Amidst a changing strategic context which has seen Russian fortunes recede from their high water mark, Ukraine’s armed forces are facing another inflection point. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) of 2026 bear little resemblance to the army which faced Russia's initial seizure of Crimea, the force which fought Russian-backed separatists in Donbas from 2014–2022, and even the force that turned back Russia’s attempt to decapitate Ukraine in February 2022. That army, which just over a decade ago was still defined by its Soviet legacy, has emerged today as something new: a hybrid force, in which legacy organisational structures and Soviet-era kit work alongside imported doctrines, arms from Western partners, and increasingly domestically produced equipment and experimental methods.
But like the war itself, that force has not reached a static final form. It remains a work in progress, adapting to circumstance as Ukraine continues to defend its sovereignty against Russian aggression. The question we ask here is: if Ukraine’s armed forces are a substantial evolution relative to the beginning of the war, what form will they take on next?
The choice facing Ukraine's forces is far from a binary between East and West. As the full-scale war enters its fifth year, with its character still changing, the AFU continues to be tasked with building, deploying, and improving its existing capabilities while simultaneously developing innovative organisational structures, tactics, and doctrine to use them most effectively.
Two camps have emerged into view this last month, each associated with a senior official whose disputes became highly public and controversial. A traditionalist camp, personified by recently relieved Chief of the General Staff Oleksandr Syrskyi, highlights the way in which Ukraine’s forces succeeded in holding the frontline against a materially and numerically superior adversary with an often-overlooked reliance on traditional tactics and weapons (PDF). A reformist camp, symbolised by equally recently dismissed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, champions technological superiority and suggests more fundamental restructuring to better leverage novel weapons, unconventional tactics, and reformed procurement practices favouring decentralisation, SMEs, and increased transparency. Put simply, this reflects a struggle of the old guard against the next generation.
One could interpret the dismissal of the senior figures in both camps as a sign that Ukraine’s leadership is trying to find a middle path, but the fundamental questions of how to continue the AFU’s evolution in the face of ongoing Russian assaults is unlikely to disappear. And as General Syrskyi’s successor Mykhailo Drapatyi assumes the role of Chief of the General Staff of the AFU, it is worth first questioning the validity of this framing. The distinction between Old and New, static and manoeuvrable, traditional and novel, is perhaps an oversimplification. The public rivalry between General Syrskyi and Fedorov cannot be viewed simply as a difference of opinion on military management, divorced from the political and cultural context from which both men have emerged. For the future of the AFU, it is far more useful to view these two sides as a contest between theories of victory and governance — and about what kind of force posture and approach to military management best achieves that end goal.
If Ukraine’s armed forces are a substantial evolution relative to the beginning of the war, what form will they take on next?
The Unmanned Systems Forces: The Command of the Future?
Within the AFU, the Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) stand out as a source of pride for their technological and technical mastery of asymmetric warfare with attritable, adaptable tools (PDF). The USF make up just two percent of the military’s personnel strength yet are responsible for roughly 30 percent of Russian losses, having irrevocably changed the character of the battlefield. Converting the AFU into a vehicle for a massively expanded USF is one possibility. That said, the remaining 98 percent of personnel (what might be termed the "traditional army") are just as essential, still accounting for the remaining 70 percent of Russian losses. To achieve full effect, hold the line, and sustain Ukraine's valiant defence over the past four years, both the “traditional” and “novel” camps have had to work together, regardless of friction, every step of the way. This is not as outlandish as it might seem at first blush. After all, it was under General Syrskyi's tenure that the world's first Unmanned Systems Force was codified as a branch of the armed forces.
But what would be the implications of either camp—the Traditionalists or the Technologists—taking the lead on the AFU’s future? To structure this discussion, we consider four areas of potential change: unit structure, training, recruitment, and procurement. And for the purposes of this thought exercise, our assumption is a relatively steady state over the next two years, with no ceasefire and a constant level of ongoing hostilities with Russia.
Scenario One: Traditionalist Retrenchment
In this scenario, the General Staff fend off radical transformation while continuing an approach of large-scale but selective integration of emerging technologies. Doing so has preserved interoperability with NATO, avoiding the unknown vulnerabilities that radical restructuring might introduce, and leant into a narrative of battlefield success and national effort to keep the ranks filled with volunteers.
Unit Structure
Over the course of the full-scale war, traditionalists have consistently favoured fielding the maximum number of brigades. As fresh recruits complete basic training, they continue to be more or less evenly distributed across all active units, rather than being preferentially assigned to higher-performing or more combat-effective formations.
Despite efforts to centralise command and control into a Corps structure, the AFU has continued to centralise decision-making at the General Staff level. As in previous years, brigades subordinated to this new corps structure remain non-contiguous across the frontline — a complicating factor that has continued to require constant intervention from the General Staff.
Training Structures
Under General Syrskyi's tenure, General Basic Military Training was extended from 30 to 51 days for standard entry into the Ground Forces. Under this regime, all soldiers are first trained as infantrymen, only later being potentially trained as Uncrewed Systems (UxS) operators. Given the prevalence of Russian infiltration tactics, and the subsequent risk of finding themselves in direct small-arms engagements, this approach persists. Moreover, despite Technologist aspirations toward full battlefield automation, human spotters and ground troops have remained essential for taking and holding positions. Centralised training ensures all personnel master foundational soldiering skills, enabling tactical movement and combined-arms discipline. In this scenario, technical expertise has remained a specialist force enhancer rather than the central organising principle of individual training.
Recruitment
In a war of attrition, with frontline ground forces bearing the cost of holding the line, waves of mobilisation have continued to be key to maintaining a viable force. As training structures continue to emphasise infantry skillsets, voluntary recruitment, which was already struggling to meet demand, has become increasingly inadequate. Despite public protest and frustration, more coercive forms of mobilisation and conscription have become necessary to fill the ranks.
Procurement
Legacy systems, alongside a staggering scale of unmanned systems production, have remained the potent toolkit that has frozen the frontline against the Russian invaders. Innovation has been rewarded where it guarantees immediate return on investment. Contracts for procurement, refurbishment and upgrading of legacy systems have continued to scale consistent with trends from previous years, and large scale contracts continue to be awarded at the discretion of the General Staff, with more decentralised procurement and production of unmanned systems remaining the exception rather than the rule.
Assessment
The Traditionalist theory of victory emphasises the need to preserve traditional offensive capability—the weapons and tactics which allowed Ukrainian forces to retake territory around Kharkiv and the city of Kherson in 2022 and punch into Kursk in 2024. In this now dominant view, over-reliance on unmanned systems, and the temptation of autonomous kill-chains that seek to separate weapon operators from danger, risks only prolonging the war. Only by eventually driving the invaders from occupied territory by manoeuvre can the war be ended justly. Offensive action by assault units, with uncrewed systems in a crucial but supporting function, remains indispensable.
This model has minimised structural risk by reinforcing combined-arms fundamentals and adapting new technology and tactics wholesale once they are proven, not before. While UxS and medium-range strike platforms offer unprecedented operational agility, they cannot independently solve every tactical problem. Heavy artillery, armoured breachers, and conventional strike assets have remained indispensable for reducing hardened, protected infrastructure. By treating UxS as a preparatory enabler used to clear logistics, destroy enemy electronic warfare and soft targets, or degrade enemy air defences ahead of ground manoeuvre, this approach has maintained operational balance while avoiding command duplication.
In a war of attrition, with frontline ground forces bearing the cost of holding the line, waves of mobilisation have continued to be key to maintaining a viable force.
Scenario Two: Technologist Transformation
In this scenario, the Technologist camp is ascendant and leans fully into an emerging model—operationally, technologically, and organisationally. At the front line, human soldiers do less of the fighting directly; increasingly, the role of traditional frontline specialists (riflemen, machine gunners, etc.) shifts toward guarding strongpoints and securing rear areas to protect logistics and communications functions. ISR, defensive fires, short-range strike, and even ground assault are increasingly handled by remote and autonomous systems, with humans serving as a backup force rather than leading the charge. This has reduced AFU personnel's exposure to enemy direct fire and allows volunteers who might otherwise be unfit for frontline duty to continue contributing to combat operations. However, it has also destabilized existing structures, increased turnover at higher ranks, and opened opportunities for Russian forces to exploit seams in Ukrainian defences—both physically and informationally. The AFU's rapid transformation also risks outpacing NATO's own force-transformation efforts, creating new obstacles to interoperability.
Unit Structure
Technologists have pursued corps structure reforms more thoroughly and centralizing command and control into coordinated hubs. High-performing brigades and corps have been further rewarded with recruits and materiel, while underperforming commands are gradually dissolved, with personnel redistributed to units under more effective leadership. Under this model, newer formations like the USF have been formalised as primary drivers of combat power. Tactical tasking has shifted away from traditional combined-arms brigades toward specialised autonomous units, with more offensive roles almost entirely delegated to autonomous platforms. Greater effort is directed toward strategic asymmetry—targeting enemy logistics at mid-range, and industry, supply chains, and military and energy infrastructure at long range and strategic depth. Where predominantly human formations undertake offensive operations, they do so in discrete, carefully bounded circumstances, helped by close collaboration with robotic systems and only in areas where systematic preparation has maximised their odds of success and survival.
Training Structures
Taking the Unmanned Systems Force's approach as indicative of the broader Technologist model, Ukrainian soldiers have continued to train first and foremost as infantry. Drone operators emerge from a unified fighting culture of frontline soldiers, not the reverse. That said, experimentation with and adoption of UxS has been more deliberately integrated into standard Basic Training, preparing soldiers to support unmanned systems-led operations. Defensive tactics, rather than the perceived costliness of offensive training, become the predominant skillset.
Recruitment
Under the Technologist approach, greater effort has gone into reforming recruitment along more practical lines. Conscription has been reimagined as an invitation to serve during defined, limited service periods, paired with a narrative emphasis on survivability as a core institutional value. Such a structure has built significant goodwill among the general population, but has not produced the raw numbers that mass mobilisation would, further driving reliance on UxS and novel tactics and reducing the AFU’s ability to surge forces to shore up weak points in the line or to contain enemy breakthroughs.
Procurement
Market forces have increasingly squeezed out manufacturers previously protected by unregulated contracts. Innovation has surged as small- and medium-sized enterprises seize smaller contracts on the periphery, while the Ukrainian and European drone-primes of tomorrow have consolidated market share and continue scaling up. Ukrainian firms have become increasingly viable players on the global defence market, but demand for their products has created some tension as the government tries to balance sustainable export success with continuing to feed the needs of the AFU.
Assessment
The Technologist theory of victory runs in a markedly different direction to the Traditionalist approach. Under this approach, unmanned systems offer asymmetric advantage and create distance between operators and the enemy. Offensive operations, rather than serving as the key to victory, become momentary and opportunistic—such as the recent pushes in the south following the whitelisting of Ukraine-based Starlink terminals, which triggered connection and communication failures on the Russian side. This camp instead pursues a theory of victory built on unrestricted technological dominance in the operational domain, particularly through medium- and deep-strike capabilities against Russian logistics and industrial infrastructure, gradually degrading the enemy's ability to wage war. Preserving human life, even at the cost of static defence, allows attritable forces to absorb the brunt of punishment. Victory, in this view, comes through economic and logistical collapse rather than decisive battlefield action.
The question is whether [a] robotic integration ends up proving that the fundamentals of war have changed … or that war changes slowly and victory comes from paying heed to fundamentals.
Conclusion
A senior officer in the USF advised the authors not to reduce the question of the AFU’s future to a simple dichotomy between old and new ways of doing things, especially regarding force structure. Unmanned systems, he explained, are a single tool in the commander’s toolbox. Increasingly essential, but still just one capability among many that must be used together and selected carefully to achieve full operational success. Unmanned systems alone cannot take a heavily fortified position; yet in the Ukrainian battlefield of 2026, it is not possible to accomplish that task without them. Those systems are essential for harassing enemy infantry, armour, and logistics at short-to-medium range, and for destroying other soft targets—but heavy artillery and armour are still needed to destroy hardened targets, and infantry is still needed to move in and hold a position once cleared. This, indeed, is the purpose of Ukraine's domestic C2 system, DELTA: to link the full range of military capabilities together via live feed and to put the most appropriate tool to any given battlefield task. Whichever theory of victory Ukraine ultimately pursues, unmanned systems and traditional military hardware will need to be used in tandem to achieve it.
The distinction between traditional and novel approaches may be more clearly evidenced not in force structure itself, but in approaches to military culture and command (USF brigades, for instance, are largely staffed by recently recruited civilians at the command level), in approaches to recruitment, training, and procurement, and in differing theories of victory: combined manoeuvre and large-scale breakthrough versus attritional, asymmetric harassment of strategic and economic objectives.
Indeed, the distinction between the Unmanned Systems Forces (13 out of over 100 total AFU brigades) on one hand, and the land forces, National Guard, and territorial defence forces on the other, is again not as clear-cut as it may seem. While the Unmanned Systems Forces pioneer new technologies, procurement practices, and force structures, all of Ukraine's forces—land, territorial defence, and National Guard alike—use unmanned systems to varying degrees and in different ways.
The question is whether this robotic integration ends up proving that the fundamentals of war have changed and that revolutionary rather than evolutionary approaches are necessary for victory—or that war changes slowly and victory comes from paying heed to fundamentals. At this stage, the question is not yet answered, but the ultimate shape and fate of the AFU will be our strongest evidence one way or the other.
