January 10, 2026: As more transformative technology became available to the military over the last fifty years, something strange happened. The technologies began to generate new capabilities faster than the military could adapt and absorb the new tech into their operations. These changes became obvious in the course of the Ukraine war, although the new tech is showing in many other wars, rebellions, Islamic terrorist operations, and criminal enterprises.

Governments are no longer obliged to get everything via long-term development and manufacturing contracts. A growing number of firms have something the military needs and deliver it unsolicited, with the option to pay for a long term use. One of the first examples of this was in 2022 when SpaceX provided their Starlink satellite communications services to Ukraine. This happened because the Ukrainian minister of digital transformation contacted SpaceX for help in dealing with Russian efforts to cut Ukrainian access to the Internet. SpaceX officials had already been negotiating with Ukraine to provide Starlink service locally. SpaceX founder Elon Musk agreed to help and within four days hundreds of Starlink satellites were moved into position to provide Ukraine with high-speed Internet service using hundreds of Starlink user kits Musk also sent to Ukraine. Musk ultimately supplied Ukraine with nearly 2,000 terminals and managed to persuade countries supplying military aid for Ukraine to include Ukrainian requests for more Starlink terminals, especially the more expensive, and capable commercial models. In this way Ukraine was able to obtain over 50,000 terminals so far. Most of these are used to keep the economy going and the ones used by the military are subject to combat losses. Civilian users face a similar but lesser risk and hundreds of terminals have been lost during Russian attacks. These have to be replaced and most, if not all, of the replacements are paid for by military aid for Ukraine.

Last year American military aid to Ukraine included shipping container size 3D-printing drone factories for Ukraine. A new American tech startup raised $12 million from corporate backers like Lockheed Martin to develop cheap miniature 3D-printing drone factories for battle zones like the Ukraine. A U.S. firm, Firestorm Labs, was founded after an American 3D printing engineer visited Ukraine in early 2024. The drone factory shipping containers come in two variants, one with a 6 meter long container and the other with a 12.2 meter container. Firestorm Lab claims these units should be able to produce around 50 UAVs a month. A feature of these 3D-printing factories is that they can be placed in remote areas and blend into the background. These operations are semi-automated manufacturing facilities that can be operated by only a few people. Power can be supplied by generators if local electric power is unavailable. Automated manufacturing makes it possible to quickly produce large numbers of UAVs.

The basic Firestorm Labs 3D-printed drone is the Tempest, which has a maximum takeoff weight of 25 kg, can carry a payload of 4.5 kg, and has a wingspan of 2.1 meters. It is 1.8 meters long and can be adapted to handle a range of ranges, loitering times, and cruise speeds. This drone can be broken down into portable cases that one soldier can carry for easy transport. There are swappable propulsion systems for different mission needs. There is also a quick connect/disconnect system that enables rapid reconfiguration.

There were many more examples like this in Ukraine, many of them involving the armed forces’ growing dependence on commercial datafication software and hardware. The war in Ukraine demonstrates a shift in the substance of combat operations. Armed forces are concurrently regionalizing distributed decision-making, so it is closer to the troops and centralizing command and control through dependence on commercial firms that provide key services like cloud computing; ISR/Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance analytics; and scalable machine learning platforms for AI/Artificial Intelligence.

Increasingly, military procurement officials no longer describe problems that are primarily responsible for defining the challenges of the modern battlespace and then producing tenders for technological fixes. Instead, private tech companies increasingly explain the ideal battlespace to militaries, offering software and hardware products needed to establish real-time data dominance.

Another important factor is the large number of civilians in or adjacent to the combat zone with cell phones. In the first year of the Ukraine War local app developers created the ePPO cellphone app to enable civilians to quickly report incoming Russian cruise missiles, especially the new Iranian Shahed 136 Russia obtained. This drone flies low, under 100 meters, slow at 180 kilometers an hour and is noisy. They are often sent in small swarms of 4 to 12 missiles and at night. With ePPO, all a user has to do is point the phone in the direction of the missile and press a large button on the phone display to transmit useful sound and location data to a special phone network. The information quickly arrived at the local air defense headquarters where numerous such reports are instantly combined on a computer display so the officer on duty can instantly send the data to nearby air defense units. With that kind of information, more and more of the Shahed 136s and even some larger, faster cruise missiles were detected and shot down. Civilians with a Take Cover app get an alert to do that if they are in the target area. Suppliers of this data are verified by another app, Diia, which contains user identification data.

Earlier the phones with Diia had a similar app to instantly report any enemy activity. For Ukrainians in Russian occupied territory, this often provided important target locations so Ukrainian guided missiles could destroy weapons storage sites as well as headquarters or troop concentrations. Technically, the use of this app in enemy territory makes the user a partisan and subject to being shot on sight. This did not discourage many Ukrainians, who noted that the Russians were already attacking civilians without any provocation.

As soon as the invasion began in February, civilians were using chat apps to quickly report where the enemy had been spotted. Ukraine’s cell phone services kept operating during the invasion because of access to the Starlink satellite system. The Russians had no such access and not many military radios. The Russians were moving and fighting blind compared Ukrainian troops and civilians with cell phones.

This persistent cell phone service enabled families to keep track of their men, and women, in the military. Apps for that had already been used in many other countries, as well as numerous navigation, first aid and fire-control apps that had been developed over the last decade. Many of these apps were also used by police, firemen and first-responders.

The military has had problems with some of these apps revealing troop locations to an enemy equipped to detect such use. This led to many apps being banned from use in combat zones until the flaws could be fixed. Although Russia also had some military apps, they had fewer of them and less opportunity to get cell phone service in Ukraine. The Russians were also unable to develop new apps to deal with new developments in the war. Ukraine always had a more robust and prolific app development community and that turned out to be a military superiority the Russians did not expect, much less deal with.

Another innovation was the use of commercial surveillance satellite photos to track your own troops and those of the enemy. Russia had fewer of these satellites in orbit and Western economic sanctions gradually reduced their ability to build and launch satellites. There is also the ability to store large quantities of data in server farms, otherwise known as the cloud. Technologies to specify and implement what can be done with this data using newly developed analytical tools were available before military procurement officers could even conceive of such things. That’s because this new tech was initially created for commercial users, with the military one of several possible secondary markets. The military gets publicity for issuing multi-million and billion dollar contracts for new items, but more important new capabilities show up unannounced. These commercial firms will offer this new tech to the military before defense officials realize what it can do for the armed forces.

In Ukraine local software and hardware engineers often surprised American tech personnel in the country maintaining or offering new tech. Ukraine had to keep much of their new tech secret from all foreigners. When NATO nation personnel in Ukraine found out about these new developments, their first reaction was to offer co-production deals and help in selling consumer grade versions to worldwide markets. There were a lot of American venture capital firms with tens of billion dollars to invest and the new tech market in wartime Ukraine was an attractive market.