The Russia-Ukraine war has raged for over a decade and destroyed families and livelihoods. But, like all wars, it's also spurred innovation through brutal necessity. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Ukraine's adoption of drone warfare.
In 2023, Ukraine launched a state-backed defense cluster designed to sync up the needs of frontline soldiers with the country's tech industry. Part of that cluster involves an e-commerce platform called the Brave1 Market. Or, more commonly, "Amazon for drones".
Ukrainian soldiers can order equipment from tech manufacturers directly to their units by logging into a dashboard and spending their allocated military funding based on what they actually need. But here's where it gets interesting: units can earn digital currency (called e-points) for completing missions — whether that's reconnaissance, evacuation or neutralizing an enemy target. Different targets have different values attached and e-points can be redeemed in the marketplace for new kit.
The Ukrainian government changes these values as its priorities in the war shift. This point-scoring in turn incentivises soldiers to buy only the right equipment they need for the mission, which, in turn, creates competition and innovation among the manufacturers. Real-time intel, like telemetry or strike verification data, is also fed back to the manufacturers by the soldiers so they can patch software or refine their products to improve them.
According to Defense Daily, the Ukrainian model has been so successful that the U.S. Army wants to roll out its own version of Brave1 later this year.
Browsing the marketplace
Despite not being enlisted in the Ukrainian military myself, there is still a huge amount of the Brave1 marketplace open to the public. I spent a morning browsing the site and, while I can't buy myself a new reconnaissance drone, I can look at specs, features and prices.
There's a huge amount of equipment available to look at, from land-based transportation drones to tiny interceptors designed to take down much larger (and more expensive) Russian drones before they can hit their target.
You can even filter down by things like which type of camera you need (nighttime or thermal imaging), payload weight as well as range and engine type.
As well as drones, soldiers can order munitions, encrypted radios, targeting tools specialized payloads and combat robots from Brave1.
While regular folks like me can't buy from the marketplace, civilian engineers, garages, and tech startups can all register their hardware or software on Brave1. If Ukraine approves it, then they can sell directly to the military.
In a January article for the U.S. Naval Institute, Marine Corps Second Lieutenant Rob Rucki noted: "Today, innovation is not just a feature of a combat system; it is a principle of warfare to be exploited for advantage. To succeed requires developing processes that enable iteration and deployment of new technologies faster than adversaries. Nowhere has this been more apparent than on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, where the pace of innovation is driving the outcome of the fight.
"A similar innovation combat marketplace for the joint force would close the gap between frontline, company-level warfighters and private-sector producers."
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