What Ukraine’s Organizational Innovation Teaches the Impact Force
When I Marine Expeditionary Force ran Steel Knight 2025, participants referred to the war in Ukraine again and again. But they did not treat it as a tactical template. The lesson they kept returning to was the speed of adaptation. One officer framed it in terms the Marine Corps has understood since General Al Gray’s Warfighting doctrine: maneuver warfare is about the speed at which a commander can make decisions. His next question was more pointed: how do we empower young field-grade officers and staff NCOs to act on commander’s intent?
That question is the right entry point. Most commentary on Ukraine centers on hardware. But the more durable lessons for an impact force are organizational. Ukraine is rebuilding a military while fighting an adversary that also learns, and it is working through the questions the Marine Corps faces as it moves from crisis response to generating decision advantage across joint kill webs: who decides, who is responsible, how learning scales, who controls resources, and how leaders are formed.
One caution has to frame everything that follows. Ukraine is not a clean success story, and it is not a model to copy. Sergeant Major Boerre Langum’s 2024 NCO Journal article, “Adapt, Lead, Win: NCO Lessons from Ukraine,” makes a compelling case that empowered NCOs and mission command gave Ukraine a decisive edge over a top-down Russian force. The core of that argument holds. But two years on, the record is more mixed, and the value of the case lies as much in where reform has stalled as in where it has worked.
The record is uneven
Ukraine’s post-2014 reform was real. With NATO support, Kyiv built a professional NCO corps. By 2020 it had introduced seven new NCO ranks and replaced more than two thousand officer posts with sergeants under a concept for a professional sergeant corps. That foundation helped Ukraine survive the opening months of the full-scale invasion.
But the culture did not convert all at once. An Oxford volume on mission command in the war notes that legacy Soviet attitudes remained embedded in some senior leadership, particularly at the operational level. Staffs also struggled to synchronize maneuver, fires and sustainment at scale, most visibly in the 2023 counteroffensive. In September 2026, more than four years into the full-scale war, Reuters reported a battalion commander’s view that officers trained at traditional institutes are “immediately instilled with a certain hatred toward sergeants and soldiers.” A 27-year-old staff sergeant told the same reporter that initiative is still often punished, particularly among sergeants.
Ukraine has not solved mission command. It shows what it takes to move toward it under extreme pressure, and how hard it is to finish. That matters for a Marine Corps that already has maneuver-warfare doctrine but faces pressure in the opposite direction: sensor-rich networks that tempt senior commanders to direct rather than command.
Lesson one: authority has to move before technology pays off
Delta, Ukraine’s situational-awareness and battle-management system, began in 2016 as a volunteer-built digital map for soldiers in the Donbas. It was adopted force-wide by August 2024. It grew bottom-up rather than from a central design, and it is accessible to frontline troops and senior commanders through tiered permissions. Wesley Bailey and Daniel Byman of CSIS describe the result as an observe-decide-strike loop increasingly closed at the lowest tactical levels, with release authority for the dominant small-drone and artillery kill chain sitting at the company, platoon and even squad levels. Their comparison with Russia is the critical point. Moscow has tried to build a Delta-class system of its own, called Svod, but “has yet to relocate authority,” and implementation has stalled.
The same technology produces different outcomes depending on where authority sits. The analyst Rob Lee has observed that even junior Ukrainian commanders can use Delta, a sharp contrast with American practice, where concern over leaks keeps access narrower.
For the Marine Corps, this goes to the core of the impact force. Steel Knight showed that distributed Marines feeding targeting data into joint kill webs is operationally coherent. It also showed the friction. Officers and staff NCOs discussed resisting over-centralization as senior headquarters gained access to forward sensor data, and giving sergeants and lieutenants decision authority in an environment where a 32-second radio transmission could bring targeting within minutes. An officer at HMLA-267, the first fully digitally interoperable H-1 squadron, worried that commanders who grow up surrounded by sensor feeds could become “even more centralized.”
Ukraine suggests this is not a question network architecture can settle. It is an organizational choice about decision rights. If every sensor can enable any shooter, the impact force’s advantage depends on settling, ahead of time, which decisions belong at the node.
Lesson two: trust cannot be temporary
For much of the war, Ukrainian brigades fought under temporary command groupings: tactical groups, operational-tactical groupings and operational-strategic groups. The Kyiv Independent’s Francis Farrell describes the consequences in a February 2026 analysis. The groupings’ commanders could be rotated at short notice and were responsible for a sector, not for the brigades in it, so there was often no properly responsible commander between brigade and General Staff. Generals became absorbed in orders about individual platoons. Battalions and companies were split off to plug gaps elsewhere, treated as expendable and lost at excess rates. Commanders sometimes hid lost positions for fear of punishment, leaving neighboring brigades exposed.
In February 2025, Kyiv announced a shift to permanent army corps of roughly three to six brigades, whose commanders could choose their own deputies and staff. A year in, results were mixed: the 3rd Army Corps, built on the 3rd Assault Brigade, fought as a coherent formation, while other corps had their commanders dismissed. Farrell’s point is that the successful corps grew from strong brigades that spread experienced commanders, technology and best practices to weaker units. Corps short of resources and of trust from above often worked much like the temporary groupings they replaced.
The relevance is not obvious at first, because task organization is a Marine strength. But distributed nodes operating under threat, sometimes out of contact, making consequential decisions without approval, depend on habitual relationships and clear lines of responsibility. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Robert Hedelund’s observations at Steel Knight pointed to exactly this: the tension of 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing serving as both force provider and operational headquarters, and unresolved questions about the relationship between the JFACC and the wing commander’s representative in theater. Ukraine shows the cost when those questions stay open under fire. Units that do not know who owns them get misused, and commanders who fear the chain above them stop telling it the truth.
The second half of the lesson matters as much. Pioneer units such as HMLA-267 are valuable less for what they can do alone than for how quickly their practices spread. A transformation that depends on a handful of exemplary squadrons is fragile; the question is how to make pioneers into seed formations.
Lesson three: institutionalize innovation without cutting it off from the edge
In 2024, Ukraine created the Unmanned Systems Forces as a separate branch, the first military branch built around air, land and sea drones. Its first commander, Colonel Vadym Sukharevskyi, described the central task as systematizing and scaling Ukraine’s successes and establishing “a unified tactical doctrine to maximize results across all units.” He also promised not to strip drone units from frontline brigades, saying that doing so “would be destructive.”
The early history was turbulent, with reported tension between the new branch and the commander-in-chief. In June 2025, Sukharevskyi was replaced by Major Robert Brovdi, commander of one of the best-performing drone units, Magyar’s Birds. The branch was then combined with the “Drone Line” units under one chain of command with a common vision of drone tactics. Meanwhile, the corps reform expanded each corps’ own unmanned systems battalions to regiment size. In other words, Ukraine is pursuing a dedicated center of mass for drone warfare and stronger organic drone capability in the line formations at the same time.
That dual structure reflects a tension every transforming force faces. Innovation starts at the edge; scaling it requires someone to codify, train, supply and standardize; but centralizing it risks losing the feedback loop that made it valuable. Ukraine’s evolving answer is to keep both.
The Marine Corps faces its own version. The 2026 Marine Aviation Plan reconceives aviation as the connective tissue of distributed operations. Digital interoperability, kill web management and unmanned expertise all have to be built somewhere and spread everywhere. Ukraine suggests designing deliberately for both functions, and expecting friction between them.
Lesson four: put some resource authority at the edge
Ukraine’s most unconventional organizational experiment is the Army of Drones Bonus program, known as e-points, linked since August 2025 to the Brave1 Market. Units earn points for verified combat tasks, which can be redeemed for drones, ground robots and electronic-warfare systems ordered directly from Ukrainian manufacturers. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence reports that in the first year, more than 400 units ordered roughly 500,000 systems worth USD 1 billion, with average delivery for in-stock items cut to seven days. The ministry says that for the first time, combat commanders can select the equipment their units need themselves. A manufacturer dashboard now lets developers track how their products perform in combat in real time.
The system has critics; the BBC has asked whether it is gamifying war. It sits alongside traditional procurement rather than replacing it, and a peacetime force cannot import a scheme built around verified strikes.
But two features are directly relevant. The first is speed of feedback. Steel Knight exposed gaps in equipment and training, raising the question of whether acquisition can adapt fast enough to close them. Ukraine has built a loop in which the user chooses, the manufacturer sees performance and the state pays, measured in days. The second feature is subtler and matters more for the impact force. Ukraine now awards points not only for destroying targets but also for reconnaissance, logistics and casualty evacuation. A force whose value lies in making others more lethal needs incentive and resource systems that reward sensing, enabling and sustaining, not only shooting. If the Marine Corps measures and resources its distributed nodes by what they kill, it will undercut the very role Steel Knight showed to be most promising: the forward sensing and decision-enabling element of joint kill webs.
Lesson five: leader development is a combat function
Langum’s central claim was that empowered NCOs, given the right training, intellect and authority, can play a decisive role. Ukraine’s 2026 experience supports the claim and shows its cost. Reuters reported in September that a Captain’s Course run by Kyiv’s military institute has trained more than 1,200 officers since early in the war, including a cohort of 103 battle-hardened squad commanders pulled from the front for three months. Withdrawing proven leaders from a front short of soldiers shows how seriously the institution now takes leader development. General Mykhailo Drapatyi, who became commander-in-chief in July 2026, met senior sergeants and published a list of problems to address: expanded NCO powers, a clearer command structure and better pay. “A sergeant was a soldier himself yesterday,” he said. “Today, he is the commander who is closest to the soldier.”
Two points follow. First, more than a decade after Ukraine began building its NCO corps, its leadership is still working on NCO authority, pay and command clarity. Doctrine and rank structures are not enough; incentives, evaluations and tolerance for honest failure decide whether initiative survives. Second, Ukraine’s new leadership tied command culture to preserving soldiers’ lives. A force that cannot replace its people quickly has to fight in ways that keep its experienced leaders alive.
The Marine Corps begins from a stronger position. Its “strategic corporal” tradition and maneuver-warfare doctrine already assume initiative at low echelons. But the impact force raises the stakes. The sergeant at a distributed node may hold a piece of the joint targeting picture that matters well beyond the local fight. Steel Knight’s officers asked how to make sure “the sergeant in the battlefield has full awareness.” Ukraine’s answer is that awareness without authority, and authority without protection from punishment for good-faith judgment, produces hesitation rather than speed.
Lesson six: the adversary learns too
Ukraine’s early edge in small, flexible drone units did not last. Russia created the Rubikon Center for Advanced Unmanned Technologies in 2024. It is less a unit than an organization of operators, instructors and researchers that develops tactics and spreads them to other formations. CNN described it as turning a Ukrainian advantage into a vulnerability, using fiber-optic drones and strikes on supply routes and drone operators. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that Rubikon operators were largely responsible for Russia’s drone campaign against Ukrainian supply routes, which enabled Russian advances in the fall of 2025.
This complicates the simple story that decentralization beats centralization. Russia’s most effective adaptation came from a centralized, elite learning-and-dissemination organization. The real lesson is about coupling: centralized capacity to learn, codify and spread knowledge, combined with decentralized authority to act on it. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces and Russia’s Rubikon are both attempts to build that coupling from different starting cultures.
This echoes a warning already drawn at Steel Knight: rapid battlefield learning cannot be assumed to be a Western advantage. A potential Pacific adversary is studying the same war, and will try to find, jam and strike the impact force’s sensing-and-enabling network much as Rubikon went after Ukrainian drone operators and supply lines. The ability to learn faster than the adversary is a capability that has to be designed, resourced and protected like any other.
Where the analogy breaks
Ukraine is fighting an existential, largely land war along a front of about 1,200 kilometers, with a mobilized army. The Marine Corps is an expeditionary, maritime force preparing for a fight it hopes to deter, within joint and allied kill webs where fires authority, escalation control and coalition politics constrain tactical speed in ways the Ukrainian front often does not. Permanent corps on fixed sectors reflect a static front, not a mobile littoral campaign.
The deepest difference is pressure. Ukraine reorganizes because it must. The Marine Corps has to create that necessity without combat. That is the real purpose of the campaign of learning and of exercises like Steel Knight: to bring command friction, logistics shortfalls and cultural resistance to the surface while there is still time to fix them. Ukraine’s experience suggests that exercises should be judged less by whether units performed well than by whether they changed how the organization assigns authority, fixes responsibility, spreads learning and moves resources.
The organizational core of the impact force
The impact force is often described in terms of platforms and networks. Ukraine’s experience points to the organizational core underneath. Decision rights have to sit where the information is. Responsibility has to be permanent enough to build trust. Innovation has to be institutionalized without being cut off from its users. Resources have to move at the speed of adaptation. Leaders have to be developed, protected and paid as though their judgment were the decisive weapon, because it is.
As Hedelund put it after Steel Knight, “You cannot do this operation with magic.” Ukraine has shown what it looks like when an institution tries to change itself under fire, with real gains, persistent failures and an adversary learning in parallel. The Marine Corps has the advantage of time and a doctrine that already points the right way. The question is whether it will use that time to make the organizational changes the impact force requires before a future adversary forces them under fire.