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Last May, NATO invited 10 Ukrainians to act as an opposing force during Hedgehog 2025, one of NATO’s largest exercises in the Baltics. The Ukrainians successfully simulated the destruction of 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 strikes in half a day, effectively neutralizing two NATO battalions before dinner. One observing commander summed up the broader implication in three words: “We are finished.” Ominously, the exercise occurred without American forces.
The Western debate on Ukraine is sometimes framed as an act of generosity, with NATO propping up a beleaguered partner. This perspective is wrong and dangerously blind to a strategic asset for the alliance hiding in plain sight. Ukraine’s expertise has already proven vital, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announcing that Ukrainian experts are deploying to the Middle East to assist in countering Iranian Shahed drones, offering the United States concrete solutions to an otherwise expensive problem. Four years ago, the West answered Ukraine’s call for military aid. Now, Ukraine is ready to answer back.
I am not making an argument for Ukraine to be allowed to join NATO, necessarily. Rather, I am imploring NATO member states — including the United States — to start treating Ukraine as the strategic priority that it has proven itself to be. NATO should take immediate steps towards incorporating two-way training programs to learn from the combat-experienced Ukrainians. Over the longer term, NATO should recalibrate discussions around Ukraine’s membership accession.
I spent nine months working in Ukraine with the United Nations and later in Washington on the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Ukraine Humanitarian Response. The gap between how Ukraine was discussed in Washington’s policy circles and what I encountered on the ground was both striking and frustrating. In Kyiv, I spoke with combat-hardened soldiers who had just returned from the Donbas. As a veteran of the Marine Corps and Triple Canopy, I expected common ground. Instead, I felt my “Global War on Terror” experience was obsolete, as these men had mastered a new kind of war completely foreign to me.
Visiting the United States on leave, I reached out to my friends still in the Marine Corps about drone integration. They were enthusiastic but it was clear that they were months, if not a year, behind the innovation cycle happening in real time on the front. Back in Kyiv and Odesa, I personally experienced air raids of drone and missile attacks. Huddled in my hallway, I could hear the air defense systems working to protect the city. Ukrainians aren’t theorizing about the evolution of warfare: They are living it.
The Ukrainian Edge: Innovation and Production
What Hedgehog 2025 exposed was not a glitch. Ukraine has spent four years building a warfighting machine more agile than NATO’s legacy ecosystem. Ukraine now produces 4 million drones annually. Tellingly, in February 2026, two Ukrainian manufacturers were selected for the “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” initiative to help the Pentagon catch up. The fundamental differences in innovation, technology, and policy behind this gap should spur a recalibration of NATO’s views on Ukraine.
The first key difference is Ukraine’s unit-level feedback loop. Ukraine has integrated drone production into units with soldiers using 3D printers, soldering irons, and even improvised explosives, allowing localized adaptation to operational needs. Ukraine now 3D prints fiber optic cable spools to mitigate Russian electronic warfare. As soldiers rotate off position, they provide feedback to engineers who immediately modify designs. This cycle cannot be replicated by NATO’s centralized procurement.
The second difference is Delta, Ukraine’s AI-enabled battlefield management platform. Built by a group of volunteers in 2016, Delta integrates satellite imagery, electronic warfare, and drone reconnaissance into real-time battlespace awareness. By 2024, it detected 12,000 targets daily. Nearly a decade after Delta won a NATO hackathon, America’s equivalent — Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control — struggles to make meaningful progress because of top-down data integration strategies. Delta’s bottom-up origins enabled continuous battlefield refinement, extending decision windows and enabling software updates for commanders’ evolving needs.
These differences reveal tensions between peacetime and wartime innovation structures. NATO’s procurement system prevents waste, increases interoperability, and maintains civilian oversight, which are reasonable in peacetime but cause friction when rapid adaptation is existential. Ukraine bypasses traditional acquisition through compressed decision cycles and flattened hierarchies. Soldiers became drone engineers because there was no time for defense contracts. Procurement timelines measured in years are irrelevant when innovation timelines are measured in weeks. NATO cannot adopt Ukrainian methods without confronting uncomfortable questions about standardization, risk tolerance, and urgency.
With the war in its fifth year, Ukraine is the world’s testing ground for AI-integrated drones. Ukrainian company Fourth Law produces $70 AI vision modules for first-person view drones, with preliminary results of one brigade increasing success rates from 20 percent to 80 percent, according to Fourth Law’s chief executive officer. The Ukrainian non-profit system OCHI has collected 2 million hours of frontline drone footage — 228 years of combat data — for retraining AI targeting systems. The “Test in Ukraine” initiative invites defense manufacturers to deploy autonomous systems in combat. Here lies a third difference: Ukrainian policymakers identified soldiers’ and engineers’ needs, creating policy initiatives conducive to bottom-up innovation.
Ukraine’s expertise is already in demand. In early March 2026, 11 countries, including the United States, requested Ukraine’s assistance in countering Iranian Shahed drones. Ukraine’s low-cost interceptor drones, like the Sting by Wild Hornets, cost as little as $1,000 and can tilt the attritional economics of the ongoing conflict in favor of the United States and its Gulf partners. Ukraine’s combat-tested and low-cost solutions challenge the billions expended on air defense interceptors in the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury. Four years ago, Ukraine received Western military aid. Today, the flow has reversed.
Ukraine’s innovation cycle moves so rapidly that Snake Island Institute publishes Defense Tech Monthly to track innovations. This approach has proven ruthlessly efficient. The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the U.K. Ministry of Defense estimate Russia has suffered approximately 1.2 million casualties since the full-scale invasion in 2022, which is more than any major power in any war since World War II. In exchange for these staggering losses, the study assesses that, on average, the Russian forces are gaining between 15 and 70 meters per day. These numbers represent institutional knowledge, forged in the crucible and paid for in blood, about fighting a modern peer adversary at scale. The difference between NATO and Ukraine’s approaches to innovation in manufacturing, digital systems, and policymaking, alongside Ukraine’s four years in continuous large-scale combat, is precisely the gap 10 Ukrainians exploited in Estonia.
Challenges and Progress in Institutional Reform
Ukraine’s military edge is not limited to innovation in hardware and software. It extends into the institutional capability to reform in wartime conditions. During my time with the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Ukraine, I contributed to border security programs for the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine to build the type of civil-military frameworks that Western militaries attempt to develop in peacetime.
The civil-military coordination deserves further exploration. I served as a U.N. inspector during the Black Sea Grain Initiative, mediating between Russians and Ukrainians aboard cargo vessels carrying wheat and foodstuffs. This initiative was a delicate diplomatic mission with serious stakes for global food security. The Ukrainian delegates held their own against the Russians. The Ukrainians were strategically sophisticated and firm but reasonable when the situation demanded it. Later, when the Russians collapsed the deal, jeopardizing food security in some of the most acute crises globally, the Ukrainians pivoted to the next logical step in ensuring the exportation of much-needed grain. They removed the Russian blockade by force, sinking ships with the use of drones like Sea Baby. Then they launched the “Grain From Ukraine” initiative in partnership with the World Food Programme. This interagency coordination and institutional logic emerged through years of pressure and reform.
Since 2014, Ukraine has made impressive military and civilian institutional reforms by introducing NATO approaches. Admittedly, they are still navigating the challenges of Soviet legacy but in the last four years of combat, they have proven that reform is possible and attainable. Bottom-up innovation cannot exist in a suffocating institution. Institutions should enable a space where soldiers can focus and innovate in real time. Since the Unmanned Systems Forces were established in the summer of 2024, drones have increased their share of effective destruction of enemy equipment and personnel from 4 percent to 33 percent, according to Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, and now account for 60 percent of all firepower used in the “kill zones.” Taken together, these changes mark a dramatic turn towards positive institutional reform, with Ukrainians acting as active participants in their own transformation.
Strategic Partnership is Strategic Security
Consider the strategic irony unfolding. For years, Ukraine lobbied NATO for membership while the alliance dodged the approach, citing concerns of escalation, readiness, and Russia’s red lines. In December 2025, Zelenskyy was prepared to completely drop NATO membership in exchange for bilateral security guarantees with the United States. Meanwhile, at the 2025 NATO summit, the United States signaled that it did not see Ukrainian security as essential to European security. By then, Ukraine had humbled two NATO battalions in Estonia, yet it was being politely told to sit down and stay quiet.
This sidelining of Ukraine is a diplomatic blunder and self-inflicted wound on European and American security. NATO cannot afford to distance itself from the one partner that has spent four years developing, testing, and refining modern warfighting capabilities. The Ukrainian experience is rewriting doctrine that NATO desperately needs to integrate and implement. The United States’ absence from Hedgehog 2025 was a symptom of the broader disengagement from NATO and the alliance’s most battle-tested partner at precisely the moment when Ukraine has the most to offer.
To be clear, the relationship would be mutually beneficial as NATO has obvious advantages in contrast with Ukraine’s shortcomings. Ukraine’s rule of law and anti-corruption benchmarks historically complicated Ukraine’s NATO candidacy, so institutional reform trajectory should be considered alongside warfighting capability. The greatest assets that NATO collectively offers members are nuclear deterrence, naval power projection, superior air assets, and exquisite intelligence. Taken all together, NATO is an impressive achievement in collective security. Ukraine would further add to NATO’s intimidating arsenal and capabilities, as illustrated by Ukraine’s deployment to the Middle East.
The policy implications are apparent and divide into near-term practical steps and longer-term strategic questions. In the near term, NATO training programs should operate in reverse. Ukrainian instructors should embed with NATO units to teach drone tactics and help NATO forces adopt modern doctrine. They can teach drone warfare, AI-enabled targeting, and unit-level drone production and innovation that current NATO training alone cannot replicate. Some NATO members have accepted assistance in training from Ukrainians during bilateral engagements, but it needs to become NATO-wide policy. The United States should also re-engage with NATO exercises rather than absenting itself, so that the United States can also confront the capability gaps that were exposed in Estonia last May and during Operation Epic Fury.
Over the longer term, the question of security guarantees requires a fundamental reframing. The question should shift from what NATO can offer Ukraine to center on what Ukraine brings to whichever security architecture becomes acceptable. The answer was made clear in Hedgehog 2025, with Ukraine offering a warfighting edge that the alliance cannot replicate on its own. This advantage was reinforced through Ukraine’s expertise in air defense becoming crucial to ongoing operations. Again, U.S. engagement is not optional. Strategic ambiguity about Ukraine’s security will only embolden Russia and undermine American security and NATO’s credibility. Whether through NATO membership, bilateral security guarantees, or another framework, it is strategically indefensible to treat Ukraine as peripheral rather than integral given Ukraine’s capabilities. This recalibrated approach will project strength and enable collective security in Europe.
The 10 Ukrainians who neutralized two NATO battalions in Estonia last May were the product of four years of continuous innovation, institutional reform, and combat against a peer adversary. This experience cannot be procured or simulated. NATO runs exercises while Ukraine runs combat missions. This is not an argument for immediate wartime accession, which would be premature and impractical given the obligations under NATO’s Article 5. Instead, NATO should fundamentally reorient how it thinks about Ukraine. The debate has been saturated with NATO’s levels of charity toward Ukraine. Hedgehog 2025 and Ukraine’s assistance to the United States and its partners in the Middle East forces NATO to ask what it would mean for its own security were it to leave Ukraine as a peripheral nation instead of a battle-hardened partner.
Ukraine is not a burden or charity case. Ukraine is the most combat-experienced, doctrinally up-to-date, and innovative partner in the Western world. If NATO recognizes this reality soon, it will be better prepared for the next major war. Talk to the drone operators shivering out in the Donbas, and it is clear that NATO cannot afford to leave Ukraine out in the cold.
Bryan Daugherty is a former enlisted U.S. marine with four deployments across the Middle East, Europe, East Asia, and the Caribbean. He is currently an International Strategy Forum fellow at the Special Competitive Studies Project. He has previously served with the U.S. Agency for International Development on the Ukraine Humanitarian Response in 2024–2025 and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2023 and 2024. He holds an M.Sc. with distinction from the London School of Economics.
Image: Sergio Hvostini via Wikimedia Commons
