The New Revolution in Military Affairs | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
A Ukrainian drone operator lands his drone after a surveillance flight near Bakhmut in the Donetsk Region of Ukraine. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
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The New Revolution in Military Affairs<br>How Ukraine is driving doctrinal change in modern warfare.
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By Andriy Zagorodnyuk<br>Published on Apr 20, 2026
Program<br>Russia and Eurasia<br>The Russia and Eurasia Program continues Carnegie’s long tradition of independent research on major political, societal, and security trends in and U.S. policy toward a region that has been upended by Russia’s war against Ukraine. Leaders regularly turn to our work for clear-eyed, relevant analyses on the region to inform their policy decisions.
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Russia’s war against Ukraine has entered a new phase, one defined less by territorial gains than by intense technological competition. Both sides are now engaged in a sustained effort to gain advantage through rapid innovation and adaptation, introducing new types of unmanned systems, countermeasures, and operating methods at unprecedented speed. Ukraine is championing a distributed, bottom-up innovation model with hundreds of firms and volunteer groups, close integration between frontline units and manufacturers, and research-and-development activity embedded directly in combat formations. Russia, by contrast, pursues a centralized approach, with the state playing a dominant role in steering, producing, and scaling new weapon systems and capabilities. Ukraine is ahead in some areas and Russia in others, but both have moved far beyond prevailing Western practices, transforming the battlefield into a live environment of continuous military-technical experimentation.<br>One illustration of this is the effort by both sides to extend first-person-view (FPV) control and remote operation to ever-greater distances. In February 2026, Ukraine successfully restricted Russia’s use of Starlink commercial satellite communications on its long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which highlighted the alarming reality that drones with real-time FPV control were operating at ranges once associated only with strategic weapons. This development challenges the common claim that long-range drones are merely “cheap cruise missiles.” Cruise missiles do not provide persistent situational awareness and FPV-enabled re-tasking. What is emerging is an entirely new category of unmanned weapons that combine reach, adaptability, and low cost with direct human control.<br>The popular Ukrainian motto, “Let the robots fight” (instead of people) reflects the possibility of using existing enabling technologies—simple or sophisticated, low-cost or more expensive—to provide an effective remote-controlled or autonomous long-range reach with a high degree of precision. Numerous new weapons systems that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago now dominate the operational environment of Russia’s war in Ukraine.<br>But the changes extend well beyond the introduction of new weapons. In Ukraine’s case, these technological innovations are reshaping operating concepts, challenging established doctrines, altering force structure, and redefining the relationship between industry and the battlefield.<br>Some write off these developments in unmanned warfare as the result of Ukraine’s lack of more advanced weapons. For example, the dismissive comments by Armin Papperger, the CEO of the German defense giant Rheinmetall, in March 2026 about the country’s drone innovations reflect a sentiment shared across some Western militaries and defense industries, which prize costly high-end programs. However, the new technologies that are being pioneered by Ukraine will profoundly shape the battlefield in clashes involving more sophisticated forces, as already evidenced by the challenges posed recently by Iran’s drones for U.S. and Gulf-state militaries.<br>The question is how deeply these developments will transform warfare. This paper explores several emerging trends from the battlefield in Ukraine and argues that, taken together, they meet the criteria for what military strategists refer to as a revolution in military affairs (RMA): a structural shift in warfare in which new technologies drive the development of novel operational concepts and doctrines, fundamentally altering how military power is generated and employed, and forcing enduring changes in military organizations. These trends include the emergence of affordable precise mass,1 the fragmentation of the air domain, the growing difficulty of maneuver, the centrality of networked warfare, and the elevation of rapid adaptation as a core military capability. This transformation is still in its early stages, but countries that fail to recognize and adapt to it risk preparing for a form of war that has lost its decisiveness.<br>A New Revolution in Military Affairs?<br>Analysts of the Russo-Ukrainian war often use the phrase “drone...