Regardless of the territorial settlement and alliance restrictions placed on Ukraine by ongoing negotiations, what should the post-war Ukrainian military look like to defend the nation’s sovereignty and deter future Russian attacks? Even if Ukraine has guarantees from Russia and foreign troops deploy to monitor any ceasefire, Kyiv cannot rule out future attacks and must maintain a larger military than before the 2022 invasion. This force must balance the security needs of the state with the tremendous costs of economic reconstruction and repatriating refugees. Yet, the formations that guard Ukraine’s steppe frontier will look different than the composition of most European militaries due to three defining trends: (1) the rise of drone warfare; (2) demographic decline across Europe; and (3) the new missile age.
To ensure that any ceasefire becomes a lasting peace, Ukraine will have to continue substituting drones for people and invest in a mix of layered air defense and long-range conventional precision strike. This force will need a deep strategic reserve that changes how free societies think about their reserve component and national service.
Trend 1: The Rise of Drone Warfare
The war in Ukraine has shown that drones are an integral part of modern combined arms warfare. Kyiv has held off Russian advances using a mix of artillery, electronic warfare, and drones to fight outnumbered and deny large Russian territorial advances. Small, cheap drones are now the most common killer on the battlefield. Entirely new drone formations and technical skills have emerged that compound this effect to stop Russian assaults in their tracks.
This new approach to ground combat requires constant battlefield adaptation and a dynamic, decentralized civilian sector that has seen the country grow from five drone companies since the start of the war in 2022 to over 500 in 2025. Thanks to a wide range of measures, including deregulation, often championed by the Minister for Digital Transformation, Ukraine now domestically produces long-range strike drones and is on track to produce over 2.5 million drones a year.
Trend 2: Demographic Decline
It is a good thing that drones are proving an effective replacement for manpower as the dominant killer on the battlefield. Ukraine, like many European states, faces a stark demographic future compounded by a wave of refugees who fled the war. Ukraine left the Soviet Union in 1991 with a total population of 52.5 million only to suffer decades of demographic decline. Low birth rates and emigration were constants even before the Russian invasion. By 2024, Ukraine’s population had dropped to 37.9 million. This reality has led to the first modern “old man’s war” in which older generations, including volunteers over 60, fight to preserve a people’s demographic future. As a result, Ukraine limits conscription to men between the ages of 25 and 60. This trend further deepens the need for Ukraine to rely on drone warfare in the future.
Trend 3: The New Missile Age
Russia struggles to advance on the front line but has created a wartime economy—supported by Tehran, Beijing, and Pyongyang—capable of mass producing long-range attack drones that support firepower strikes. The result has been a trend toward war waged increasingly in terms of holding civilians hostage to punishing terror attacks from the skies, as seen most recently during its Blitz-like attack on Kyiv in late April. As seen in the missile exchanges between Israel and Iran in 2024, this new form of war transcends the conflict in Ukraine and is likely to define future great power conflicts. Given the declining costs and increased range of modern missiles and drones, this trend will only accelerate and create entirely new campaigns. States will still need to hold terrain and defend their territory, but countering long-range attacks while retaining the ability to strike the enemy in depth will become increasingly important.
The New Sword: More Drones, Fewer People
These three trends define what a post-war Ukrainian military will look like. The new force will be larger than 2022 but smaller than 2025, at least in terms of manpower, given a need to get people back to work and rebuild the country.
First, the new force will need to continue Ukraine’s comparative advantage in drone warfare. That requires not just keeping drone units but also maintaining the network of small and medium firms that allowed Ukraine to scale its production during the war. This industrial requirement also creates workforce and education demands. Ukraine will need to explore how to maintain a technical training and education pipeline for both its drone economy and military force. Even if major backers like the United States reduce direct aid, they can find new forms of economic diplomacy to invest in this drone ecosystem, mutually benefiting both Kyiv and Washington.
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Second, Ukraine will need to expand its layered air defense network while sustaining its production of long-range precision strike assets. To date, much of Ukraine’s air defense emerged from a mix of Western support and ingenious adaptations of legacy weapons systems. That will have to change with new investments in high-powered microwaves, high-energy lasers, and other low-cost ways and means for limiting Russian drone and missile attacks. The United States can support this domestic Ukrainian expansion through revisiting its International Traffick in Arms Regulations restrictions and even, as with Iron Dome in Israel, finding coproduction and experimentation projects that benefit both countries.
Third, Ukraine will need to develop new defense plans that explore how to integrate larger, unmanned formations with layered defenses and standoff precision strike. These plans must include entirely new concepts for a strategic reserve. Unlike U.S. reserve forces, which involve monthly commitments, Ukraine needs tiered categories that allow computer coders and engineers to rebuild the economy as a form of national service, aided by creative online means and annual short-term mobilizations to say current. A new strategic reserve could also find creative ways of better integrating cyber defenses and shifting money from paying people to subsidizing the drone industry. It should also—like the Army of Drones initiative—find creative ways to mobilize civil society at home and abroad.
Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab and a senior fellow for the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.
