OPINION — The February snow was over a week old but still piled heavy on the roads and sidewalks of Independence Avenue, the kind of stubborn Washington winter that refuses to yield to DC’s imperium, turning the capital’s marble grandeur into a grey, grimy obstacle course of frozen slush and ice-crusted curbs. We had back-to-back meetings on the Hill, the kind where you wear a suit and choose your words carefully and try to translate the chaos of a modern battlefield into something a Senate staffer can fit onto a one-pager. Later that afternoon I was due to speak at the Veterans Forum for the 5th Annual Ukrainian Week, another room full of people trying to bridge the distance between policy and new realities.

I have been working in Ukraine since 2019, first as an active Green Beret advising in an official capacity, then after leaving that service, directing special operations on the ground and more recently carrying hard-won lessons back to NATO before they are forgotten or overtaken by the next news cycle. That is what brought me to Washington, and it is what this article is about. I write it alongside friends from the humanitarian and policy world who came to the same fight from very different directions. We come from different backgrounds and often speak with different vocabularies, but common cause in Ukraine forged a shared set of concerns and a purpose. DC has been threaded through this work for all of us in ways I never anticipated, but I will be honest: moving through it in a blazer instead of body armor never quite feels right. My natural habitat is not a briefing room. It is not a Hollywood set, where I spent time advising filmmakers like Sean Penn on how war actually looks and sounds and smells. It is not a think tank conference room or a war journalist’s interview chair, and it is certainly not the back of a cab crawling past the Capitol.

And yet there I was, wedging myself out of a DC taxi in front of the Rayburn House Office Building, my service dog Mad Max bounding out ahead of me into the slush, when I heard the unmistakable sound of dress pants surrendering under pressure. The seam goes. Completely. Standing on Capitol Hill in a split suit, cold air rushed in where composure once lived and the surrealism of the last few years landed all at once. But our meetings wouldn’t wait. And that surrealism belies the dire urgency which brought me here with like-minded friends and colleagues: the future of war is now, the time to prepare was yesterday, and the clock is running fast.

The urgency is not theoretical. In a wargame run last May called Hedgehog, ten Ukrainian drone operators running Delta (the Ukrainian equivalent of the US military’s battlefield management platform ATAK) defeated two NATO battalions in a matter of hours, an outcome that would take a conventional NATO peer force weeks to accomplish, if it could be accomplished at all. The United States was not there to witness it firsthand.

Those of us who have been there in Ukraine for years have been trying to close that distance. In August 2025, a drone pilot and former US Special Operator from my team, writing under the callsign “Xen,” warned in The Cipher Brief that drone warfare has already rendered Western military doctrine obsolete, and that without urgent restructuring of how the US military trains, procures, and integrates autonomous systems, America risks being catastrophically outpaced. Last fall, our team provided security and frontline access to humanitarian and fact-finding delegations whose reports carried the alarm further. Dr. Douglas Davis, Bert Watson, and Mike Hightower, writing from the rubble of a Shahed strike in Dnipro, laid out the tactical urgency — a narrow window to supply critical material before Russian pincer operations sever the Donbas — while warning that a horizontally linked axis of China, Iran, North Korea and other proxies is out-innovating Western procurement at every level. A companion piece in the Kyiv Post by Dr. Davis argued the broader strategic case: that Ukraine’s military-technology ecosystem and decentralized clandestine network position it to actively degrade China’s global proxy architecture in ways the US legally and diplomatically cannot. All three pieces arrive at the same conclusion: supporting Ukraine decisively is not charity, not regionalism, and not a distraction from the China threat. It is the most cost-effective security investment America can make against the very network of adversaries that underwrites Russia’s war and drives the broader contest between authoritarianism and the free world. And the window to make that investment and to reap our dividends is closing.

I’ve assisted colleagues in developing these pieces in part because Western media coverage has often lacked accurate, timely, and complete reporting on these issues. I’ve also given interviews to a handful of journalists committed to illuminating these gaps, including David Kirichenko. His reporting, informed by extensive frontline experience, is among the few efforts that accurately and comprehensively document the doctrinal changes unfolding in real time, from the soldier-as-engineer reality at Chasiv Yar to Ukraine’s evolving “drone wall,” and the AI-enabled and fiber-optic systems now reshaping the battlefield.

The numbers tell the story. Ukrainian aerial and naval drones costing hundreds or thousands of dollars are destroying Russian systems worth millions. At Avdiivka, Ukrainian units averaged one Russian killed every 6.5 minutes, while persistent drone surveillance , defense and strike capabilities stripped Moscow of meaningful aerial freedom along much of the frontline. The result is a battlefield that in many ways looks less like modern maneuver warfare and more like World War I: dense surveillance, constant attrition, and lethal exposure to anything that moves.

Meanwhile Kyiv has scaled drone production into the millions, demonstrating that battlefield advantage now flows less from exquisite platforms and more from rapid innovation, mass production, and real-time doctrinal adaptation. Countermeasures will inevitably emerge, but the structural advantage favors the side that can iterate fastest, produce at scale, and absorb those doctrinal shifts as they happen.

The implications for NATO should be impossible to ignore. Ukraine is rewriting the playbook of modern warfare in real time, while most Western militaries still train and equip themselves as if the sky is largely empty and the battlefield permissive. It isn’t, as has become clear over the past week as Iranian Shahed drones saturate the skies of the Middle East. The next war will belong to the side that can produce cheaper autonomous systems at scale, adapt doctrine at the speed of software, and treat every soldier not just as a warfighter, but as an operator, engineer, and innovator on a battlefield saturated with drones.

But we did not come to Washington to warn about alarms already sounded. We came to propose solutions. Our adversaries in Russia, Iran, China, and their proxies have already internalized these lessons. Here is what we’ve proposed.

Why What Exists Is Not Enough

The drone training that currently exists in the American military and law enforcement pipeline touches almost exclusively on how to fly and arm a drone. These are Level One tasks or the equivalent of a flat-range rifle qualification course. They test one individual skill and stop there. What they do not teach is planning, full mission profiles, field craft, or the combined arms understanding of how a drone interoperates with the broader fight around it.

Consider the rifle as an analogy. Qualifying on a flat range validates marksmanship, one key task. But it does not teach a soldier how to employ that weapon in combat. Stalking into position, camouflage on movement and in position, movement techniques, barrier usage, target effects, rates of fire, suppressive versus sustained fire, target selection, bounding techniques: these are the individual tasks that collectively determine whether a rifle is carried to the fight or actually used in it. Marksmanship alone is the beginning, not the end.

The same logic applies to drones, and the gap between where training currently stops and where it needs to go is vast. An FPV drone is now as common in the hands of a Ukrainian infantryman as an M4 carbine is in the hands of an American one. Drone employment can no longer be treated as a strategic-level asset or a specialist skill set. It must be incorporated into doctrine at every level, from the individual soldier to the theater commander.

The point at which a soldier effectively employs a weapon system in combat requires mastery of three things in combination: individual core soldier skills, technical proficiency with the system, and battle drills. A battle drill is a collective action rapidly executed without applying a deliberate decision-making process, the kind of deeply rehearsed, muscle-memory response that kicks in when there is no time to think. React to Contact. Squad Attack. These are drilled into every infantryman’s subconscious through grinding repetition. They work because everyone in the element knows their role, knows the SOP, and has trained to the point where the action is automatic.

Most SOPs, however, are written in blood. Combat lessons are only truly learned on a two-way range, where the outcome of one force against another can be accurately assessed. Training field hypotheses are not battlefield truths. NATO’s Hedgehog wargame in Estonia last spring demonstrated this with devastating clarity. America and NATO are currently disconnected from real-world battlefield truths in drone warfare, and without a program designed to extract and transmit those lessons continuously, there is no way to close that gap.

What We Are Doing About It

We are learning modern drone warfare techniques in real time, through the blood sacrifices of the Ukrainian front. With a constant pulse on the front line and joint operations with Ukrainian SOF units, we continuously extract current tactics/techniques/procedures (TTPs), SOP developments, and technology validation from a live, evolving fight against a near-peer adversary. Our instructors rotate in and out of theater on a continuous cycle: deploy, extract lessons, return stateside to instruct American SOF and law enforcement, take leave, return to Ukraine. Repeat. In doing so, we have already proven the only model which can keep pace with the monthly-evolving modern drone warfare environment.

The Full Spectrum of What Modern Drone Warfare Requires

To train for modern drone warfare, instruction must cover the full spectrum of the fight. That means understanding drones by type (FPVs, quadcopters, hexacopters, heavy lift platforms, fixed wing, bombers versus kamikazes, ISR variants) and knowing which system delivers which effect under which conditions. It means understanding how drone sectors of fire interlock, how systems can be dual-tasked, and what the limiting factors are when they are. It means understanding combined arms drone warfare: how to mass firepower and tasking, how ISR feeds targeting, how battlefield assessment informs maneuver.

It means planned employment, the operator techniques and TTPs required to move a system within range of a target, employ it effectively, and retrograde. It means react-to-contact drills for unplanned engagements. It means understanding communication systems across fiber, radio, SATCOM, and autonomous navigation, and knowing the real-world limitations of each. It means thermal mitigation, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence awareness: understanding your own signal footprint, capturing enemy video feeds, and knowing how signals security measures create either vulnerability or protection.

A brief example illustrates the depth of what is available. FPV drones are sacrificial kamikaze systems, not designed for ISR or sustained intelligence gathering. They work best in combination with another platform. A heavy lift bomber, with a robust stabilized camera, longer loiter time, and higher operating altitude, provides a complementary attack method if the FPV fails, a battle damage assessment platform following engagement, and a persistent intelligence-gathering asset that monitors both enemy and friendly maneuver and front-line trace. Pairing an FPV with a second FPV is a less preferred option, limited by the sacrificial camera quality and reduced loiter time, but viable in a react-to-contact scenario.

A react-to-contact battle drill built around these systems looks like this: return fire, get down, seek cover, get online with the soldiers left and right, call the three D’s: distance, direction, description. The rear element, not decisively engaged, immediately deploys two FPVs: one hunter, one spotter. The spotter confirms the reported information and maintains awareness of friendly front line trace and maneuvering elements. The hunter finds targets of opportunity and selects an attack angle. Spotter and hunter work in conjunction to assess battle damage, with a standing task of conducting a follow-on attack if required.

That is one battle drill. One grain of sand in a desert of untapped battlefield experience.

Tailoring the Lesson to the Audience

Effective instruction must also be audience-specific. What applies to a Marine platoon’s doctrine does not translate directly to Army maneuver warfare. What a conventional infantry unit needs is not what a Special Forces team preparing for unconventional warfare in a denied environment requires.

For Green Berets deploying worldwide to train and advise partner forces, the calculus shifts substantially. Foreign weapon systems become central to the curriculum. Low-cost drones available on the open market that can achieve desired combat effects become invaluable knowledge. Resistance warfare will incorporate drones from this point forward. Chinese, Russian, Iranian and Ukrainian technology will be present in future conflicts around the globe regardless of scale. Questions that matter in that context are different: What is available now? How is it employed? How do you defend against it? How do you operate in a small team, in a denied country, in airspace you do not control?

Staffing a former Green Beret as team leader on each rotation into theater addresses this directly. It brings language proficiency, cultural awareness, an unconventional warfare trained mind, and a leader experienced in building programs of instruction for both American and foreign forces.

Regular overlapping rotations of a nine-person instructor team, drawn from combat arms veterans across all branches of the military, is the most efficient mechanism available for digesting battlefield-learned information and translating it into doctrine-aligned, audience-specific instruction. That is not a claim made lightly. It is the product of years of doing exactly this work, on the front lines where the lessons are being written in real time. And properly funded, at a cost amounting to less per annum than a handful of Patriot missiles, it could be paradigm shifting. But it is only the start.

The problem is buy-in, scale, and consistent support. A handful of dedicated volunteers cannot revolutionize the entire US military alone. We have thus far moved faster than contracts or legislation could keep up with, and the inconsistency of that support has its own cost: volunteers burn out, move on, and take their hard-won knowledge with them, decoupling the gains made and resetting the clock. The bidirectional lane between US and Ukrainian industry and military is in urgent need of widening, not closing. Policymakers, senior military officers, lobbyists, and defense technology experts must push hard to make efforts like ours official. Given that there is no political will to deploy hundreds or thousands of uniformed advisors and liaisons into Ukraine, contracting is not a workaround. It is the only viable path to ensuring America does not fall further behind.

The clock is running, as is evident today with the unfolding escalations in and around Iran. 3 American F-15s were just shot down by friendly fire in Kuwait in part due to skies saturated with cheap long range Iranian drones. Across what were once considered “safe zones” in the Middle East, embassies and high-rises are beginning to look more like scenes from Kyiv than the calm rear areas they once were.

So today, that cold February air rushing through the split seam in my suit on Capitol Hill just weeks ago now feels less like metaphor than diagnosis. We are not approaching a crisis. We are already standing in one, pants down, exposed, our adversaries long through the door while we are still fumbling with the handle. The second hand keeps moving. But it is no longer counting down to a warning. It is counting the seconds of our indictment.

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