innovation is the repeated restoration of capability. It is not only about building a better technology, but about repeatedly rebuilding effectiveness. Battlefield testing, software updates, rapid procurement, operator feedback, and distributed engineering are all part of the effort to answer the same question: what still works? Regeneration gives a more precise description of what practitioners are trying to achieve. Change is not happening for its own sake; it is happening to regain a function that has been lost or degraded.

Electronic warfare is central to this paper because it makes the mechanism unusually visible, but it should not be treated as the sole driver of regeneration. Kinetic attrition forces adaptation. Air defense changes tactics and flight profiles. Weather changes sensor performance. Production limits constrain what can be fielded. Manpower shortages create incentives for automation. Commercial technology changes what solutions are available. EW is one source of pressure within a larger adaptive battlefield.

Nevertheless, EW clearly shows how military effectiveness is distinct from the physical survival of a weapon. It shows that military power is not only about the weapons a force possesses, but also about the systems that make those weapons useful. Regenerative warfare describes the repeated process of restoring that usefulness as adversarial adaptation degrades it.

03Research Design

Ukraine is used as a theory-building case because these processes are unusually visible and occur at a speed that allows sequences of adaptation to be observed. There is no claim that Ukraine is a universal model for all future warfare. The war in Ukraine is a high-intensity conflict with pervasive and persistent electronic warfare, large numbers of unmanned systems, widespread use of dual-use and commercial technology, and close interaction between military operators and civilian engineers. The software component also allows some systems to be updated continuously without requiring a new physical platform. Russian and Ukrainian forces continuously adapt against each other. These conditions allow the organizational and technological feedback loops to be observed as the conflict continues.

The empirical material draws on original field research conducted in Ukraine during summer 2026. The research corpus includes interviews, technical discussions, field observations, handwritten notebook material, secondary-source notes, and the author's analytical reflections. As a result, this paper does not intend to make universal claims, but instead looks for causal patterns and meaningful variation.

This kind of analysis is more valuable than focusing only on how the electronics work because many of the technical details observed in Ukraine may quickly become obsolete. Instead, the paper looks at what can be learned from technological progression by asking why these changes occur rather than focusing only on the mechanics or how-to details. It asks: Why was it done this way? Why does it work? Why is it important? Why were the advantages not greater? There is no final or perfect technical solution because adaptation does not end. The value of studying these changes therefore lies in understanding how military forces adapt, restore capability, and turn those adaptations into military advantage.

Part IIRegeneration in Practice

04Regenerating Navigation

Navigation is a useful starting point for explaining this pattern because it is a function needed by most military weapons. The technique and technology used to accomplish navigation can change, but the need for it never disappears.

Modern drones and precision weapons often rely heavily on GNSS for navigation. This was once a secure mode of navigation, but it has become increasingly vulnerable as satellite jamming and spoofing have become more prevalent. GPS denial is therefore a major pressure on unmanned systems in Ukraine. We can see this by looking at the number of adaptations that have occurred in a relatively short period of time.

This is especially visible in Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas (CRPAs). GPS jamming becomes increasingly complex as receiving antennas become more advanced. A CRPA receives signals from satellites, but its strength lies in its ability to use several antenna elements in an array to process those signals and reduce interference based on direction. Each element receives signals independently, allowing the system to create a directional reception pattern. The system can then use advanced algorithms and null steering to differentiate between desirable and undesirable signals and reduce the effect of jamming or spoofing.

At the start of the war, the number of elements seen on CRPAs in captured weapons was often eight. As the war has progressed, that number has increased, with Russian missiles now often found using sixteen elements. As the number of elements increases, the difficulty of jamming the antenna increases not linearly but exponentially. As each side develops and fields higher-element CRPAs, the other must increase its own ability to jam increasingly complex systems. A higher-element CRPA can therefore maintain a battlefield advantage for longer than earlier versions because existing jammers become less effective against it.

This contest matters because a more advanced CRPA preserves the capability to navigate, while the ability to jam or spoof it can make a precision weapon inaccurate or ineffective. With Ukraine having run out of Patriot missiles in summer 2026, the requirement to defend against Russian missiles still remained. One Ukrainian military unit developed the LIMA project as a system intended to disrupt enemy navigation through complex CRPA jamming and spoofing. The system was used to protect Ukrainian airspace from satellite-reliant weapons, including drones, missiles, and aircraft. The military requirement remained the same even though the method changed. What once might have looked like a Patriot missile physically intercepting an incoming missile could instead take the form of electronic or cyber capabilities disrupting its satellite navigation. The same end result is pursued through a different means.

The converse is to reduce reliance on satellite navigation. There are several methods designed to do this. Inertial navigation uses measurements of position, velocity, and orientation to estimate location without continuous satellite input. Visual navigation can use stored maps or imagery to determine position. In testing, combinations of the two have also proven successful. During the terminal phase, optical or thermal sensors can be used to guide a weapon toward the target. All of these methods provide navigation without relying entirely on GNSS.

These changes show that an adversary does not always need to destroy the weapon itself. It can instead attack the function that allows the weapon to operate. By making the current navigation method unreliable, a weapon can become ineffective until that function is restored in another way. This is central to the mechanism of regenerative warfare. Militaries often think in terms of platforms, but regenerative warfare shifts attention toward functions. The need to navigate remains even while the capability used to perform that function changes. Regeneration occurs when the organization preserves the function even though the technology used to perform it changes.

The same logic explains how a countermeasure can become obsolete. The countermeasure may remain technically intact, but the dependence it was designed to attack may shift. For example, as satellite navigation becomes less reliable, drones may rely more heavily on visual-inertial systems. A countermeasure aimed at satellite navigation then becomes less useful because that method is no longer being relied upon in the same way. A force can therefore escape one technological contest by changing the dependency itself.

05Regenerating Connectivity

The modern battlefield is highly connected, with the movement of information central to operations. Whether for communication, sending control inputs, receiving video signals, or transmitting target information, these connections create electronic signatures that can be detected, intercepted, and attacked.

The contested nature of connectivity can be seen most clearly in the radio link. Communication between a drone and its pilot occurs on a specific radio frequency. If that channel is jammed, the operator must switch to a different frequency. This often has to happen quickly, otherwise control of the drone can be lost. Some pilots have noted that frequency availability varies by region, making local knowledge important for knowing which channels are clear.

Frequency changes are not the only response to jamming. Other techniques include separating the video antenna from the control antenna and using repeaters or airborne relays. As detection and jamming become more persistent, the countermeasures also become more complex. Instead of using a fixed frequency, frequency hopping makes the link harder to jam. Another response is to use more receivers so that a wider part of the spectrum is accessible. Software-defined radios also make it easier to change how signals are transmitted. The communications system and the jammer therefore evolve together.

This process can also be seen in the frontline workshops used to adapt technology to local battlefield conditions. One brigade leader estimated that 80 percent of drones were modified before use. These modifications show that connectivity is not maintained through a single technical solution. Systems are repeatedly changed to remain usable under current conditions.

Connectivity can also be regenerated through redundancy. Repeaters, airborne relays, satellite communications, and mesh networks can all create alternative pathways for information. Repeaters and relays extend communications range, especially where terrain blocks a signal.

Satellites provide another way to communicate, while mesh networks create multiple pathways so that there is no single point of failure.

Each solution, however, creates different tradeoffs. Repeaters can make it easier to trace a signal back to the operator. Airborne relays add complexity and may require greater coordination. Starlink has recently increased in popularity as its price has become more competitive with fiber-optic systems. However, using Starlink does not guarantee connectivity, as jamming has begun to appear on the front lines. Regenerating a function therefore does not eliminate vulnerability; it often shifts the vulnerability to a different technology.

With electronic warfare widespread and coming from multiple directions, electronic fratricide was also commonly raised as a problem. Friendly interference with one's own drones creates a strong need for greater coordination. This is important because many countermeasures add complexity and increase coordination requirements.

Fiber-optic drones provide one of the clearest physical examples of regenerative warfare. Instead of making an RF control link harder to jam, the system abandons the RF link and restores control through a physical cable. The function of connectivity remains, but the technology used to perform it changes. Fiber optics also introduce tradeoffs in cost, weight, range, and cable management. The rising cost of fiber-optic cable has reduced its popularity in some frontline settings and made alternatives such as Starlink more attractive.

Fiber optics illustrate the deeper point of regenerative warfare. The goal is not to preserve a particular technology. The goal is to preserve the function. When defending the original architecture becomes too difficult, a force may gain more by abandoning it.

06Regenerating Control

The third function is control. Control concerns the ability of a system to continue performing necessary tasks when continuous external human control becomes unreliable. This is not to say that electronic warfare is forcing all weapons to become autonomous. Rather, EW creates pressure to reduce the dependence of systems on vulnerable external links.

There are also incentives toward greater autonomy. Autonomous functions can reduce manpower requirements, which is consequential given Ukraine's manpower constraints. They can also increase reaction speed, reduce the effects of latency, and enable more coordinated use of multiple drones. EW creates an additional incentive because the ability to maintain command and control of a weapon can be lost when the external link is jammed.

However, the shift toward autonomy is incremental. Rather than moving directly toward complete automation, small tasks are automated and then built upon. This is especially feasible through software, which can be changed much more quickly than hardware. What emerges is functional delegation rather than a complete transition to autonomy. Navigation can move onboard while targeting remains human-controlled. Target tracking can be automated while still requiring human authorization. In this way, agency moves between the human and the machine as different tasks are automated. Many “last mile” functions have followed this pattern because the terminal phase is often when the operator is most likely to lose control of the weapon. This can be seen in the development of pixel lock and machine-assisted terminal guidance.

The effect of navigation and connectivity on control can also be seen in systems tested on the battlefield. One system had an entirely closed-loop system operating alongside communication with the operator. When the radio link was jammed, the system could shift to the closed loop, using its own camera hard-wired into the processing system so that EW could not interfere with its internal decision-making path. Countermeasures have already emerged in response to AI-assisted terminal guidance, including unusually painted military vehicles designed to make recognition more difficult for AI systems.

Navigation, connectivity, and control therefore reveal the same underlying structure. In each case, the enemy attacks the current means through which a military function is performed. The force responds by modifying, supplementing, or replacing that means. The technological form changes while the military requirement remains. This repeated restoration is the empirical foundation of regenerative warfare.

The next question is how long each restored advantage lasts.

Part IIITime and Scale

07Temporal Compression

A successful adaptation does not necessarily create a lasting advantage. Once it is used, the enemy gains information about it and can change its jammer, tactics, defenses, software, or equipment in response. The useful life of an adaptation therefore depends partly on the speed and effectiveness of the enemy's response.

The field research contains repeated descriptions of relatively short periods of advantage. One interview described a communications workaround that remained effective for roughly three or four months before enemy EW began reducing its effectiveness. Another set of notes described drone configurations undergoing another “evolution” every two or three months. A separate practitioner described older tactics becoming dangerous to continue using after several months and requiring substantial modification within shorter periods.

These estimates should not be treated as a single battlefield clock. They refer to different technologies, units, and conditions. Their value lies in the pattern they describe. Some electronically dependent systems encounter meaningful countermeasures on timescales measured in weeks or months rather than the years associated with conventional acquisition cycles.

External research supports this pattern. Berthelsen emphasizes the need for continuous operator-engineer interaction and rapid iterative development in Ukrainian unmanned systems.¹ A Hudson Institute report by Can Kasapoğlu similarly argues that Ukraine's advantage lies in civilian components and military adaptations that can change in weeks, while Western procurement treats innovation as something bought with a new system, through programs whose development can stretch over 10 to 20 years.²

This paper calls the shortening of the period in which a battlefield advantage remains effective temporal compression. The concept shifts attention from how quickly an adaptation is created to how long its military advantage lasts.

This distinction matters because a capability can remain technically functional after its military advantage has declined. A commercial drone may still fly perfectly outside the combat zone but become unreliable near the frontline. A radio may still work under normal conditions while becoming predictable to an enemy jammer. The technology still exists, but its military value has changed.

Not every advantage is short-lived. The field research repeatedly described Starlink as unusually resilient. One set of notes records the view that it had remained effective for years while other communications configurations changed far more quickly. This is an important counterexample because temporal compression does not mean that every capability rapidly becomes obsolete.

Instead, the duration of advantage varies. Some technologies expose signatures that the enemy can target. Some rely on widely available components that make countermeasures easier to develop. Some can be changed through software, while others require more complex hardware changes. The important point is not that every capability has a short lifespan, but that the duration of military advantage has become an important variable in parts of the contemporary battlefield.

Time itself is not new to military theory. Strategy has always depended on timing, tempo, and the sequencing of action. The argument here is narrower. Ukraine shows why the duration of battlefield advantage matters when military organizations must repeatedly adapt technical systems against an adaptive enemy.

This creates an organizational problem because militaries also operate on their own timelines. Testing takes time. Procurement takes time. Production takes time. Training and information sharing take time. The enemy is developing a response throughout these processes.

A force can therefore develop the correct adaptation and still fail to gain much from it if the organization takes too long to use it more widely. Temporal compression is not only a technological problem. It determines how much time a force has to turn a successful adaptation into military advantage.

That leads to the next problem: how a local adaptation becomes wider military capability before the enemy counters it.

08From Regeneration to Advantage: The Conversion Problem

How does a successful adaptation affect the bigger picture? The problem of scale makes regenerative capacity a strategic issue, not only a tactical one.

The field research captures this problem in one unusually concise observation. An idea could emerge in the morning and generate battlefield feedback by evening. The next problem was to scale it as quickly as possible. The first part of this sequence demonstrates rapid adaptation. The second shows why adaptation alone does not determine military advantage.

A solution developed inside one drone team is not yet a wider military capability. The organization must first recognize that the solution works. Other units then need to learn about it. The adaptation may require changes to software, hardware, training, procurement, or tactics before it can be used elsewhere.

The field research repeatedly identifies friction in this process. One interview sequence records a lack of mechanisms for capturing information, innovations that were not shared, non-standard systems, and problems with integration and synchronization. These are not problems of invention. They are problems of turning a successful adaptation into wider military capability.

Ukraine's decentralized innovation system makes this tension especially visible. Local autonomy allows units to react quickly to problems that higher headquarters may not yet understand. Frontline laboratories can modify systems, test new equipment, and learn directly from operators. Brigades can also exchange ideas and adapt them to different local conditions. This creates many simultaneous experiments.

The same decentralization can also fragment learning. Knowledge may depend on personal networks. Separate units can solve the same problem independently. Equipment can become incompatible. Training becomes harder when units operate different configurations. Friendly EW can interfere with friendly systems. A force can therefore adapt quickly at the frontline while remaining uneven as a whole.

The field notes describe exactly this tension. Brigades visit one another's laboratories and take useful ideas back to their own units, showing that horizontal learning does occur. Yet the same research raises repeated concerns about non-standard systems, information capture, and coordination. The important point is not that decentralized learning fails. It is that local learning does not automatically become organization-wide learning.

Existing scholarship supports this distinction. Kollars shows that networks affect whether soldier-led adaptations spread through military organizations.³ Berthelsen's research on Ukraine similarly shows that direct soldier-engineer collaboration can produce rapid innovation while still requiring institutions capable of sustaining and scaling successful solutions.⁴ Discovery is therefore only one part of adaptation.

The organizational problem is relatively simple. Decentralization helps the frontline identify problems and experiment quickly. Coordination becomes more important when the force needs to compare solutions, determine what works, maintain interoperability, change training, and increase production.

Ukraine has increasingly built institutions intended to perform some of these functions. Berthelsen traces the emergence of Brave1, the Unmanned Systems Force, and other structures connecting state institutions, military users, and producers.⁵ The field research also records changes in training, lessons-learned processes, data collection, and analysis. These developments suggest that Ukraine's adaptive system is itself adapting.

The challenge is not to replace decentralization with hierarchy. Doing so could reduce the speed that makes local adaptation valuable. The challenge is to create enough coordination around decentralized experimentation that successful solutions can move beyond the units that created them.

Temporal compression makes this problem more serious. A military may eventually identify and spread the correct solution, but eventually may not be fast enough. The enemy may already have developed the next countermeasure. Successful adaptations therefore have to spread while they are still useful.

The sequence is straightforward. The force detects that something has stopped working. It diagnoses why. Operators and engineers develop alternatives. A promising solution is tested. The lesson then has to spread, integrate with the wider force, and reach enough users to restore meaningful military effectiveness.

The enemy can respond during every stage. A force can therefore be extremely fast at identifying a problem and still be slow at restoring capability across the wider force.

This is the conversion problem: the gap between discovering an effective battlefield adaptation and turning that adaptation into wider military effectiveness before the enemy erodes its advantage.

09Regenerative Capacity and the Changing Basis of Military Advantage

The conversion problem gives regenerative capacity a more precise meaning. Regenerative capacity is the ability to restore effective military capability as the enemy adapts. At the organizational level, this also requires identifying battlefield failure, generating and selecting useful adaptations, spreading those adaptations, and restoring effectiveness at meaningful scale before the enemy counters them.

This is more demanding than innovation speed alone. A force that produces many adaptations but cannot determine which ones work may waste resources. A force that finds the correct solution but cannot spread it remains locally innovative. A force that scales solutions without maintaining interoperability may create new weaknesses. Speed matters, but speed must lead to restored effectiveness.

Ukraine illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of this process. Its military and defense ecosystem can generate solutions quickly. Engineers work close to users. Software can change rapidly. Brigades run laboratories. Commercial technologies can enter military use through pathways much shorter than traditional defense acquisition programs.

At the same time, the field research shows why these strengths do not automatically produce wider military advantage. The same system can also create non-standard equipment, uneven information sharing, duplication, and electronic fratricide. Regenerative capacity is therefore an organizational property, not simply a technological one.

A simple comparison shows why this matters. Imagine two forces that discover the same useful adaptation at the same time. The enemy will take three months to develop an effective response. The first force validates the adaptation quickly but spends most of those three months spreading it. The second moves the lesson through testing, training, software, procurement, and fielding much faster. Both found the same solution, but the second gains far more military value from it before the enemy responds.

The relevant military advantage is therefore not simply the adaptation itself. It is the ability to use that adaptation effectively while it still provides an advantage. This brings time, scale, and organization into the same explanation of military effectiveness.

The argument does not overturn existing theories of military power. Biddle shows that weapons and numerical strength do not translate automatically into battlefield outcomes because force employment matters.⁶ Military-effectiveness scholarship similarly emphasizes the ability of organizations to turn resources into fighting power. Regenerative warfare extends this logic into an environment where the effectiveness of those resources is repeatedly contested.

Industrial capacity remains essential. Ukraine does not show that mass has become irrelevant. Wars consume ammunition, drones, vehicles, spare parts, and people. A force that cannot replace losses will eventually lose combat power.

What changes is the relationship between production and effectiveness. Producing large quantities of a configuration that no longer works does not create the same military value as producing systems that remain relevant to current battlefield conditions. A defense industrial base may therefore need not only the ability to produce at scale, but also the ability to change what it is producing as the battlefield changes.

Regenerative capacity therefore complements industrial capacity. Mass still matters, but some forms of mass must also be adaptable. Software may need to be updated. Components may need to be replaced. Testing and production may need to operate more closely together. User feedback must be able to change what is produced.

The same logic applies to information superiority. Modern forces depend on sensors, communications, navigation, networks, and data to coordinate combat power. These systems create major advantages when they work, but they also create dependencies that the enemy can attack.

A force therefore needs more than the ability to create an information advantage. It may also need the ability to restore that advantage after communications are jammed, navigation is spoofed, or networks become vulnerable. Regenerative capacity does not replace information superiority. It helps preserve its military value.

This makes the movement from industrial warfare to information-age warfare useful only if it is understood cumulatively. Industrial warfare showed the importance of producing combat power at scale. Information-age warfare added the importance of sensing, networking, and coordinating that power. Ukraine reveals another requirement: when an adaptive enemy can repeatedly degrade the systems through which combat power is produced, the force must also be able to restore their effectiveness.

Regenerative warfare therefore does not replace older forms of military power. A military still needs production, information, quality, training, and effective force employment. Regenerative capacity matters because it helps determine how long those assets remain useful against an adaptive enemy.

The larger implication concerns military advantage itself. Military advantage is not simply something a force possesses. It exists in relation to the enemy and changes over time. A weapon creates advantage while it can produce useful relative effect. An information system creates advantage while it can provide information the enemy cannot sufficiently deny or exploit. An innovation creates advantage while it remains effective against the enemy's response.

The ability to keep restoring that useful effect is the core of regenerative capacity.

Part IVImplications

10Strategic and Organizational Implications

The first implication concerns readiness. Traditional readiness emphasizes inventories because wars consume material. That remains correct. Regenerative warfare does not eliminate the need to stockpile weapons, ammunition, and components.

It does, however, suggest that militaries should distinguish between durable platforms and rapidly changing configurations. A platform may remain useful for years while its communications system, software, navigation package, or payload changes repeatedly. Readiness may therefore depend partly on the ability to modify stored systems rather than simply accumulate finished ones.

The field notes raise this question directly: what should be stockpiled when technology bought today may not remain effective in the configuration required by a future battlefield? The answer is not to abandon stockpiles, but to build adaptability into both the stockpile and the production system that supports it.

The second implication concerns information. Battlefield data has little value if an organization cannot use it. A regenerative force needs rapid information flow between operators and engineers because frontline failure is an important source of technical knowledge. It also needs ways to compare experience across units so that useful patterns can spread beyond personal networks.

This requires both horizontal and vertical learning. Practitioners need to exchange solutions quickly, while higher-level organizations need enough information to compare units and determine what actually works. Neither is sufficient alone.

The third implication concerns standardization. Rapid adaptation is often presented as the opposite of standardization, but the more important question is what should be standardized. Freezing every technical configuration would make a force less adaptable. Having no standards would make interoperability difficult.

A stronger approach is to standardize the parts that allow systems to change. Data formats can remain common while software changes. Power and communications interfaces can allow components to be replaced. Testing procedures can remain consistent while the systems being tested evolve. The aim is adaptability without fragmentation.

The fourth implication concerns command. Local autonomy is especially valuable during discovery because frontline units usually encounter operational failure first. Higher-level coordination becomes more important when successful solutions need to be validated, integrated, and spread.

Debates over centralization and decentralization can therefore be too simple. A military does not need one model for every task. Frontline organizations need enough freedom to experiment, while the wider institution needs enough authority and information to recognize success and spread it.

The fifth implication concerns the relationship between the military and industry. The traditional distance between developer and user becomes harder to maintain when battlefield conditions change faster than formal acquisition systems. The field research repeatedly describes the battlefield as the “source of truth” for development and emphasizes the importance of engineers seeing how systems actually perform.

This does not mean that Western militaries should copy Ukrainian institutions directly. Ukraine is adapting under invasion and under political, legal, industrial, and mobilization conditions that may not exist elsewhere. The narrower lesson is that when battlefield conditions change faster than normal acquisition systems, the connection between operations and development becomes part of military capability.

The final implication is a warning against technological determinism. Regenerative capacity is important, but it does not determine strategic victory by itself. Ukraine can adapt rapidly at the tactical level while still facing problems of manpower, industrial depth, air defense, logistics, and territory. Drones do not eliminate combined arms. Autonomy does not remove politics. Rapid learning does not substitute for strategy.

The argument is therefore deliberately bounded. Regenerative capacity helps explain whether a force can preserve and restore military effectiveness under rapid adversarial adaptation. It is not a complete theory of victory.

These implications also affect how capabilities should be evaluated. If effectiveness increasingly depends on the ability to restore a capability after it has been degraded, regenerative capacity should become part of decisions about what to field and what to fund.

This is not an argument to restrict innovation. The structure that allows rapid local adaptation should remain. The problem is making successful adaptations spread as quickly and as widely as possible while they still provide an advantage. A local solution creates the most military value when it reaches other units facing the same problem before the enemy develops an effective countermeasure.

Once a function has been successfully restored, the organization should therefore make it a priority to spread that adaptation wherever the same function has been lost. This is time-sensitive because the use of a successful countermeasure gives the enemy information and begins the next cycle of adaptation.

11Implications for Investors and Operators

The argument of this paper also changes how military systems should be evaluated. If battlefield advantages can be temporary, performance at the moment of fielding is not enough. The more important question is whether the organization surrounding a capability can restore its effectiveness before enemy counter-adaptation removes its advantage.

For operators, this is a readiness problem. For investors, it is a question of whether technical advantage can be repeatedly recreated rather than simply possessed.

One way to assess this is to measure four variables:

Each variable can be scored from one to five using documented, reported, or assessed evidence. Where evidence is unavailable, the variable should remain unscored rather than estimated. The resulting scores only have meaning in relation to how long the relevant advantage is likely to last. An organization that adapts quickly by conventional standards may still be too slow if enemy counter-adaptation occurs faster.

This distinction also raises the question of durability. Speed of regeneration is not necessarily a durable moat. Individual forms of EW hardening, software modification, autonomy, modularity, and rapid iteration can spread across competitors and become expected features of military systems. The more consequential source of advantage is the ability to repeatedly solve the conversion problem: identify battlefield failure, determine what works, spread the adaptation, integrate it, and field it at meaningful scale before the enemy responds.

The commercial implication is therefore narrower than simply investing in companies that move quickly. The argument favors organizations whose products and processes allow battlefield learning to change fielded capability. This includes software-defined systems, modular architectures, flexible manufacturing, rapid testing, and direct pathways between users and developers. It is less favorable to fixed configurations, closed architectures, or systems whose value depends on one technical advantage remaining effective for long periods.

The institutional landscape described in this paper suggests that parts of this problem are already being addressed separately. Ukrainian frontline laboratories support local experimentation. Horizontal networks move successful adaptations between units. Brave1 connects military users, developers, and state institutions. The Unmanned Systems Force represents an effort to coordinate and scale unmanned capability. The problem identified by this paper is therefore not simply a shortage of innovation. It is the difficulty of turning distributed adaptation into wider military effectiveness before the enemy responds.

The policy and commercial implications should remain distinct.

For operators, regenerative capacity should become part of readiness assessment. Systems exposed to rapid enemy adaptation should be evaluated not only on whether they work under current conditions, but also on how quickly they can recover after navigation, connectivity, software, components, or tactics are degraded. Standardization should preserve interoperability without preventing the changes required to restore effectiveness.

For investors, diligence should focus on whether an organization can repeatedly turn battlefield learning into fielded change. The relevant questions are: How quickly does battlefield feedback reach the organization? How quickly can that information change the product? Can production and procurement change with it? Can adaptations spread without creating interoperability or coordination problems? And is there evidence that the change restored operational effectiveness rather than simply producing another technical iteration?

Three decision gates follow:

Before investment or fielding

assess all four variables and compare them with the expected duration of the advantage.

Before follow-on capital or procurement

require evidence that the organization has completed the full cycle from identified failure to restored operational effectiveness.

Before scale

determine whether the adaptation can spread without creating production, interoperability, or coordination costs that erase the advantage it produces.

The next step is to apply this framework to additional companies or programs using operating data rather than public claims alone. The sponsor should be the investor, acquisition organization, or operational command making the relevant allocation decision. This paper does not contain sufficient evidence to assign a defensible dollar cost or dated checkpoint to that work. Those should be established by the sponsor once the scope, systems, and access requirements are known rather than invented here.

The assessment should also remain falsifiable. The argument would weaken if faster adaptation did not produce faster restoration of operational effectiveness; if relevant advantages consistently lasted longer than existing acquisition and adaptation cycles; or if rapid change created interoperability, reliability, or coordination costs greater than the effectiveness it restored.

Regenerative capacity does not replace industrial capacity, information superiority, technical quality, or strategy. It helps determine whether those sources of military power can remain effective as the enemy adapts against them.

For operators, the question is no longer only whether a capability works, but how quickly its effectiveness can be restored when it stops working. For investors, the question is whether an organization possesses a temporary advantage or the capacity to repeatedly recreate one.

12Conclusion

The war in Ukraine is often described through its most visible technologies, especially drones. Yet drones are only the surface of a deeper contest. The more important question is whether military systems continue to work after the enemy learns how to attack the conditions that make them effective.

Electronic warfare makes this problem especially visible because it can make a weapon ineffective without physically destroying it. Navigation can be denied. Connectivity can be disrupted. Control can become unreliable. The system may remain intact while its ability to perform the mission declines.

Russian and Ukrainian forces respond by restoring the lost function. Navigation shifts toward protected, inertial, visual, and combined approaches. Connectivity moves across frequencies, protocols, relays, satellite links, mesh networks, and fiber. Control changes as some functions move from vulnerable external links onto the platform.

The technical solutions differ, but the military logic remains the same. A method works. The enemy degrades it. The force adapts. The function is restored. The enemy responds. The process begins again.

This is regenerative warfare. Its significance is not that militaries now adapt. They always have. Its significance is that repeated restoration can become central to military effectiveness when an adaptive enemy can repeatedly reduce the usefulness of the systems on which a force depends.

These cycles also create a temporal problem. Some advantages remain effective for years. Others encounter serious countermeasures within months. Temporal compression describes the shortening of the period in which a battlefield advantage remains useful as enemy counter-adaptation accelerates.

Temporal compression then creates an organizational problem. A successful local adaptation has limited military value if the wider force cannot use it before the enemy responds. The lesson must be captured, tested, shared, integrated, and fielded while it is still useful.

Ukraine reveals both sides of this process. Its decentralized system can generate rapid adaptation. Operators and engineers interact directly. Frontline laboratories modify equipment. Units experiment. Software changes quickly. Yet the same system can also produce fragmentation, non-standard equipment, uneven information sharing, and coordination problems.

The military challenge is therefore not simply to innovate faster. It is to restore effective capability and spread successful adaptations before the enemy counters them. That requires local experimentation, but it also requires the ability to turn successful local learning into wider military effect.

This is regenerative capacity: the ability to restore effective capability as the enemy adapts. At wider scale, that depends on whether the organization can identify failure, determine what works, spread and integrate successful responses, and restore effectiveness before the enemy responds.

Regenerative capacity does not replace older sources of military power. Industrial capacity remains essential. Information superiority remains essential. Technology, training, and force employment remain essential. But all of them exist in relation to an adaptive enemy. Weapons matter while they produce useful effects. Information systems matter while they provide reliable information. Innovations matter while they continue to create military advantage.

The organization surrounding the technology therefore becomes part of the capability itself. It determines whether battlefield failure becomes information, whether information becomes learning, whether learning becomes adaptation, and whether adaptation restores effectiveness before the enemy responds.

The central proposition of this paper is therefore straightforward. The war in Ukraine demonstrates the emergence of regenerative warfare: a condition in which military forces must repeatedly restore capabilities that adversary adaptation has made less effective. As these cycles accelerate, the useful life of battlefield advantage can contract. Under these conditions, military advantage increasingly depends on regenerative capacity: the ability to restore effective capability faster than the enemy can make it obsolete.

Military competition has always involved reducing the enemy's capacity to fight. Ukraine reveals the other side of the same contest. Advantage also depends on which force can restore its capacity to fight when the capabilities that worked yesterday no longer work today.

Notes

1. Emilie Berthelsen, Innovating at the Pace of Relevance: The Case of Ukrainian Unmanned Systems, Defence Studies, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1080/14702436.2026.2692416. ↑
2. Can Kasapoğlu, Ukraine's Drone War: The Rise of Machine-Speed Adaptive Hyperwar, Hudson Institute, 2 July 2026, https://www.hudson.org/technology/ukraines-drone-war-rise-machine-speed-adaptive-hyperwar-can-kasapoglu. ↑
3. Nina A. Kollars, War's Horizon: Soldier-Led Adaptation in Iraq and Vietnam, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 38, no. 4, 2015, pp. 529–553, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.971947. ↑
4. Emilie Berthelsen, Innovating at the Pace of Relevance: The Case of Ukrainian Unmanned Systems, Defence Studies, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1080/14702436.2026.2692416. ↑
5. Emilie Berthelsen, Innovating at the Pace of Relevance: The Case of Ukrainian Unmanned Systems, Defence Studies, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1080/14702436.2026.2692416. ↑
6. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, Princeton University Press, 2004. ↑