Ukraine’s Long Neptune. A much-improved, long-range improved version of the missile that sank the Russian guided missile Moskva.

For nearly four years, and at least from the ‘Western’ point of view, Ukraine has been the most important battlefield laboratory in the world. Every week seemed to bring a breakthrough—a new drone, a new countermeasure, a new way of thinking about war. From garage workshops to defense ministries, innovation was happening at every level. But the tempo feels different now. We may be entering a new phase: not the death of innovation, but its plateau.

Right from the start of the Russian all-out invasion, necessity was the mother of invention. Ukraine had to improvise because its very survival depended on it. The absence of reliable Western support created space/necessity for experimentation. FPV drones strapped with grenades, ad hoc electronic warfare rigs, the Neptune missile repurposed for long-range strikes—all of these grew out of urgency, not abundance. Innovation was existential.

Now, however, the curve of innovation looks flatter. What I see emerging are incremental refinements on existing systems rather than paradigm shifts. Ukraine has moved from creating the first FPV bomber to iterating on range, payload, and guidance tweaks. From shocking the world with the Neptune’s strike on the Moskva to producing longer-range variants and its own Shahed-like drones, the energy is more about scaling proven concepts than wholesale inventing new ones. The edge cases—the unusual hacks that once defined Ukraine’s battlefield improvisation—are increasingly the norm.

Plastic drink bottles have played a role in the war. From makeshift stabilizer fins to shot canisters.

That does not mean creativity has dried up. It means the bottleneck has shifted. The breakthrough ideas exist, but their implementation now depends on scale, logistics, and industrial plant rather than on sheer ingenuity. Take artificial intelligence. There is no shortage of AI-enabled prototypes for targeting, navigation, and signals intelligence. The constraint isn’t imagination; it’s production. Training models at scale, ruggedizing edge computing, hardening units against jamming—these are problems of capacity, not of concept. In other words, the hard part now is less “What can we dream up?” and more “How can we build enough of it, fast enough, to matter?”

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This shift is typical in the lifecycle of wartime innovation. Early phases reward improvisation; later phases demand standardization. The same story unfolded in the First and Second World Wars: chaotic bursts of creativity gave way to industrial pipelines that decided the conflict (an argument for innovation ending the war in the Pacific is valid). Once a design proves effective, the real race is producing it at a scale that overwhelms the enemy’s defenses. Today, Ukraine’s challenge is not to invent the next wonder-weapon, but to create the throughput that keeps drones, missiles, and EW kits flowing to the front (and into Russia) in volumes that matter.

There’s also a danger in fetishizing “the next big thing.” Not every breakthrough looks like a revolution. Often, wars are won by the side that makes small, unglamorous improvements—cheaper batteries, more reliable communications, easier-to-train operators. These marginal gains, multiplied across thousands of systems, shift the balance far more than a handful of dramatic prototypes. Ukraine’s genius may now lie in the discipline of iteration at scale.

So has Ukraine reached “peak innovation”? Perhaps in the sense that the era of constant headline-grabbing breakthroughs has ended. The front is still a laboratory, but it is less a garage workshop and more a factory floor. The decisive question is no longer “What can Ukraine invent?” but “What can Ukraine mass-produce?” That answer will then determine Russia’s ability to endure further attrition of its oil and gas sector and whether Western backers can be convinced that their support is fueling not just clever one-offs but scalable systems.

For savvy observers, this is an important frame. If the first years of the war told a story of scrappy innovation, the next chapter is about industrial endurance. That doesn’t make the story less exciting—it makes it more consequential. Because in modern war, the side that can turn invention into infrastructure is the side that wins.

Benjamin Cook continues to travel to, often lives in, and works in Ukraine, a connection spanning more than 14 years. He holds an MA in International Security and Conflict Studies from Dublin City University and has consulted with journalists and intelligence professionals on AI in drones, U.S. military technology, and open-source intelligence (OSINT) related to the war in Ukraine. He is co-founder of the nonprofit UAO, working in southern Ukraine. You can find Mr. Cook between Odesa, Ukraine; Charleston, South Carolina; and Tucson, Arizona.

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This text is published with the permission of the author. First published here.