Source: Azeem Azhar, Exponential View
Ukraine has weaponized distributed drone operations to solve the coordination problem that defeats traditional militaries: how to move at the speed of individual engagements rather than institutional decision cycles. By decoupling targeting, firing, and damage assessment from centralized command, Ukrainian forces have compressed the observe-orient-decide-act loop from hours to minutes, forcing Russian defenses into a reactive posture they cannot sustain. This model—enabled by cheap autonomous platforms, mesh communications, and unit-level autonomy—inverts how industrial militaries organize themselves, with implications for how any large organization moves at scale under time pressure.