Nir Hassid[1]
The Russia–Ukraine war has shown that military advantage in an age of disruptive innovation is determined not only by the quality of weapons, but also by a military's ability to adopt new systems and absorb them in time. Despite its military inferiority, Ukraine expanded its unmanned-systems capabilities within a few years and established mass production lines for systems such as fiber-optic guided FPV drones, counter-drone interceptors, the AN-196 Liutyi long-range strike drone, and electronic warfare systems. The expansion of their use was accompanied by a change in the procurement mechanism. Brave1, established in 2023 and expanded in 2025 into an online marketplace, allows units to purchase expendable systems using points awarded to them on the basis of verified performance. In practice, this mechanism links activity on the battlefield to the assessment of effectiveness and to the allocation of resources.
The literature on disruptive innovation has so far pointed to the potential of cheap and accessible technologies to alter the balance of power against established organizations, and to the difficulty military systems face in adapting to the pace of change these technologies enable. The success of Brave1 points to a further dimension, one that stems not only from the technologies it promoted but also from the change in the decision-making and procurement mechanism. This raises the possibility of extending the discussion to institutional disruptive innovation, in which the change that unsettles the accepted pattern of action lies not only in the technology but in the way the state organizes its selection, procurement and adoption. Brave1 is thus the only known test case in which the institutional components discussed below existed together, on a scale that permits systematic observation and with documentation resting on both government reporting and academic research. Operation Lion's Roar in February 2026 showed that the discussion carries implications beyond the Ukrainian arena, bearing on questions such as how the role of air power in combat is understood and the potential for disruption on the modern battlefield.
The Problem
The protraction of the war in Ukraine produced a high rate of attrition of expendable technological systems at the level of the individual soldier, and forced Ukraine to improvise solutions. A quadcopter drone, for instance, performs about three sorties on average and a one-way attack drone a single sortie; roughly 90% of systems are expended each year, and only some 20%–40% of them reach their target, owing to countermeasures (Berthelsen). What ages rapidly is not the airframe but its control link (the connection to the operator) and the response to countermeasures. Software was at times updated daily and hardware went through new versions every few months, and an entire family of fiber-optic guided drones grew within about a year to roughly a third of the strike drone fleet.
In an attempt to provide a more effective response, the government launched the “Army of Drones” program in 2022, which consolidated donations, procurement, supply and operator training. Parliament, for its part, exempted drones and their components from customs duty and from value added tax in 2023. In parallel, an industry grew from below, originating in the civilian drone-hobbyist community, and most of the new manufacturers were small volunteer teams driven by security rather than commercial motives. This is disruptive innovation in its classic definition, in which cheap civilian technology bypasses the established defense industry. The number of domestic manufacturers rose from seven on the eve of the war to about 500, and annual production capacity reached some 4.5 million systems, supplying almost all demand.
Yet increasing supply did not solve the problem of the wireless link between the drone and its operator. The time until Russia blocks that link with electronic interference is shortening, and changes at a pace of weeks. While production capacity grew, it was still impossible to ensure that the right system reached the right unit in time. A study based on 36 interviews describes a system that was fast at the edges and slow at the center. At the edges, civilian engineers and frontline operators worked side by side in short improvement loops that far outpaced annual procurement cycles. At the center, by contrast, emergency regulations required standards for unmanned systems to be set within a month, and every technical upgrade — a change to an antenna or to an anti-jamming component, for example — obliged the manufacturer to repeat the codification procedure of re-registering the system in the state procurement catalog. As a result, procurement agency approvals were delayed and dual-use components were held up at customs. In addition, access was not uniform across units, and the earliest collaborations rested on personal and business connections that widened the capability gaps between them irrespective of their operational achievements.
Brave1 Mechanism
Brave1 was established in April 2023 in cooperation with the General Staff, the Ministry of Digital Transformation, the Ministry of Defence and other government bodies, and was expanded in April 2025 into an online marketplace (Ministry of Digital Transformation). Under its operating principle, a unit that carries out a strike uploads video documentation. Once the documentation is verified in the DELTA command-and-control system, the unit is credited with points according to a public price list that weighs the importance of the target and the complexity of the strike, and finally converts them into equipment of its choosing. In the marketplace's first year of operation, more than 400 combat units ordered through it some 500,000 systems, among them drones, robotic vehicles and electronic warfare systems, at an estimated value of about one billion dollars, and average delivery time was shortened to about eight days (Ukraine MoD). The mechanism serves for the procurement of tactical and expendable systems only, while strategic systems are procured through state channels and international assistance.
Before turning to the analysis, two limitations should be noted. This observation does not prove that the mechanism is what produced the result in the field, since no centralized alternative operated alongside it for comparison, and some of the data rest on Ukrainian reporting. There is also a competing explanation, according to which the mechanism's success rested on a developed civilian technology sector that predated the war and on exceptional external funding, and not on institutional design alone.
The novelty therefore lies not only in the speed of procurement but in the identity of the actor that defines the requirement. In the conventional mechanism, a central program office, in the ministry of defense or the general staff, formulates a specification on the basis of a needs assessment, and at the end of the process the unit receives a standard equipment package matching the type of force to which it belongs, so that the unit is the recipient of an allocation. In Ukraine the order was reversed: the unit becomes a customer when it defines the requirement through the act of purchase, and the supplier learns from sales which systems prove themselves in the field.
From Technological to Institutional Innovation
According to the disruptive innovation thesis, a cheaper and simpler product, initially inferior in performance, enters at the margins of the market and improves gradually until it displaces incumbent suppliers, who are focused on their existing customers and are late to respond. Eviatar Matania and Alon Berkman extended this thesis to the security arena in their article “Digital Weapons: How Global Digital Platforms May Potentially Disrupt the Modern Battlefield”. They show how cheap and accessible civilian platforms are adapted for use as digital weapons and generate disruption against regular militaries, and how the difficulty a large organization has in adapting quickly grants an advantage to a small and agile actor.
Brave1 does not contradict this thesis but extends it. Michael Horowitz has shown that the adoption of a military innovation depends not only on the availability of the technology but on the organizational capacity to absorb it, and that wealthy militaries in particular struggle with this. Traditionally, adoption capacity is viewed as a given attribute of the organization, explaining who adopts and who does not. The Ukrainian case points to another possibility, according to which the state can design its own adoption capacity, and do so in the middle of a war, so that capacity turns from a precondition into an object of innovation. It follows that while technological innovation changes the tools available to the military, institutional innovation changes the way the military assimilates them into its force structure.
An online marketplace, however advanced, shortens the distance between the unit and the supplier but does not grant the unit decision-making authority or control over the allocation of resources. Further evidence of the institutional character of the change is that the Brave1 mechanism also became a measurement mechanism: the number of strikes verified by video in 2025 is identical to the figure reported as the output of the incentive program, and hence a mechanism designed to allocate equipment also served as the state's source of knowledge about what was happening at the front. The literature on military innovation tends to distinguish between an adaptive front and a slow bureaucratic rear, but research on open innovation shows that the real gap lies between closed institutions and open civilian networks, and the Ukrainian case illustrates precisely this: the dividing line is not between front and rear but between informal networks — whether on the battlefield or in the civilian sector — and the formal institutional center. Decentralized innovation is not sufficient in itself, and for it to spread an institutional environment is required that identifies the innovations, verifies them and allocates resources to them. The Brave1 mechanism is such an environment, and it succeeded in turning local learning into a system-wide capability.
Why Russia and the United States Did Not Get There
Comparison with other cases sharpens the argument. In Russia, the decentralized side of military procurement in the first two years of the war rested on an informal network of fundraising foundations, private manufacturers and improvised workshops. Between April and December 2024 alone it delivered to the military more than 65 developments, among them 31 types of drones, 20 electronic warfare systems and eight ground robotic vehicles; but without uniform solutions, standardization and quality control it was impossible to evaluate them or to produce them on a wider scale (War on the Rocks). In order to restrain the decentralization and return it to the supervision of the Ministry of Defence, the “Rubicon” center was established in August 2024 (Lapaiev), with the aim of turning the use of drones and autonomous systems into an institutionalized, system-wide combat arm. In the United States, by contrast, initiatives such as AFWERX and the Defense Innovation Unit work to lower entry barriers for small suppliers. Yet at times the pace at which grants are awarded exceeds the system's capacity to absorb the innovations, and entrepreneurs are left without a military customer to adopt them, which derails the process of commercialization (CNAS) — as is to be expected of a state whose constraint is organizational rather than budgetary. Opening the door to the entrepreneur is not the same as placing purchasing power in the hands of the unit that will use the product. In Russia and in the United States one of the three components that existed together in Ukraine is missing: decision-making authority at the unit level, a central layer of verification and standardization, and a direct link between verified performance and procurement resources.
The Price of Institutional Innovation
At the same time, more comprehensive investigation is required to validate the claim, in order to rule out a case in which the three components are present and the mechanism fails, or a case in which one of them is absent and the mechanism succeeds. On the evidence of Brave1 at least, the challenge of transferring authority appears no less significant than the establishment of an online procurement platform itself, since it is what places the budget and the layer of verification and standardization behind that platform (Modern War Institute). Even so, institutional innovation, like technological innovation, comes with a price. First, a unit rewarded on the basis of a metric may divert its efforts towards the missions that are measured and neglect those that cannot be measured (Holmström & Milgrom), a phenomenon documented also in target regimes in the public service (Bevan & Hood), and Ukrainian commanders have indeed warned against the gamification of combat (Shuster, TIME). Second, competition over resources may damage unit cohesion, which is an operational resource in its own right (Shils & Janowitz). In addition, the concentration of procurement and information in a single platform may create a new kind of centralization. It is Brave1 that determines which products enter the catalog, are standardized and are priced in points, and therefore a manufacturer that does not appear in it is inaccessible to units even if its product is effective. Thus the mechanism intended to remove barriers becomes the single door through which everyone passes, and Ukrainian commanders have also pointed to the concern over the concentration of sensitive operational data in the hands of a single actor (Shuster, TIME).
In conclusion, the points price list is a means by which the state directs what units actually do. The value of hard targets was raised, the value of tanks was lowered as they became easier to hit, and the value of a prisoner was raised in order to assist in prisoner exchanges (Business Insider). What emerges is a form of command by incentive rather than by order, which operates alongside the traditional chain of command and outside it, and raises questions of accountability, of transparency and of the boundary between operational autonomy and central control. Moreover, the more procurement moves to the units, the more the center loses its picture of what is happening at the front, and Ukraine was therefore required to compensate for this with digital monitoring tools (Bondar). The lesson is not confined to unmanned systems. In the air domain too, as the pace of technological change shortens, the test is not the operational concept but the ability to sustain it over time in terms of supply, maintenance and training (Burczyńska). Shortening innovation cycles requires institutional mechanisms of procurement, authority and learning that will bring the innovations to the right unit in time. Therefore, if disruptive innovation is identified mainly with technology that challenges the institution, the case of Brave1 points to a complementary possibility: that the institution itself can be the disruptor.
[1] Hassid, N. (2026, August). Brave1 and the institutional disruption of defense procurement (Aerial Insights No. 6/2026). Elrom Center for the Study of Air and Space Policy and Strategy, Tel Aviv University.