Accelerating defence innovation is essential for Europe to remain strategically relevant, Samuel Cranny-Evans warns. At the recent Digital Defence Series 2.0 debate, the Royal United Services Institute associate fellow highlighted Ukraine’s rapid adaptation and Russia’s advanced drone capabilities.
Samuel Cranny-Evans—the editor of Calibre Defence, an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, and a thought leader at the German startup Helsing—cuts quickly to the practical. Years spent cataloguing armoured vehicles have convinced him that doctrine matters only if steel, silicon and soldiers arrive together.
At the recent Digital Defence Series 2.0 debate, the Welsh analyst used that hard-won pragmatism to confront European policymakers labouring over a new package of defence legislation. His central worry: Europe may legislate itself into irrelevance while battlefronts in Ukraine evolve at lightning speed.
Is air superiority obsolete?
Mr Cranny-Evans framed Ukraine’s war as a giant test bed in which rapid adaptation trumps exquisite design. “Ukraine’s been reasonably successful and if you look at the stats through January, the deep strikes into Russia, it’s affected GDP and then if you look at the high strategic sanctions and oil and there’s some really good stuff that’s happening there,” he said.
Those strikes, he argued, show that a nimble, underfunded state can dent a larger aggressor’s economy without air superiority. Europe, supplier of most of Kyiv’s artillery shells and half its drones, cannot assume current production habits will stay relevant for long.
You might be interested
The analyst structured his talk around the venerable British triad of deep, close and rear battles. The deep fight now belongs to nations that compress design, testing and fielding cycles into months rather than decades. “So we mustn’t forget that the deep strike is good,” he said, hammering home that lesson for officials who still see drones as niche add-ons to classic firepower.
The close fight punishes armies that fail to fuse electronic warfare with infantry manoeuvre. The rear fight—railways, depots, substations—has become lethal because loitering munitions cost less than the pylons they destroy.
Changing depths
Cheap Neptunes and improvised drones have allowed Ukraine to hit oil depots at Novorossiysk and airfields near Kursk. Mr Cranny-Evans drew two conclusions. First, long-range strike need not be dominated by expensive missiles; it can rest on 3D-printed fins and open-source chips.
Second, the same ingenuity that powers Ukraine can undermine Europe if the Union clings to peacetime certification. “The weather’s been really poor recently,” he warned, and cloud cover alone has hampered Ukrainian counter-drone screens. European ports, rail hubs and power stations stand just as exposed.
For Brussels legislators trying to finalise safety rules for unmanned systems, that point stings. Under the current draft, a drone must still clear layers of paperwork before flight tests. Mr Cranny-Evans suggested an alternative: sandbox exemptions that expire quickly, allowing engineers to crash cheaply and learn fast. Without such leeway, Europe risks building yesterday’s weapon for tomorrow’s fight.
The Rubicon challenge
Nothing captures battlefield acceleration more vividly than Russia’s own drone corps. “Rubicon, which is the Russian initiative for drones is really impressive,” Mr Cranny-Evans noted. Created in 2024, the Rubicon Center fields roughly 5,000 operators, engineers and analysts under GRU stewardship.
Seven field detachments roam the front; a rear campus at Patriot Park feeds them weekly software updates. Their kit spans FPV swarms, fibre-optic-guided “ghost-wire” drones and long-range loiterers that strike 2,000 km away. Veteran crews rotate to spread each tweak.
They’re learning and adapting, they have mass in terms of people, and you’re seeing them better synchronized. — Samuel Cranny-Evans, analyst at RUSI, Helsing
European planners view Rubicon with a mixture of dread and envy. The outfit enjoys direct funding and regulatory slack that most Union firms would envy. When a new antenna proves promising, a Rubicon team can push it to the line without compliance limbo. Mr Cranny-Evans distilled the contrast: “They’re learning and adapting, they have mass in terms of people, and you’re seeing them better synchronized.” Brussels cannot grant itself Russian-style fiat, but it can prune redundant audits and encourage small firms that prototype quickly.
Lessons at arm’s length
Rubicon’s practices already echo in Ukraine’s counter-drones. Kyiv deploys five variants each morning, flies the one least jammed by midday and iterates by nightfall. The analyst called such churn essential. European budgets dwarf Kyiv’s, yet factories still parcel upgrades into triennial lots.
“Mission command would still stand,” he said, but officers must tolerate new gadgets appearing mid-exercise rather than waiting for a full procurement cycle. That flexibility must extend from brigadiers to junior coders soldering boards in shipping containers.
Here the EU’s pending Defence Industrial Regulation offers hope. Early drafts promise pooled orders and shared IP, but the annex on accelerated testing remains bracketed. Mr Cranny-Evans urged negotiators to fill that gap with hard timelines. If a prototype fails on Friday, a revised board should fly on Monday, not next quarter.
Training at tempo
Troops must learn at the same speed. Mr Cranny-Evans imagines a field exercise where a grey-haired general barges in, announces a sudden jamming threat and expects cadets to print a counter-antenna before sunset. “Technology leaders is really, really important and how you then link to innovation,” he said. European academies have started coding modules, but many still grade navigation by stopwatch rather than bandwidth. Brussels can nudge ministries by tying subsidy cheques to curricula that mix soldering irons with sandtables.
The personal cost of failure is rising. Russian drones now deny medics the ‘golden hour’ to evacuate casualties. Morale, therefore, depends on leaders who grasp spectrum warfare and human resilience in equal measure. Policy, the analyst implied, must match the lethality curve.
Old assumptions about stockpiles have collapsed. Mr Cranny-Evans quoted a fellow panellist—“Just-in-time deliveries mindset is out the window”—before sharpening the line: “Just go cheap, go fast and make it work.” Ukraine prints circuit boards in basements and buys Chinese parts retail.
Stocks and shocks
Russia piles rouble subsidies behind Rubicon’s order book. Europe risks the worst of both worlds: comfortable budgets shackled to multi-year tenders. The analyst reminded officials that Rubicon claims to have killed 1,160 Ukrainian drones and 270 vehicles in March alone. Delay, therefore, is not neutral; it bleeds lives.
Just go cheap, go fast and make it work. — Samuel Cranny-Evans
Commission economists fret about distorting the single market with blanket subsidies. Mr Cranny-Evans suggested ring-fenced funds for crash-programme munitions linked to strict delivery milestones. Miss a deadline twice, lose the grant. Such carrot-and-stick discipline might shock some primes, but it would reassure finance ministers who fear open-ended pork barrels.
Mr Cranny-Evans’s second intervention zeroed in on manufacturing culture. Ukraine’s workshops move computer-aided files across encrypted apps as artillery thumps nearby. “They’ll have five drones lined up for the day’s battle, which one’s going to work and they’ll adapt as, as it, because of what the EW threat may be,” he said. European export laws—designed to stop rogue regimes—now slow allied improvisation. The analyst did not call for lower standards, only for ‘fail-fast’ corridors that expire after the emergency.
Big maps, nimble penciles
Rubicon’s rotation scheme proves the concept. Each detachment returns from the front, briefs engineers, then redeploys with new code. Even if Ukrainian special operation forces strike Patriot Park, the doctrine lives in mirrors across field cells. The lesson for Europe: redundancy resides not just in hardened bunkers but in skills spread widely across reservists, SMEs and universities.
In his closing tale Mr Cranny-Evans described coaching cadets who practise analogue map-reading in case GPS dies. Then he scanned the modern horizon. “I think I need a bigger map because there’s so much going on out there,” he said. Spy balloons, Baltic seabed cables, cross-border drone sightings, all of this widens the theatre. Regulators, too, must enlarge their charts to include data law, energy policy and cyber norms in a single operational picture.
That sweep led to his most sombre line. “Innovate as you look forward to win the future. Right now I worry that we won’t,” Mr Cranny-Evans confessed — meaning he fears Europe will not win the future unless it accelerates. The verb matters: he worries Europe will not win. Without reform, Union forces may watch adversaries iterate at drone speed while their own auditors demand revised spreadsheets.
Choice and consequence
Victory, the analyst implied, will go to whoever compresses invention into days, not decades. Rubicon has already crossed that boundary. If Brussels writes legislation that spurs rapid prototyping, flexible certification and disciplined subsidies, the gap can close. Fumble the pen, and the next drone revolution may unfold over Antwerp rather than Avdiivka.
The choice remains Europe’s. It can overcome its process-heavy instincts to ‘go cheap, fast and make it work’, as Mr Cranny-Evans pleaded. The alternative means waiting for signatures while watching adversaries iterate, mass-produce and adapt.
