Adversarial development of battlefield technology
A practical method to maintain innovation in warfighting during peacetime
The war in Ukraine has unleashed unprecedented amounts of innovation in warfighting and both Ukraine and Russia copy each other within 12 weeks but the Ukrainians are more innovative because they have effectively decentralized procurement to their brigades.
This allows for a Ukrainian company to sell to 1 brigade with no bureaucracy and co-develop solutions with them. They will then sell to more brigades and eventually have enough good references to convince central procurement to buy their systems at scale.
The ability to sell directly to the units is great in wartime, because they have an urgent need and they are constantly buying as their equipment gets used and destroyed.
This market will die the moment there is peace in Ukraine.
We simply do not have a peacetime equivalent of this at the moment and armies do not cycle through their equipment except in very limited training scenarios (e.g. NATO exercises).
This poses a problem for armies, because the equipment they will buy today will be outdated in 2 months and they will be stuck with this equipment for the next decade.
Likewise, as innovators you have a problem because the equipment doesn’t get cycled, everything has to remain backwards compatible which poses a lot of development costs/limitations.
The other problem is that you can not really co-develop with army units because they will not actually use it in real war-like conditions.
However, real-world combat is increasingly robotic in nature
The war in Ukraine is more and more machine-on-machine fights with drones taking out other drones.
This poses an opportunity for NATO armies because if the fighting is robotic, that means they don’t have to worry about personnel safety and they can actually blow things up in a real-world robotic fight.
Real-world robot-on-robot fight with real explosives and real electronic warfare conditions can be done. It can be done between units inside the same army or it can be done by what I call an experimental “prototype” unit that fights other armies units similar to a football league.
This solves the innovator problem too because now there are multiple units they can work with and sell too that are willing to buy experimental equipment in order to win from the other units.
Nations can fight each other on their home territory and on away territory
For example, the experimental unit of the Belgian army can fight the Swedish army in Sweden military domains and then invite the Swedes back to Belgium for the rematch.
If all European countries do this then it creates a dynamic and competitive market for military innovation similar to how sports equipment is a dynamic market.
Everything that gives you the win or an edge will be adopted by all units, after which it can be procured at scale.
Those units could be given a fixed annual budget (experimental equipment will always be more expensive then mass-produced ones) but as everybody is focussed on winning, the budget can be allocated freely (direct procurement).
Those units could also work with accelerators and defense investors to create new equipment and solve real-world challenges they have on the field such as EW-resistant communication links, longer endurance drones, …
Such battles could be held every two weeks
Similar to football again, one could train during the week and then do a match in the weekend with another country.
The adversarial nature of it and the very high frequency would enable the military to recreate the dynamic market dynamics that underpin Ukrainian innovation.
It would also support an industry used to rapid iteration of technology.
There is no need to create a long-term roadmap for defense, it will evolve from real-world combat similar to how real-world market competition for customers evolves products and services in the wider economy.
Nothing prevents such units to invest in long-term innovation either, as those competitions will go on forever.
Those units are your prototype units that will be the model for your army at war
Once war breaks out, those units will be your first response but also, their methodology and training can be adopted and transferred to the peacetime army at regular intervals.