How Ukraine Became the World's Most Valuable Military Trainer

The air defense kill chain Ukraine built under fire is about to become the global standard for defeating cheap, one-way attack drones.

Licensed by the author

Ukrainian interceptor drone specialists will deploy in the coming days to the Middle East to assist in the defense of US bases and other sensitive sites in Southwest Asian host nations.

Zelensky acknowledged the first group flew to Jordan the day after Washington called, with more groups departing this week. The deployment follows at least eleven separate requests for Ukrainian counter-drone assistance, coming from the US, Europe, and multiple Gulf nations simultaneously.

Notably, the British Army’s 12th Regiment Royal Artillery, its primary counter-UAS formation, deployed to the Gulf on March 3, with many soldiers having trained directly alongside Ukrainian units.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Parliament that Britain would bring Ukrainian and British counter-drone expertise together to help Gulf partners shoot down Iranian drones.

So, what will they teach?

Well, you can’t fight Shaheds the way you fight ballistic missiles. Most countries aren’t as rich as the United States and can’t afford to shovel greenbacks into an active volcano for fun.

Clearly, after taking the Bar exam, I now have way too much time on my hands during the day to make shit like this in Photoshop.

Trust me, Lockheed Martin execs really want you to keep using PAC-3 (Patriot Advanced Capability-3) interceptors on Iranian mario cart drones. They told me as much as they were taking a swim in their Scrooge McDuck-sized money vaults.

Still, there are some academics who believe that the US hasn’t learned anything from the Ukraine War.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analyst Dara Massicot said in her assessment published this week: despite Russia’s extensive and damaging use of one-way attack drones against Ukraine for four years, (and Ukraine’s ongoing development of counters to these capabilities), it does not appear that the types of low-cost defense solutions Ukraine is using were replicated across Gulf nations or by the US military in the region.

That is the polite academic version of: nobody was paying attention.

I disagree with Ms. Massicot on one point: The US had started equipping F-16s and F-15s in the region with APKWS rockets as early as last spring. These are ideal for Shahed hunting and the US initially pivoted this direction when it was engaging the Houthi rebels’ slow-ass drones last year.

The APKWS or Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System is essentially a dumb hydra rocket upgraded with laser guidance. We [OSINT reporters] started spotting these upgraded rockets on US warplanes in the wild last year and many APKWS units have already made their way to Ukraine.

The Kill Chain: Why Speed Is the Whole Game

Okay, so before we get into specific Ukrainian lessons, there is a framework worth understanding because it applies to everything Ukraine will teach, and everything that goes wrong when air defense fails.

The Kill Chain! Not only would it make for a cool name for a metal garage band, but it’s also moderately useful in war.

In the Air Force, we called it F2T2EA. Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess.

I should note, the name ‘kill chain’ is also used in cybersecurity which can lead to some confusion. But forget those computer nerds for now… for our military purposes, it starts here:

Find: detect that a threat exists somewhere in your operational environment.

Fix: establish its precise location.

Track: maintain continuous awareness of where it is going.

Target: match the right weapon to the right threat at the right moment.

Engage: execute the kill.

Assess: confirm the kill and determine whether the threat is neutralized or still requires action.

Every act of releasing a munition or air defense effector, from a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone over Afghanistan, to the sinking of the Iranian destroyer by an American torpedo in the Indian Ocean last week, runs through a variation of this sequence.

The framework doesn’t change based on the weapon, the theater, or the century. What changes is how fast each link executes, how much information fidelity you preserve between links, and how many humans are in the chain slowing it down.

My thesis is simple: the side with the shorter (or faster) kill chain, without losing control or information fidelity, wins.

I believe that principle has always been true. What makes the current era different is the convergence of cheap sensors, ubiquitous data links, and artificial intelligence creating the conditions for kill chains that compress from hours to minutes to seconds, and in some autonomous systems, to milliseconds.

Okay, I’m actually proud of this one. Created by the author in Canva

The United States built its kill chain doctrine around high-end threats moving fast; think ballistic missiles, supersonic aircraft, time-critical targets with defined engagement windows.

The chain was optimized for precision and legal compliance; multiple humans at multiple nodes confirming identity, authority, and proportionality before a trigger gets pulled. This kept the DoD lawyers happy but the kill chain could be painfully slow at times.

Ukraine had no choice but to compress the chain. Under sustained attack from waves of Russian-Iranian drones arriving at unpredictable intervals across a 1,500-kilometer front line, the old doctrine of deliberate multi-node approval collapsed under its own weight.

Ukraine rebuilt the chain from first principles: push detection to the edge, pre-delegate engagement authority to the lowest capable level, automate the handoff between sensors and shooters wherever possible, and accept that some engagement decisions would be made by a twenty-three-year-old FPV pilot with a two-second window rather than a targeting officer with a checklist.

I want to pause here to note what you just read: Ukraine has effectively sped up the kill chain, but they had to lose some centralized control in the process.

The result is arguably the most compressed air defense kill chain in operational use anywhere in the world today.

This is exactly why Ukraine’s trainers are flying to the Gulf.

Not necessarily because Gulf militaries lack sophisticated equipment… they have some of the most advanced air defense hardware on the planet. But hardware without a compressed, disciplined, rehearsed kill chain is hardware that fires too late.

The Shahed that hit NSA Bahrain’s radar installation didn’t defeat a missile. It defeated a decision cycle.

Where AI Enters the Equation (a quick aside)

Artificial intelligence has genuine potential to compress the kill chain further, and the Ukraine conflict has been an accelerated laboratory for exactly this application.

I wrote about this in my “AI in Warfare” primer here on Substack, but essentially AI-assisted target classification reduces the time between Fix and Track by automating the sensor fusion step; correlating inputs from radar, RF sensors, electro-optical cameras, and acoustic arrays simultaneously, filtering false tracks, and presenting operators with a ranked threat picture rather than a raw data flood.

The human still makes the engagement decision, but the machine has already done the first four steps of the chain at machine speed!

AI-assisted cueing goes further, automatically assigning incoming tracks to the appropriate engagement layer based on pre-programmed cost ladder rules.

A track classified as a slow, low-altitude fixed-wing consistent with a Shahed profile gets assigned to an interceptor drone crew.

A track with ballistic trajectory characteristics gets assigned to a Patriot battery.

A track with electronic emissions consistent with a reconnaissance UAV gets flagged for electronic warfare response.

All of this happens before a human intelligence officer has finished putting his Half and Half in his shitty morning coffee.

This is the cheesiest photo I could find on Envato market of an intelligence officer drinking coffee. Licensed by the author

Ukraine’s drone industry has been integrating computer vision and autonomous tracking into interceptor systems at a pace that would be unrecognizable in a traditional defense procurement environment.

General Cherry’s Bullet interceptor uses onboard AI to detect and track Shaheds autonomously, reducing the FPV pilot’s role from continuous guidance to terminal engagement confirmation.

That one change meaningfully compresses the Track-to-Engage link for operators managing multiple simultaneous intercepts.

The limitation worth me saying out loud, because Ukraine will say it out loud to Gulf partners: AI accelerates the chain but does not replace the human judgment required at the Engage node.

Anyways, the broader point is this: the kill chain framework that Air Force officers have carried in their heads since the 1990s is now the most relevant conceptual tool for understanding why drone warfare is reshaping modern conflict.

The weapons change.

The terrain changes.

The threats change.

The chain doesn’t.

What changes is how fast each link fires, and whether the humans in the chain are trained, positioned, and authorized to keep up with the threats moving through it.

Ukraine shortened the chain. That is why Ukrainian cities are still standing after 57,000 drone attacks.

That is what the trainers are bringing to the Gulf.

Okay, we’re like 1,500 words into this piece and haven’t even gotten to the lessons yet… Here’s what Ukraine trainers are bringing to the Gulf:

Triage, or the Art of Not Wasting Your Best Ammunition

Ukraine’s first and most important contribution to Gulf air defense culture is teaching triage, specifically, the discipline of deciding what gets killed with expensive interceptors and what gets handled with cheaper layers.

This sounds obvious until you’re the base commander at 0200 watching forty tracks appear on your radar and realizing that firing a PAC-3 at every one of them will empty your battery before sunrise.

Ukraine’s answer is a cost ladder.

High-end threats: ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, advanced UAVs, go to high-end interceptors.

Everything below that threshold gets pushed down to the cheapest available layer capable of reliably killing it.

Machine guns. Lasers. Short-range missiles. Electronic warfare where it actually works. Interceptor drones where the geometry allows.

The goal is to preserve your premium interceptors for the threats they were built to kill and handle the rest with systems that cost less than the drone you’re shooting at.

Ukraine has been living inside this doctrine since 2022. The Gulf is about to learn it under fire.

Multi-Sensor Detection, Because One Sensor Lies to You

If you want to beat a low, slow drone consistently, you don’t bet your life on a single sensor type. You fuse.

Ukraine’s detection architecture layers multiple sensor types precisely because Shaheds and their variants can be configured different ways.

Some emit RF signals throughout flight.

Some go quiet on approach.

Some fly predictable corridors that make pattern recognition possible.

Some hug terrain in ways that create false ground clutter.

No single sensor handles all of these configurations reliably.

Ukraine’s likely playbook starts with short-range radars tuned for small, slow targets combined with passive RF sensors for anything emitting, electro-optical and infrared for confirmation and tracking, and in some environments acoustic detection arrays as an additional tripwire.

There is also an environmental adaptation problem the Gulf presents that Ukraine’s Colonel Yurii Cherevashenko, deputy commander of Ukraine’s air defense cover forces, flagged specifically to NPR: the terrain is predominantly flat with little vegetation, leaving mostly unobstructed lines of sight… which is good. But the temperatures are harsh, and the sensors of interceptor drones might not work properly in extreme heat.

That is not a minor footnote.

It is a significant operational variable that Ukrainian specialists will need to account for in their recommendations.

The same system that performs reliably in a Ukrainian winter may behave differently sitting on a runway in Kuwait in a 115-degree heat.

I’ve been to Ali-Al-Salim in Kuwait during the summer. I’ll just say this to my Ukrainian comrades: USE sunblock and hydrate!

The author in Kuwait. You can almost feel the heat through this photo…

Cueing Speed, or How Hesitation Kills You

Ukraine’s most important operational improvement since 2022 is cueing speed: the elapsed time between “someone’s sensor detected something” and “a shooter has a valid track and engagement authority.”

Ukraine has spent four years compressing the timeline to automated track correlation, standardized comms, pre-delegated engagement authorities, and relentless rehearsal of the handoff between detection and engagement.

Ukrainian teams in the Gulf will teach exactly that: who owns the track, who owns the shoot decision, how fast the assignment moves from the sensor operator to the cheapest available layer that can kill it.

They will also teach something less glamorous but equally important: radio discipline. When a base gets hit and multiple threats are inbound simultaneously, the instinct is to flood the net with voice traffic.

Ukraine has learned that this instinct kills people. Short, standardized comms when the sky is busy is a skill, and it is one that requires deliberate practice to build.

The Immune System Concept, Not the Perfect Shield

This is the hardest cultural shift for Western-trained air defenders, and it is the most important thing Ukraine will bring to the Gulf.

Western air defense culture, built around the NATO model, is designed around perfection.

The goal is to defeat every threat.

The training, the doctrine, the success metrics… all of it is oriented toward 100 percent intercept rates. That is a reasonable aspiration when you are defending against occasional high-value threats. It is a fantasy when you are defending against an industrialized raid campaign designed to overwhelm you with volume.

Ukraine had to abandon the perfect shield concept early because it had no choice. What replaced it is something more realistic and ultimately more sustainable: an immune system model.

You harden what can be hardened. You reposition what can be repositioned. You add decoys. You camouflage critical assets. You accept that some drones will get through and you structure your defense so those leaks don’t create strategic damage.

You protect the things that make you functional like fuel, power, aircraft on the ground, ammunition storage, command nodes, runways; rather than trying to sanitize the entire sky.

For Gulf bases currently under pressure, this likely means changes to aircraft parking discipline, generator redundancy, shelter usage, rapid runway repair posture, and the location of command and control nodes.

None of that is a weapons system. All of it is how you keep flying sorties on day fourteen when the magazine is running low and the crew rotation is stretched.

Passive defense reduces the number of shots you need. Every drone you defeat by deception or hardening is a missile you didn’t have to fire.

Electronic Warfare: What It Does and What It Doesn’t

Every conversation about drone defense eventually arrives at the same suggestion: just jam it.

Ukrainian specialists will deliver the same assessment they have been giving anyone who will listen for three years: electronic warfare is not a cheat code.

Jamming can disrupt some drones, in some configurations, in some environments. It can also disrupt your own systems, your own communications, and your own air traffic management if you apply it carelessly.

And autonomous drones with inertial navigation, drones that don’t rely on GPS for guidance, can ride through jamming attempts better than most operators expect.

The contribution Ukraine brings to EW in the Gulf is disciplined employment doctrine: use electronic warfare as one layer of a layered defense, measure its actual effects in your specific environment, and do not assume it is working just because you turned it on.

The Interceptor Drone Piece: The Cheap Bullet, Exported

This is mostly what the press coverage has focused on, and it is genuinely significant, but it needs context.

Ukrainian interceptor drones, including the Wild Hornets’ STING starting at $993 per unit, and the P1-SUN, are designed to detect, chase, and physically destroy Shaheds before they reach their targets.

They represent a fundamental shift in the cost equation: instead of firing a million-dollar missile at a thirty-thousand-dollar drone, you fly a thousand-dollar drone into it.

The intercept geometry is FPV: first-person view pilots guide the interceptor to its target using onboard camera feeds and ram the Shahed out of the sky.

This approach has achieved confirmed hit rates of 80 to 90 percent against standard Shaheds in Ukrainian operating conditions. It has driven the cost-per-kill down by multiple orders of magnitude compared to missile-based intercepts.

For Gulf deployment, interceptor drones would likely be used to cover specific high-value areas, thin out saturation waves so missile batteries don’t get magazine-emptied by cheap threats and push the engagement further out from critical infrastructure.

They are not a replacement for the full layered defense.

The heat sensitivity issue Cherevashenko flagged is real and will require either hardware adaptation or operational workarounds like engaging earlier in the flight path before heat affects sensor performance or deploying from shaded or cooled positions.

These are solvable problems, but they require the kind of ground-truth environmental calibration that you only get from being on the ground with the system.

There is a second-order implication that deserves the final word.

Every time the world gets better at killing Shaheds, Russia’s primary long-range terror weapon against Ukrainian cities becomes less useful. Russia has launched more than 57,000 of these drones at Ukrainian infrastructure and they were counting on that weapon to remain effective indefinitely.

Now the Gulf states, the US military, and potentially several other regional partners are about to receive four years of accumulated Ukrainian counter-Shahed doctrine.

This information is GOLD. I hope Ukraine is charging top dollar. God knows the Gulf states, and the US, can afford it.

The kill chain Ukraine built under fire is about to become the global standard for defeating cheap, mass-produced, one-way attack drones.

Ukraine didn’t ask to become the world’s drone defense instructor. Russia and Iran forced it into the role.

Now Ukraine is showing up to teach because it understands something Putin still hasn’t figured out.

In modern war, experience IS the weapon.

Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the heroes. Crimea is Ukraine.

Note: I typically publish free articles here on Tuesdays and Fridays. I try to stick to that schedule, but occasionally, news will require earlier posting in order for it to still be, ahem, newsworthy. So this article is posted a day earlier than expected. As a reminder, I also post on Medium (usually unique analysis) and on YouTube (if you prefer to listen to my Midwest accent with occasional Texan sneaking in).