NATO is measuring Russian adaptation the wrong way

Russia’s war in Ukraine has generated an extraordinary reservoir of combat experience. NATO has understandably focused on what Moscow has learned: new approaches to unmanned systems, electronic warfare, reconnaissance-strike integration, command-post survivability, air defense, assault operations and logistics. 

However, the future Russian threat will depend less on what its forces have learned in Ukraine than on what the Russian military can reproduce elsewhere with different personnel, after casualties, rotation and organizational turnover. A brigade can discover a successful method for dispersing command posts or integrating drones with fires, without the Russian Armed Forces as a whole acquiring that capability. Other formations may copy it, a military academy can teach it, but there is no proof that a newly-generated formation can recreate the same military effect after the original innovators and their informal networks have gone. 

That distinction should change what NATO watches, what it models in exercises and how it thinks about disrupting Russian forces. For NATO, reproducibility, not adaptation alone, should become a distinct measure of Russian military capability — and drive how the alliance is making its military plans going forward.  

From Battlefield Innovation To Reproducible Capability

Russian military sources suggest that the General Staff and Ministry of Defense understand this problem increasingly well. Their learning architecture extends from battlefield lessons groups through command bodies, military-scientific committees, research institutes and military universities to training organizations and industry.

Of course, producing a recommendation is easier than changing battlefield behavior. But the push reveals something consequential: Moscow is attempting to build an institutional system that can capture experience, generalize it, teach it, test it, revise it and eventually regenerate the resulting capability.

Unmanned systems provide the clearest example. Russian drone warfare initially grew through a highly uneven ecosystem of military units, volunteers, commercial manufacturers and specialist organizations. The important development now is not another FPV drone or a higher operator count; it is the attempt to build permanent command structures, specialist education, training centers, repair and supply systems, military-scientific support and mechanisms for generating complete units. 

In July 2026, the Russian Defense Ministry said more than 8,000 specialists had been trained for its Unmanned Systems Forces during the first half of the year. The more important claim was that training was moving beyond individual specialists toward collective preparation of formed units on their assigned equipment.

For NATO intelligence, the 8,000 figure is less important than the institutional question behind it: can a newly generated Russian unmanned-systems unit deploy, integrate with other arms, maintain its equipment, replace casualties and continue generating operational effects without an exceptional external support network? That is the threshold between possessing combat experience and possessing a reproducible military capability.

NATO therefore needs to supplement traditional force assessment with what might be called force-generation intelligence. Orders of battle, equipment inventories and production rates remain essential, but they tell NATO primarily what Russia possesses. They are less effective at revealing what the Russian military is becoming capable of generating repeatedly.

Some of the most important indicators may consequently appear in institutions before they become visible in inventories: Changes in military-school curricula; new specialties and qualification systems; instructor assignments and battlefield placements; expansion of training centers; revised collective-training standards; methodological publications; maintenance arrangements; new command relationships; and, above all, the performance of newly generated or rotated formations. 

A new missile is obvious intelligence. A revised curriculum is not. Yet the second may offer earlier warning that a battlefield practice is becoming a durable component of Russian military power.

The distinction also helps avoid a recurrent analytical problem: extrapolating from Russia’s best units to the whole force. Russian adaptation has produced islands of considerable competence alongside much weaker average performance. A capability may be deeply institutionalized inside Rubicon or another specialist ecosystem while remaining difficult to reproduce in ordinary formations. Conversely, a method can spread widely while remaining shallow because units lack the training, maintenance or specialist support needed to execute it consistently. NATO assessments should therefore distinguish depth from breadth, rather than treating “Russia has adapted” as a useful conclusion in itself.

Destroying A Capability Is Not The Same As Defeating It

The same problem should enter NATO exercise design and operational planning. If a Russian reconnaissance-fire process depends on a small group of unusually experienced specialists, destroying that group may produce a substantial operational effect. If the organization has already trained replacements, standardized technical procedures, rehearsed alternative command relationships and built the support structure needed to recreate the process, the same strike may produce little more than temporary disruption.

NATO therefore needs to ask not only whether it can break a Russian military system, but how quickly Russia can restore an adequate version of it. After a command post is destroyed, are alternative headquarters already prepared to assume its functions? After a drone detachment is suppressed, how rapidly can replacement operators and equipment be introduced? If a logistics network is disrupted, are alternate routes and command arrangements already rehearsed? When specialist personnel are lost, does the replacement force inherit their competence through an institution, or must it relearn the problem from first principles? 

These questions change the value assigned to tactical success. A capability that can be reproduced demands different targeting, exercise and campaign assumptions from one that remains dependent on a few people or privileged formations.

Watch What Russia Can Regenerate

None of this means Russian institutionalization is inevitably succeeding. Lessons can become obsolete before they reach the force. Scaling can dilute competence. Ukraine-specific solutions can be generalized beyond the conditions that made them effective. Elite formations can create a false impression of force-wide transformation. And Russian military institutions may improve operational execution while remaining resistant to lessons that challenge hierarchy or politically protected strategic assumptions. Those weaknesses are precisely why the analytical standard needs to become more demanding.

The relevant question is no longer whether Russia has learned a lesson — it is whether that lesson survives time, scale, casualties, organizational transfer and changing battlefield conditions; and whether new personnel can reproduce the military effect after the people who originally discovered it have disappeared. 

For NATO, the most consequential warning signal will not be another Russian battlefield innovation. It will be the point at which Russia no longer needs the people who invented it.

Roger N. McDermott specializes in Russian military strategy, military thought and operational adaptation. He is a Senior Fellow on Russian Military Strategy at the Saratoga Foundation and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.