Sam Scanlon
The war in Ukraine has produced a steady stream of striking images and tactical innovations that have baited the US defense community into simple conclusions: Either Ukraine is a crystal ball for the future of warfare or its experience is so theater- or country-specific that it has no bearing on US strategy and modernization efforts. What is missing in much of the debate is critical thinking anchored in doctrine, operational understanding, realities of the current state of American equipment, and strategic context. Far too often, the conversation begins and ends with first-person-view (FPV) drones, and the larger lessons get lost. FPVs matter and have a role to play, but they should not dominate how defense leaders and the policymaking community should think about this war. To understand Ukraine’s relevance for US strategy, we need to widen the aperture—looking beyond FPVs to the other innovations across air, land, and sea that the United States can adapt for defense modernization to counter threats around the globe—in the many theaters where it has interests and where US forces might find themselves actively engaged. While there are vast potential lessons learned from Ukraine, hardware implementation is an area that offers the promise of particularly quick wins for the United States.
Ukraine’s maritime story during the war is the most visible example of necessity forcing creative adaptation. Kyiv has weaponized the littoral in ways Western navies rarely imagined before the war. Small unmanned surface vessels (USVs)—Magura is the most well-known producer—have gone beyond kamikaze boat missions to perform surveillance, logistics, and even antiair missions in the Black Sea. In early May 2025, Ukrainian forces shocked the world when the Magura USVs armed with repurposed air-to-air missiles shot down two Su-30 fighters, marking the first reported instance of uncrewed surface drones downing manned military aircraft in combat. That event did not happen in a doctrinal vacuum: It was the result of integrating the latest innovative technology with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance tools, weapons platforms, and distributed operators into a coherent maritime concept of operations. The point for US planners is not to simply import Magura USVs—even though a US-listed company, Red Cat Holdings, has agreed to a coproduction deal—but to recognize what low-cost, networked surface systems change about naval campaigning. In the Indo-Pacific—where geography rewards dispersion and the tyranny of distance strains centralized defenses—attritable USVs can extend sensor nets, complicate enemy targeting, impose costs on high-value surface and air platforms, and even, as Magura proved, provide deadly surface-to-air attacks in contested environments. In South America, the same platforms can fuse maritime security and defense missions: persistent interdiction of illicit traffic, protection of coastal infrastructure, and low-risk presence operations without sending major surface combatants to every flashpoint. The lesson of the Black Sea is doctrinal: When inexpensive platforms can force a peer navy to alter operations, they become a lever of deterrence and maneuver rather than a sideshow. The United States is slowly learning this, but more investment, education, and doctrine creation are needed to fully operationalize the lesson.
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