Mick Ryan describes the fast following loop in war.
Ukraine pioneered mobile teams to hunt drones. Russia copied it and incorporated it into its own defense. Russia came with unjammable fibre-optic drones but Ukraine quickly followed. After Ukraine developed uncrewed naval drones, Russia built its own.
The wheel of action and counteraction turns ever faster:
The most consequential fast following, though, has been institutional. Ukraine built the world’s first Unmanned Systems Forces branch in 2024. Russia’s Rubicon Center was established as a response to Ukrainian drone innovation and in November 2025 Moscow stood up its own Unmanned Systems Forces. Fast following has moved from copying a weapon to copying tactics to copying an entire force structure.
Extend that logic further, and eventually you’ll get to the level of grand strategy: If a particular type of state is better at waging war, maybe you want to become that kind of state rather than lose the war.
If meat waves confer an advantage on the battlefield, maybe Ukraine wants to become more like Russia, with a prostrate population easy to use as cannon fodder.
If Ukraine’s decentralized Brave1 kill market confers an advantage, maybe Russia wants to become less hierarchical and authoritarian, so that it can use that kind of military procurement.
You see the problem. Sometimes adopting the adversary’s strategy conflicts with who you are. When mistreatment of Ukrainian soldiers in regiment Skelya was reported earlier this year — brutal handling, beatings and likely killings — public outrage ensued. As Centre for Eastern Studies writes:
The authorities are likely to seek to channel public outrage towards [Commander-in-Chief of the AFU] General Syrskyi, who is widely perceived as a commander willing to sacrifice the lives of his soldiers in order to accomplish assigned missions. Should further cases of misconduct […] come to light, his dismissal cannot be ruled out.
And that’s exactly what happened. After some political drama, the dismissal of the defense minister because of conflicts with Syrskyi and the subsequent street protests, Syrskyi was dismissed himself on July 21st.
The other way round: Russia recently tried to copy Ukraine’s Brave1 military procurement market, but the differences are telling. Where Brave1 works as a state procurement tool that rewards combat performance, Russian Roy.Market looks more like a closed, politically connected Amazon for soldiers and the donors. There are no points to be earned for successful strikes that the units would use to procure weaponry of their choice. That absence, in turn, breaks the market mechanism, the direct feedback loop from the front line to the armament producers, which lies at the very core of Brave1. In short, Roy.Market is likely to become just another point where those in power can siphon money from the system.
In adversarial settings, you can copy any innovation the enemy uses. Innovation happens in fast back and forth cycles as each side copies the successful moves of its rival. But then there’s asymmetric warfare. These are things that cannot be copied. Russia may rely on its larger population to overwhelm Ukraine. Ukraine may, in its turn, exploit the Russia’s size and the fact that it cannot be fully covered by air defense.
The ultimate asymmetric weapon, however, is one that the enemy cannot use without becoming more like yourself.
To put it in strictly autistic terms: If you are a defect bot, you may observe that tit-for-tat bots are doing better. You can switch to tit-for-tat algorithm yourself. But at that point you cease to be a defect bot. You are now a tit-for-tat bot.
A natural objection is: who cares? If becoming more like Ukraine is Russia’s path to victory, then why not? The institutions may become a bit different, but it would still be the same nation, the same people and now they win instead of lose.
But look at it from a practical perspective. If the winning move is to become less authoritarian and hierarchical, to become more decentralized and bottom-up, will Putin agree? Likely not. It would threaten his power. Neither would the elites. More of bottom-up is a threat to the patronage networks they benefit from. Even the general population may not like it. Less command-and-control in a society that’s based on it could collapse the state capacity and ordinary Russians have learned their lesson from the nineties well.
Another way to look at it is from a military perspective. Let’s repeat with Clausewitz: War is the continuation of politics by other means. And let’s not miss the corollary that usually gets forgotten: The ultimate objective of war is political, not military. You don’t fight to win. You fight to achieve a political outcome.
Russia can't win by becoming Ukraine, because preventing that kind of society is the point of the war. Ukraine can’t win by becoming Russia for the same reason.
Both sides are bound by what they're fighting for. The question is whose binding hurts more.