From Ukraine’s Wartime Adaptation to Europe’s Defence Readiness: Learning from Ukraine’s Adaptive Governance in the Defence Sector
By Matthew B. Arnold, Viktoriia Roller and Khrystyna Zhyvogliad
Europe’s defence challenge is more than drones and budgets; it is about whether the defence institutions of states and their wider security apparatuses can keep pace with modern warfare and increasing hybrid threats. This paper uses Ukraine’s wartime experience to develop a holistic concept of adaptive defence governance and to test its implications for a largely peacetime Europe. It offers a working definition built around four dimensions – adaptive institutions, distributed innovation and learning, networked state–society co-production, and strategic anchoring – and traces how these developed across Ukraine’s defence sector after 2014 as state, military, industrial and societal actors jointly shaped adaptive capacity. Taken together, these dimensions show that adaptive defence governance can transform wartime shocks into more enduring national resilience through a democratically anchored defence ecosystem that systematically mobilises and coordinates state and societal capabilities.
The analysis shows how high-intensity war exposes rigidities and unlocks capacities that peacetime reform rarely reaches, pushing Ukraine to adapt its defence governance under continuous pressure rather than through short-lived emergency fixes. It argues that Ukraine’s experience constitutes an early European stress test of adaptive defence governance and a usable model for designing peacetime institutional tempo across core defence-management functions. It draws out practical lessons for European allies on how to build latent and active adaptive capacities before crisis hits.
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This research report is part of the Democratic Resilience in a New Age of War project. It was produced in partnership with the Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO), an NGO registered in Kyiv, Ukraine.
About the Authors
Matthew B. Arnold is Programme Director of LSE IDEAS’ Democratic Resilience in a New Age of War Programme. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Viktoriia Roller is Head of the Analytical Unit, Defence Policy Sector at Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO). She holds a doctoral degree in law from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
Khrystyna Zhyvogliad is Senior Defence Policy Analyst, Defence Policy Sector at BRDO. She holds a master’s degree from Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics.