Is The West Finally Learning To Fight The New Modern War?

Russia-Ukraine

If there's anyone on Earth who has mastered the art of learning to defend itself only after being punched in the face several times, it's Russia. But now the West is finally starting to take notes, and only after a few bloody noses of its own.

You all know how much I've been ranting that the West is too slow and too dogmatic to adapt to the new reality of war. A reality in which entire columns of the most advanced armour on the planet can be wiped out in minutes by $500 drones.

It seems to have taken the Iran War for everyone in Brussels and Washington to wake up to the threat they are facing. The U.S. had clearly failed to study Ukraine, or was simply too confident in its own edge to think the lessons worth adopting. But when Shaheds started landing on key military installations across the Middle East, eyebrows were raised, and I can well imagine some very serious finger pointing followed. That is the irony of it. Sometimes you need a slap in the face to wake up.

For the U.S., the most notable shift is an agreement signed with Ukraine to import interceptors and other drone technology. The deal began as a draft memorandum, first reported in May 2026, negotiated between the State Department and Ukraine's Ambassador to Washington, Olha Stefanishyna. It would let Ukraine export military technology to the U.S. and build drones through joint ventures with American firms, the first time Kyiv has sold weapons abroad since banning exports in 2022 to feed its own front. Washington has already bought an initial 1,000 P1-SUN interceptors for Middle East air defence. The logic is pretty simple: Ukrainian interceptors cost a few thousand dollars, while a single Patriot round runs around $4 million. (You could also note the production gap here if you want the punchline harder: one Ukrainian firm alone plans 3 million-plus FPVs in 2026, against roughly 300,000 built across the entire U.S. in 2025.)

I do believe that, out of necessity, the strategists and planners in the Department of War are starting to shift trajectory toward understanding how modern wars are actually fought. The larger concern is that the U.S. defence industry, like most but especially the American one, is mired in a desire for profit extraction as much as quality. That instinct can defeat the entire purpose of building a low-cost defence force.

I can give the U.S. some slack given its relative distance from any front, though only slightly. The Europeans, on the other hand, deserve as much berating as I can muster. Not only have most European states been the most earnest backers of Ukraine, they sit on the border of the deadliest conflict since WW2 and still have their heads buried in the sand.

The most famous example is the one you already know I'm about to raise. During the joint "Hedgehog 2025" exercises in Estonia, a single Ukrainian team of around ten operators, acting as the opposing force, ran rings around a NATO formation of several thousand. In roughly half a day they "destroyed" 17 armoured vehicles and logged some 30 strikes on other targets, enough to take two NATO battalions out of the fight. The kicker: NATO units never even located the drone operators, while their own exposed columns sat in the open and were picked apart. (Worth flagging that U.S. forces were absent from Hedgehog entirely, which says plenty on its own.)

So what did we actually have here? Bureaucracy getting in the way? An old guard that refuses to accept its ways are outdated? Incompetence, or all of the above at once? Whatever it was, it landed. It sent shockwaves through the military world over just how unready NATO is, even as it talks constantly about a possible war with Russia.

And then I saw the tweet: drone netting installed over a road during a recent military exercise as an armoured column rolled through it. Now, it isn't perfect, and a net does nothing to change my belief that there is a deep level of incompetence at play. But from an optimistic angle, it at least shows that some progress is finally starting to happen.