Ukraine's former top commander has a warning for anyone betting that new gadgets will win the war, he wrote in a column for Ukrainska Pravda. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the country's Commander-in-Chief until 2024 and now its ambassador to the UK, argues 2026 is a war of technologies and, no less, of the strategies and doctrines that must keep pace with them. Bolting modern tech onto an old Soviet playbook, he says, drove mobilization into a dead end.

A year ago, Zaluzhnyi warned that Ukraine would need thousands of counter-drone systems and mass drone production to cope with the growing role of UAVs in war. A year later, those capabilities still aren't there at the scale he called for, mobilization has hit the dead end he now describes, and the four measures he proposed have not kept pace with how quickly drones are spreading.

Drones are already cheap, widespread, and shaping the war, and the front has gone static, Zaluzhnyi writes, while Russian strikes keep reaching railways and fuel stations far behind it.

This is no longer a drone war

The drones filling headlines no longer exist on their own, Zaluzhnyi writes. They have evolved into more familiar weapon types, cheaper and more effective—anyone still treating drones as a stand-alone class is about three years behind. Fixating on individual gadgets, he argues, misses the real contest: strategy and doctrine.

He reaches back to World War I for the danger he sees, running the line from Verdun and the Somme to Robotyne and Bakhmut. Before that war, soldiers in one army marched in bright red trousers that were supposed to help against repeating rifles, machine guns, and long-range artillery, and later against tanks and aircraft.

Today's faith in old security guarantees, he warns, is that same proud symbol worn onto a modern battlefield.

"The red trousers taught them nothing," he writes of those still moving tanks and artillery toward the fight by yesterday's logic.

New weapons, old strategy

The war has surrendered itself to marketers and wheeler-dealers, Zaluzhnyi writes—people who, without understanding or strategy, stoke it for quick profit while flaunting the pace of technological progress. Trying to retake land with Soviet methods and new weapons drove mobilization into a dead end, and fewer and fewer people were willing to take the one chance it offered.

"Damn marketing that kills," he adds.

The way out, he argues, is to treat technology as a new weapon, build tactics around it, and only then reshape the force.

That is what he calls doctrine, built through resource and technological alliances into a strategy for victory. Ukraine and Russia, he writes, have become real-time testing grounds.

What he warned a year ago

In September 2025, Zaluzhnyi named the four fights Ukraine had to win to survive mass drone warfare: counter-drone systems at scale, state-level drone production, integrated battlefield networks, and channeling tech talent into defense industries.

The counter-drone systems he put first are still short of the scale he warned Ukraine would need. Mobilization, he writes, has hit a dead end, and marketers—not the doctrine he calls for—are setting the pace.

Ukraine's former top general, now its ambassador to Britain, says Russia's jet-powered Geran drone is a glimpse of where war is heading, where high technology keeps getting cheaper. Valerii Zaluzhnyi told a London defense-technology showcase that an expensive Cold War missile had evolved into a cheap weapon that can be fired in bulk, Interfax-Ukraine reports.

During his tenure as Commander-in-Chief, Zaluzhnyi acknowledged that it had been a mistake to believe that the sheer number of casualties inflicted on Russia could bring the war to a halt, per UkrInform. By 2025, he had turned that lesson into a doctrine. Given Ukraine’s population, he argued, it cannot win a war of attrition and can wage only a high-tech war of survival. His doctrine was later echoed by former minister Mykhailo Fedorov and the current Yevhen Khmara.

The drone has become a missile in all but name, Zaluzhnyi said, and that is the point. Now, such missiles are affordable to any side, not only to wealthy countries.

The jet Geran flips the economics

The danger such cheap weapons pose is financial as much as military: if a country spends far more on each interceptor than the enemy spends on each target, its defense cannot scale, and the rich risk losing to the poor, Zaluzhnyi believes.

Future wars, he argued, will be decided less by who fields the more sophisticated systems than by who can turn them out cheaply and in volume.

Ukraine needs its own component base

Ukraine has already built much of a modern defense industry on exactly that logic, Zaluzhnyi continued, with combat driving its makers to develop the unmanned systems that now do much of the killing on the ground.

"No other country can offer more relevant experience for developing new weapons, modernizing them, and the ways of using them," he said.

The bottleneck, he added, is components: much of the parts base for Ukrainian weapons still sits abroad, capping how far production can scale and modernize.

He urged partners to pour long-term private investment into Ukrainian defense production, framing it as a two-way deal. Backing Ukraine's makers, he argued, both weakens Russia and builds the partners' own defenses, with Ukraine's battlefield experience as the foundation for weapons fit for the wars to come.