Ask an insider and they would say that one of the biggest challenges to the growth of a homegrown defence industry Is the bureaucracy. Capital and technology are of course major constraints, but sometimes the paperwork and procedures are the real pain. Ukraine, in the middle of a long-drawn war has figured out a way around the paperwork. In this piece, Adam Gramegna shows how Ukraine has turned military procurement into almost a game.
He begins in a muddy dugout near Bakhmut where soldiers are peering over a tablet. They “aren’t scanning Netflix or a social media profile. They are looking at a leaderboard.” On the DELTA system, one Russian T-72, “spotted by a scout and finished by a loitering munition, has just been ‘cashed in’ for forty points.” That, Gramegna explains, is “a down payment on a fresh stack of FPV drone interceptors. This is the new ePoint economy, a system that has turned the grim business of attrition into a high-stakes version of a tactical loadout screen.”
“Simplicity is the game here; if you can prove the kill, you get the gear,” he writes. “A standard infantryman could be worth six points… A mobile rocket system or a high-value electronic warfare suite can net a unit seventy points or more. Evacuating wounded friendlies? You are looking at possibly 120 points.” Units spend what they earn to buy drones and kit directly from manufacturers, and nothing pays out on trust alone: “No payout occurs without a timestamped, geo-located video feed of the impact.”
In the old world the soldier took whatever central command sent; “In the Brave1 economy, the soldier is a consumer.” If a model of drone keeps failing against Russian jamming, “the soldiers stop buying it. The points will flow elsewhere. This market pressure forces manufacturers to innovate or go bankrupt.” It is, he writes, “a Darwinian cycle that ensures the hardware in the trenches is what is actually working today, not what a lobbyist promised would work three years ago.” Through a shared dashboard the makers “aren’t looking for polite reviews; they are looking to see why their product failed to trigger an ePoint payout,” and so “a vulnerability found on Monday is patched in the software by Wednesday and shipped in a new hardware revision by the following week.”
The winners compound. Emerging from the competition, Gramegna writes, are “units that are so well funded by their own performance that they operate almost as independent military entities. They have their own R&D labs and their own direct lines to manufacturers, fueled entirely by the ePoints they harvest from the Russian invaders.”
He does not pretend the discomfort away. “Critics of the system will point to the ‘video-game’ optics as a descent into ritualized slaughter,” he writes, before laying out its moral counterbalance: a live prisoner “is significantly higher than the bounty for a kill. A surrender is worth sixty points, nearly ten times the value of a kinetic engagement.” That design, he admits, is unsentimental – part sparing soldiers a “Pavlovian response to death,” part “a little more sinister in nature, but tactically sound… a cold, calculated move to bolster the prisoner exchange fund.”
Gramegna is clear-eyed about what it all is: “not some ‘rad innovation’ or tech-bro experiment; it is a desperate, yet effective response to a war of attrition that has outpaced the traditional world,” and “the first time in history that the ‘ledger of war’ has been put directly into the hands of the people fighting it.” In the future, he writes, a soldier’s equipment “isn’t just a rifle and a ruck; it’s a shopping cart fueled by the wreckage of any invading enemy.”
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