Oleksiy Honcharuk Senior Defence Seminar

Oleksiy Honcharuk, our recently joined Senior Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS, delivered a senior defence seminar to UK and European officials and academic practitioners earlier this month.

A former Prime Minister of Ukraine, advisor to the founding leadership of the world’s first Unmanned Systems Forces, and Chair of the Expert Council of one of Ukraine’s most effective combat units, Honcharuk shared key lessons from the war and outlined his strategic vision for UK and Western partners.

Honcharuk explained how Ukraine has been able to resist a numerically superior adversary while imposing disproportionate costs. The core of this success lies in a new operational approach adopted by next-generation units known as Combat Hubs.

Warfare has traditionally been understood through classical domains: land, air, sea, space, cyber, and information. Unmanned systems, Honcharuk argues, operate differently and should be analysed through the lens of the Time Domain. What matters most is the speed at which systems evolve and adapt processes and technologies to battlefield realities. The side that wins in this innovation race gains advantage in Time Domain and, he argues, can then capitalise on this to win the war. “Our systems should evolve faster than the enemy’s doctrine,” Honcharuk noted.

This new doctrinal perspective requires a new type of military unit. Honcharuk drew our attention to the Combat Hub as a hybrid structure—simultaneously a combat unit, command and control hub, an R&D department, and a drone manufacturer.

The Time Domain framework is grounded in the real-world experience of Ukraine’s most effective frontline units. Honcharuk concluded that the lessons learned in Ukraine must inform future defence planning for Europe. These ideas will be further developed in a forthcoming report for LSE IDEAS.