Thoughts on Ukraine as the Conflict Grinds On.

• Author: Jones, Nick
• Position: NDIA Perspective

As I sat in my basement Feb. 24 watching live television coverage of Russian tanks roll into Ukraine, I thought the Russia-Ukraine War would be over within a few weeks, at most.

Many of my friends and associates felt the same way too--with the odds heavily favoring a brutal Russian advance across Ukraine. Previous Russian military interventions seemed to reinforce this view. Chechnya in the 2000s, Georgia in 2008, the conflict in Ukraine's Donbas region starting in 2014, and Syria since 2015.

There were also some worrisome suspicions. In the years leading up to the 2022 invasion, signs indicated that the Russian military had figured out how to cope with some of the newest battlefield tech.

Reports from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine over the past few years suggested that some unmanned systems might become inoperable in the face of persistent Russian jamming. Indeed, over the past few years there were a few notable instances of the Special Monitoring Mission losing non-American-made autonomous systems to Russian electronic warfare attacks.

As it happened, the armchair consensus about how the beginning of this war would unfold was wrong. Instead, the Ukrainians fought back, and the technology worked.

US.-built systems like the Javelin, an antitank weapon, and the Stinger, a man-portable air defense system, have proven to be incredibly effective during the initial phases of the war, literally decimating Russian armed forces units across Ukraine. Ukrainian use of unmanned systems also appears to be widespread and effective.

In the information sphere, geospatial intelligence companies like Maxar Technologies and BlackSky provided crystal-clear images of Russian Army positions to the world.

Gum-shoe hobbyists and journalists exploited videos from ubiquitous cameras to give the world near-real-time insights to counter the Kremlin's disinformation machine. SpaceX even figured out how to provide broadband connectivity to the Ukrainians with Starlink, and then defeated Russian jamming efforts through over-the-air software updates, providing vital communications links to the outside world.

Indeed, the U.S. defense industrial base appears to have provided an edge to the Ukrainians, allowing them, at times, to operate well inside the Kremlin's decision cycle.

Back home, the conflict has reinforced a few persistent questions for the industrial base. For example, how do we quickly get the...