Speakers
Description
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 inaugurated a high-intensity prolonged conventional war that has since become stalemated. Recent Russian and Ukrainian offensives have failed to achieve meaningful territorial advances. The fate of the war increasingly hinges on each sides’ ability to adapt and innovate—particularly for Ukraine where the early loss of territory and dependence on western aid create vulnerabilities for strategic loss in a context of military draw. This project is collecting extensive new data on how Ukrainian military adaptation collected from research trips to Ukraine, compilation of open sources, and interviews with Ukrainian experts and decision-makers. Early analysis suggests that Ukraine’s approach to adaptation largely depends on the decentralized efforts of individual military units collaborating with a dense network of civil society organizations. For example, Ukraine’s success innovating drones that inflict disproportionate damage on Russian forces is a case in point. Drones collective and amateur workshops have led the way modifying commercial drones for military operations. Civil society organizations then spearheaded the training of 35,000 Ukrainian drone pilots. Close informal relations between individual military units and these outside actors have fostered rapid feedback loops between soldiers at the front and technicians in the rear. However, there are drawbacks to Ukraine’s decentralized approach including that policymakers lack adequate mechanisms for identifying and funneling resources to the most successful developments. Limited resources are also dispersed across multiple organizations that duplicate one another’s efforts.
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | Political Science |
|---|---|
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | No, I am submitting a Closed Panel abstract |
| Are you a PhD student or early-career researcher? | No |
