Western militaries are undermining Ukraine’s defence, experts say

A combination of rigid Western military attitudes and regulatory paralysis in Kyiv is leading to fewer weapons at the front.

A Ukrainian unit prepares to use new unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, on May 22, 2026 [Thomas Peter/Reuters]

Mundane regulatory problems in Kyiv and unimaginative institutional thinking in Europe’s militaries are holding up joint weapons production. And that is undermining Ukraine’s battlefield performance and leaving Europe’s armed forces unprepared for modern warfare.

Those are the conclusions of a new report from the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS) at King’s College London, and experts who spoke to Al Jazeera.

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For two years, Kyiv has sought to scale up its weapons production by inviting Western partners to fund new production facilities in exchange for battlefield testing. Kyiv receives weapons, Western partners receive know-how.

That formula has led to at least 180 business-to-business partnerships between Ukrainian and foreign partners, but 22 percent of them are stalled, according to the report, Beyond Aid: Making Ukraine Defence Cooperation Work.

One of those stalled ventures is an artillery shell factory that German defence giant Rheinmetall announced a year ago, which should now be starting production. Yet ground has not been broken on the project, because Ukrainian authorities have delayed permits and the government then moved the factory’s site.

There are other legal and bureaucratic problems.

“The process of registering intellectual property is lengthy,” Chris Pool, a visiting fellow at the CSNS, told Al Jazeera. “Iteration cycles move so quickly, often what’s registered and protected is obsolete.”

Former CIA Director General David Petraeus recently discussed how Ukrainian drone manufacturers “can make software changes once a week as required by what the Russians are doing to counter their systems. They can make hardware changes every three or four weeks.”

That is a dizzying speed of innovation by the West’s peacetime standards.

“What happens If the product ends up with a Ukrainian brigade and that brigade then modifies it and adapts it to new developments? Who then owns the intellectual property in the improved product? Does the Ukrainian state have a stake at that point?” said Pool.

Export rights are another problem.

“While focusing exclusively on the Ukrainian market may be viable at the initial stage, the absence of a clear export mechanism may later constrain companies’ ability to … integrate Ukrainian-based facilities into wider international supply chains,” said the report.

‘Not relevant to us’

The problems sometimes lie in Europe’s rigid approach to land warfare, said Pool, who has spoken to Ukrainian teams looking for Western partners.

In 2022, both Russia and Ukraine were fighting exclusively with classic battlefield artillery and heavy armour. Ukraine defeated Russia’s initial attacks with effective use of defensive weapons.

But when Ukraine went on the counteroffensive in 2023, it was unable to compete with Russian scale and production capacity, and quickly adapted.

It designed cheap, long-range drones and missiles to stanch the flow of Russian weapons and fuel to the front, and to destroy Russian refining capacity. It also began to design and build its own first-person view (FPV) drones as a form of artillery.

Ukraine reportedly invested $1bn in drone warfare in 2023, 10 times what it spent in 2022. A New York Times video analysis found that it struck as many Russian armoured vehicles in three months this year as in all of 2022.

In 2024, Ukraine produced a million FPV drones. In 2025, the production was more than 3 million. This year, Ukraine will produce an estimated 8 million – 16 for every 10 that Russia fields – achieving localised air superiority.

The new weapons came with new tactics and new command structures.

“The most important thing is decentralised command. Ukraine has implemented this more than anyone else,” said Konstantinos Grivas, who teaches advanced weapons systems at the Hellenic Military Academy.

“Units don’t wait for commands from upstairs. They harvest their own information and make their own decisions … You need very capable junior commanders,” he told Al Jazeera.

That dispersed command runs counter to classic military hierarchies and tactics.

“In the UK, there’s a certain amount of arrogance that the British army wouldn’t fight like this, and this is all very interesting, but ultimately, not relevant to us,” said Pool. The Ukrainian teams he spoke to were told, “’Couldn’t you just partner with [defence companies British Aerospace] or Babcock and then we can deal with the faces with whom we’re used to dealing,’” he said.

Ukraine has demonstrated the challenges of this approach.

In wargames dubbed Combined Resolve in August, Ukrainian drone operators destroyed a US tank brigade by simulating their tactic of dropping armour-piercing artillery directly onto tanks. They did the same to a British brigade in February.

“Faced with teams who are presenting a new technology or navigation that doesn’t rely on GPS, for example, there isn’t that curiosity to find out what’s going on and how this could be adapted to the British Army,” said Pool.

Western militaries have “not even started to shift all of the land forces units into drone infantry,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former senior adviser to Ukraine’s Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs, now a land warfare expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based think tank.

“If you actually don’t use drones as the main weapon of your infantry, they are obsolete,” he told Al Jazeera. “These people, you recruited and trained to fight with assault rifles, they will never see the enemy. They will be all killed with drones.”

Perhaps the biggest problem of all is money.

The US stopped funding Ukraine last year, and far-right leaders in France and Germany want to follow suit. The European Union is providing the bulk of Ukraine’s military and financial aid for now, but Kyiv overspent in the first half of this year to finance two counteroffensives that took back at least 870sq km of land Russia had occupied, and is impatient for more funds.

Those funds, too, are tied up in European regulations, and Ukrainians feel that with current political trends, receiving them over the long term is an increasingly precarious proposition.

“I don’t see any real chance for any positive transformations in the West,” said Danylyuk.

“Instead of actually using this miracle, which was given by God to the West, and using this Ukrainian heroism and this readiness to sacrifice themselves and the nation, it was just wasted.”

西方僵化的军事态度和基辅的监管瘫痪导致前线武器减少。

2026年5月22日，乌克兰哈尔科夫地区，一支乌克兰部队准备使用新型无人地面车辆（UGV）。[Thomas Peter/路透社]

基辅一些琐碎的监管问题以及欧洲军队缺乏创新思维的体制弊端，阻碍了联合武器的生产。这不仅削弱了乌克兰的战场作战能力，也使欧洲军队在现代战争中准备不足。

这是伦敦国王学院国家战略与安全中心 (CSNS) 的一份新报告以及接受半岛电视台采访的专家们得出的结论。

列表 1/4：普京为何向俄罗斯军队增派 15000 名士兵？

俄罗斯对基辅地区发动袭击，造成四人死亡，袭击目标是电网，此为四起袭击事件中的第二起。

俄罗斯无人机袭击乌克兰基辅一所学校（共4条记录，此为第3条），莫斯科加大空袭力度

列表 4/4：俄罗斯警告北约，如果加里宁格勒被切断联系，可能采取核反击措施

两年来，基辅一直试图通过邀请西方伙伴出资新建生产设施，以换取战场测试，来扩大其武器生产规模。基辅获得武器，西方伙伴获得技术诀窍。

该模式促成了乌克兰与外国伙伴之间至少 180 项企业对企业合作关系，但根据《超越援助：让乌克兰国防合作发挥作用》报告，其中 22% 的合作关系陷入停滞。

这些停滞不前的项目之一是德国国防巨头莱茵金属公司一年前宣布兴建的一座炮弹工厂，该工厂本应已经投产。然而，由于乌克兰当局拖延发放许可证，且政府随后更改了工厂选址，该项目至今仍未动工。

还存在其他法律和行政方面的问题。

“知识产权注册过程很漫长，”中国科学技术研究中心（CSNS）访问学者克里斯·普尔告诉半岛电视台，“技术迭代周期太快，很多时候注册和受保护的内容已经过时了。”

美国中央情报局前局长戴维·彼得雷乌斯最近谈到，乌克兰无人机制造商“可以根据俄罗斯为应对其系统而采取的措施，每周进行一次软件更改。他们也可以每三到四周进行一次硬件更改。”

以西方和平时期的标准来看，这种创新速度令人眼花缭乱。

“如果该产品最终落入乌克兰军队手中，而该军队又对其进行改造并使其适应新的发展，会发生什么？那么改进后的产品的知识产权归谁所有？乌克兰国家届时是否拥有权益？”普尔问道。

出口权是另一个问题。

报告称：“虽然在初期阶段只专注于乌克兰市场可能是可行的，但缺乏明确的出口机制可能会在后期限制企业将乌克兰的工厂整合到更广泛的国际供应链中的能力。”

“与我们无关”

Pool表示，问题有时在于欧洲对陆地战争采取的僵化态度。他曾与一些寻求西方合作伙伴的乌克兰军队交谈过。

2022年，俄罗斯和乌克兰都只使用传统的战场火炮和重型装甲进行作战。乌克兰凭借有效运用防御性武器击退了俄罗斯的初期进攻。

但当乌克兰在 2023 年发起反攻时，它无法与俄罗斯的规模和生产能力竞争，并迅速进行了调整。

它设计了廉价的远程无人机和导弹，旨在切断俄罗斯武器和燃料向前线的输送，并摧毁俄罗斯的炼油能力。它还开始设计和制造自己的第一人称视角（FPV）无人机，作为一种火炮。

据报道，乌克兰在2023年投入10亿美元用于无人机作战，是2022年的10倍。《纽约时报》的一项视频分析发现，乌克兰今年三个月内击落的俄罗斯装甲车辆数量就相当于2022年全年的数量。

2024年，乌克兰生产了100万架FPV无人机。2025年，产量超过300万架。今年，乌克兰预计将生产800万架——相当于俄罗斯每10架无人机中就有16架——从而实现局部空中优势。

新式武器带来了新的战术和新的指挥结构。

“最重要的是分散指挥。乌克兰在这方面的实施程度超过了其他任何国家，”希腊军事学院教授先进武器系统的康斯坦丁诺斯·格里瓦斯说道。

“各部队不会等待上级的命令。他们会自行收集信息，自行做出决定……你需要非常有能力的基层指挥官，”他告诉半岛电视台。

这种分散指挥方式与传统的军事等级制度和战术背道而驰。

“在英国，有些人傲慢地认为英国军队不会这样作战，这一切固然很有意思，但最终与我们无关，”普尔说道。他表示，他接触过的乌克兰团队被告知：“你们为什么不直接与英国宇航公司或巴布科克公司合作，这样我们就可以和我们熟悉的那些人打交道了？”

乌克兰的例子表明了这种做法的挑战。

在8月份代号为“联合决心”的军事演习中，乌克兰无人机操作员模拟了美军直接向坦克投放穿甲炮的战术，摧毁了一个美军坦克旅。他们曾在2月份对一个英军旅使用过同样的战术。

“面对那些展示不依赖 GPS 的新技术或导航技术的团队，例如，人们并没有那种好奇心去了解发生了什么以及如何将其应用于英国陆军，”Pool 说。

乌克兰国防部和外交部前高级顾问、现任伦敦智库皇家联合军种研究所 (RUSI) 陆战专家奥列克桑德·丹尼柳克表示，西方军队“甚至还没有开始将所有陆军部队转变为无人机步兵”。

“如果你真的不使用无人机作为步兵的主要武器，那么他们就过时了，”他告诉半岛电视台。“你招募和训练这些人使用突击步枪作战，他们根本看不到敌人。他们都会被无人机消灭。”

或许最大的问题就是钱。

美国去年停止了对乌克兰的援助，法国和德国的极右翼领导人也希望效仿。目前，欧盟承担着乌克兰大部分的军事和财政援助，但基辅今年上半年为了发动两次反攻，夺回了至少870平方公里被俄罗斯占领的土地，支出严重超支，急需更多资金。

这些资金也受到欧洲法规的约束，乌克兰人认为，按照目前的政治趋势，长期获得这些资金变得越来越不稳定。

“我认为西方没有任何真正积极变革的机会，”丹尼柳克说。

“西方本应充分利用上帝赐予的这个奇迹，利用乌克兰人的英雄主义和牺牲自我、为国家奉献的精神，却白白浪费了这一切。”