Petraeus Praises Ukraine Innovation – ‘Tomorrow’s Technology for Today’s Wars’

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — We say this often, but it really is a pivotal moment in Russia’s war against Ukraine. While Russian troops make small gains — at enormous cost — in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian troops are holding hundreds of square miles of Russian territory, following their bold incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Next week Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be in the U.S., where he says he will deliver a peace plan to President Joe Biden (and — if the Republican Party nominee wishes to see it — to Donald Trump as well). All the while, Zelensky is pleading with Biden and other world leaders to drop restrictions on the use of western long-range missiles for deep strikes on Russian territory, not least because Russia is mounting a major effort to cripple Ukrainian energy infrastructure as another winter of war approaches.

With so much in play, The Cipher Brief caught up with General David Petraeus (Ret.) on the sidelines of the 20^th Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference in Kyiv, to discuss these dynamics and more. Petraeus, a Cipher Brief expert, offered a sweeping look at the state of the war, from the battlefield to the decision making in Kyiv and Moscow. What has stood out to the former CIA Director is Ukraine’s capacity to innovate for war needs at an “unprecedented” scale and pace, a rate of innovation which Petraeus said far surpasses the innovative capacity of the U.S., given its large and antiquated systems of bringing new ideas to the fore. “When the guns fall silent here,” he said, “Ukraine is going to be a military industrial powerhouse with the ability to innovate much more rapidly than anything that we have.”