Four years into the war, Russia's savagely mauled military has been forced into a series of adaptations that reveal both the armed forces' capacity for learning under duress and the systemic constraints that limit how far those lessons can go. A new report from the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) describes the emergence of so-called "Rubicon units" as one of the most significant developments in the conflict.

Iskander Rehman, the report's author, argues that these units have "fundamentally transformed Russian drone operations by standardizing procedures across the front, enabling rapid innovation, and systematically sharing lessons between formations," "Hvylya" reports, citing the HCSS study.

Russia entered the war relying heavily on unobserved massed artillery fire, but Ukrainian counter-battery operations forced significant changes. Russian units integrated small unmanned aerial systems for fire adjustment, compressing the sensor-to-shooter cycle and improving accuracy. The front line is now so saturated with drones that vehicle movement within 15 kilometers is effectively impossible, forcing infantry to march to their positions on foot.

Russian tactics have also evolved in parallel. Ukrainian commanders describe "1,000 cuts" tactics, in which small teams of two to four soldiers exploit gaps in Ukrainian positions that can be up to 1,000 meters apart. Glide bombs and Shahed-type drones are used to create gaps where none previously existed. Drones now reportedly account for more than 80 percent of destroyed Russian targets in Ukraine, underscoring the revolution in unmanned warfare the conflict has produced.

The study draws a parallel to Nazi Germany's Condor Legion in Spain, which tested 27 types of aircraft over three years and refined combined-arms tactics that proved devastating in World War II. The open question, Rehman argues, is whether Russia's adaptations represent genuine institutional learning - like Germany's - or merely battlefield pragmatism unlikely to survive into peacetime doctrine, like the Soviet army's experience after Spain.

"Hvylya" earlier reported on how NATO's spending surge is driving demand for the very weapons that drones are already destroying on the battlefield.