Bureaucracy in Kyiv and Rigid Thinking in the West Are Stalling Ukraine’s Weapons Production, Report Finds

A new report from the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS) at King’s College London concludes that a combination of sluggish regulatory processes in Ukraine and entrenched, unimaginative attitudes within Western militaries is slowing joint weapons production at a critical moment for Kyiv’s defence. The findings, which were discussed with experts who spoke to Al Jazeera, suggest that these obstacles are not merely administrative annoyances but are actively degrading Ukraine’s performance on the battlefield and leaving Europe’s armed forces ill-prepared for the character of modern warfare.

For the past two years, Ukraine has pursued a strategy of inviting Western partners to invest in new production facilities on Ukrainian soil. The arrangement is designed as a two-way exchange: Kyiv receives a steady supply of weapons, while its Western partners gain invaluable know-how from a military fighting a high-intensity war in real time. According to the CSNS report, titled "Beyond Aid: Making Ukraine Defence Cooperation Work," this formula has generated at least 180 business-to-business partnerships between Ukrainian and foreign entities. However, 22 percent of these ventures are currently stalled.

One of the most prominent examples of a stalled project is an artillery shell factory that German defence giant Rheinmetall announced a year ago. The facility should now be entering production, yet construction has not even begun. According to the report, Ukrainian authorities delayed the necessary permits, and the government subsequently relocated the factory’s intended site. Such delays have a direct impact on the volume of ammunition reaching the front lines.

The problems extend beyond permits and site selection into the realm of intellectual property. Chris Pool, a visiting fellow at the CSNS, told Al Jazeera that the process of registering intellectual property in Ukraine is lengthy and poorly suited to the pace of modern conflict. Because iteration cycles move so quickly, what gets registered and legally protected is often already obsolete by the time the paperwork is complete. This mismatch creates uncertainty for Western partners who want to know what they actually own.

The speed of Ukrainian innovation is difficult for Western defence establishments to comprehend. Former CIA Director General David Petraeus recently noted that Ukrainian drone manufacturers can make software changes once a week in response to Russian countermeasures, and hardware changes every three or four weeks. By the peacetime standards of Western militaries, that is a dizzying rate of adaptation. Pool raised a further complication: when a Ukrainian brigade receives a product and then modifies it for new battlefield developments, the question of who owns the intellectual property in the improved version remains unresolved. It is unclear whether the Ukrainian state would hold a stake at that point.

Export rights represent another significant hurdle. The CSNS report notes that while focusing exclusively on the Ukrainian market may be viable during the initial stage of a venture, the absence of a clear export mechanism may later constrain companies’ ability to integrate Ukrainian-based facilities into wider international supply chains. Without a predictable path to export, Western firms have less incentive to commit to long-term production inside Ukraine.

The obstacles, however, are not solely Ukrainian. Pool, who has spoken with Ukrainian teams seeking Western partners, points to a rigid approach to land warfare in Europe’s militaries. In 2022, both Russia and Ukraine fought with classic battlefield artillery and heavy armour, and Ukraine defeated Russia’s initial attacks through effective use of defensive weapons. But when Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in 2023, it could not compete with Russian scale and production capacity, and it rapidly adapted. It designed cheap, long-range drones and missiles to interrupt the flow of Russian weapons and fuel to the front and to strike Russian refining capacity. It also began producing first-person view (FPV) drones to serve as a form of artillery.

The scale of this pivot is staggering. Ukraine reportedly invested $1bn in drone warfare in 2023, ten times what it spent in 2022. A New York Times video analysis found that Ukraine struck as many Russian armoured vehicles in three months this year as in all of 2022. In 2024, Ukraine produced a million FPV drones. In 2025, production exceeded 3 million. This year, Ukraine will produce an estimated 8 million drones — 16 for every 10 that Russia fields — achieving localised air superiority in key areas.

These new weapons have been accompanied by new tactics and new command structures. Konstantinos Grivas, who teaches advanced weapons systems at the Hellenic Military Academy, told Al Jazeera that the most important development is decentralised command, which Ukraine has implemented more than anyone else. Units do not wait for orders from above; they gather their own information and make their own decisions. This approach demands highly capable junior commanders, and it runs directly counter to classic military hierarchies and tactics.

That cultural gap was on display in wargames dubbed Combined Resolve. In August, Ukrainian drone operators destroyed a US tank brigade by simulating their tactic of dropping armour-piercing artillery directly onto tanks. They did the same to a British brigade in February. Pool said that when Ukrainian teams present a new technology or a navigation system that does not rely on GPS, they encounter a lack of curiosity from their Western counterparts about how it might be adapted. In the UK, he added, there is a certain amount of arrogance that the British army would not fight this way, and that while the Ukrainian experience is interesting, it is ultimately not relevant.

Ukrainian teams have reportedly been told to partner with established defence companies such as British Aerospace or Babcock so that the British military can deal with the familiar faces it is used to. Western militaries, according to Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former senior adviser to Ukraine’s Ministries of Defence, have not even started to shift all of their land forces units into drone infantry. The cumulative effect is a troubling paradox: Ukraine is fighting a war that is reshaping how wars will be fought, while the regulatory paralysis in Kyiv and the institutional inertia in Western capitals are slowing the very cooperation that could help both sides adapt.