Militaries are often seen as bastions of discipline and tradition – yet when it comes to learning and adapting, they can be paradoxically slow and inefficient. There are essentially two very different ways armies learn: top-down, meaning from the hierarchy down to the soldiery, (usually during peacetime, driven by high command, doctrine, and formal training) and bottom-up (usually during war, driven by frontline troops adapting under fire). History and recent conflicts show that while generals might prepare extensively in peacetime, it’s often the grunts on the ground who innovate in wartime, sometimes rendering years of top-down training obsolete overnight. This editorial explores how these two modes of learning play out, why peacetime militaries often “fight the last war,” and how the humble quadcopter drone became a symbol of bottom- up wartime innovation in Ukraine and Israel.
Peacetime Preparation: Top-Down Doctrine and “Fighting the Last War”
In peacetime, military learning tends to be a top-down affair. Strategies, training curricula, and weapons procurement are decided by senior leadership and planners far from any battlefield. The assumption is that experts at the top can anticipate future wars and prepare soldiers accordingly. The problem? As an old (and scornful) proverb holds, “generals are always prepared to fight the last war.” This adage, popularized after the disastrous slaughters of World War I, reflects how military institutions often cling to the tactics and doctrines of the previous conflict. When technology and tactics evolve rapidly, as they did in the 20th century, training for the last war can become a recipe for failure. The bloodbaths of the Somme and Verdun, for example, were eloquent condemnations of military rigidity – generals who couldn’t grasp that marching waves of troops against machine guns and artillery was now suicidal.
Top-down learning in peacetime relies on hierarchical command and bureaucracy. Armies develop elaborate doctrines, massive training exercises, and expensive weapons programs in theory to prepare for war. Yet theory only goes so far. War has a nasty habit of making unexpected demands. As one U.S. Army War College piece dryly noted, “one thing we know about war is that it has the power to surprise us in unpleasant ways.” You can drill a certain maneuver or invest in a certain technology for years, only to find when the shooting starts that it’s ineffective or outdated. The result is that peacetime militaries, despite all their training, are often caught off guard by the reality of combat.
Why does this happen? Part of the reason is institutional inertia. Large military organizations are, by nature, bureaucratic and resistant to change. Frank Hoffman, in Mars Adapting, observes that militaries are “built around routines and core competencies [that] are hard to alter” . These rigid structures help maintain order in peacetime but impede adaptation to the volatility of war. In peacetime, innovation is typically driven from the top down – think generals updating doctrine or defense departments launching new weapons programs. Such institutional innovation often assumes the next war will resemble a scaled-up version of training exercises or the previous war. It’s no wonder that when reality diverges – as it almost always does – those carefully laid plans and drills can prove of limited use.
Learning Under Fire: Bottom-Up Adaptation on the Frontlines
When war erupts, the learning dynamic flips. Suddenly, it’s the troops on the ground who become the drivers of change. Wartime battlefield conditions quickly expose which of the old methods actually work and which don’t. Frontline units facing life-or-death challenges cannot afford to wait for distant headquarters to approve a new manual or gadget – they innovate on the fly. Military scholars have noted this pattern: peacetime innovation is mostly top-down, but wartime adaptation originates in the field
. Frontline soldiers and junior officers, confronting unforeseen problems, often jury-rig solutions and improvise tactics based on hard experience. In Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, many improvements in tactics, armor, and procedures were initiated by troops reacting to insurgent threats in real time.
War-on-the-Rocks, a defense commentary site, describes this contrast succinctly: “Military innovation is largely a peacetime process of institutional actors aiming to prepare for future warfare. Adaptation emerges in a bottom-up manner from the battlefield as units in contact with the enemy seek to close the gap between the war they prepared for and the one they encounter. In other words, war throws a curveball, and soldiers closest to the fight must find ways to hit it. Their adaptations are pragmatic, born of necessity: whatever keeps you alive and accomplishes the mission is worth trying, spit-and-baling-wire if needed.
Bottom-up learning during conflict can lead to breathtaking bursts of innovation. But these grassroots solutions don’t always filter up easily. Often there’s a lag before the higher-ups recognize and institutionalize a good idea that bubbled up from below. Organizational learning theorists point out that knowledge gained by individuals or small units needs to be transmitted upwards and across the wider military to truly change the institution. That process can be clunky. It sometimes takes heavy casualties or embarrassing failures to get the generals to pay attention to a battlefield innovation that lower-level troops figured out months earlier.
There’s also a tension between quick fixes vs. long-term change. Frontline workarounds might conflict with established doctrine or require new equipment the bureaucracy hasn’t approved. Implementing these lessons on a larger scale can challenge institutional norms and vested interests. In fact, truly paradigm-shifting adaptations often require what Hoffman calls “double-loop learning” – changes so significant they force the military to question and alter its core assumptions. That kind of change is inherently difficult. Hoffman found that in some cases, the military only adopted vital wartime innovations after external pressure or intervention from political leadership. A classic example: the
U.S. Army’s slow acceptance of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles in the Iraq War. For years, troops in Iraq endured devastating roadside bomb (IED) attacks in vulnerable Humvees. Soldiers improvised extra armor with scrap metal and sandbags (a grassroots response) while the top brass was initially reluctant to divert funds from other programs. Only after casualty numbers climbed and Congress and Defense Secretary Gates intervened did the Pentagon rapidly procure thousands of MRAPs, vastly improving troop survivability against IEDs. It shouldn’t require an act of Congress to act on battlefield reality, but often that’s what breaking top-down inertia takes.
War: The Great Teacher of Hard Lessons
If peacetime militaries are often among the least effective learning institutions, war is the merciless teacher that forces them to get smarter or die. The early phase of any major conflict usually reveals the gap between how the military thought things would play out and how they actually do. Each war,
especially in modern times, seems to come with its own unpleasant surprises that weren’t in the playbook.
- New Threats & Technologies: Conflict can unveil weapons or tactics that commanders dismissed or never conceived. In World War II, for instance, the French high command’s top- down obsession with static defense (exemplified by the Maginot Line) proved useless against German Blitzkrieg maneuver warfare. In recent decades, insurgents and terrorists have continually sprung new threats – from roadside bombs to weaponized drones – catching conventional forces off guard. War is a constant game of cat and mouse where today’s clever trick can become tomorrow’s standard technique.
- Challenging Old Assumptions: War has a way of shredding peacetime dogmas. Tactics and tools that seemed to work in exercises often fail under real enemy pressure. For example, prior to the 2022 Russian invasion, many Western analysts believed tank offensives supported by air power would dominate any European war. Yet the Ukraine conflict has showed the unprecedented power of cheap anti-tank weapons and drones, turning heavy armor into prey. Both Russian and Ukrainian forces had to relearn combined-arms warfare under fire, adjusting tactics to cope with modern precision munitions and surveillance. What worked on paper in war colleges didn’t survive first contact with modern weaponry – reminding us that “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” as Helmuth von Moltke famously said.
- Institutional Resistance: Often the biggest barrier to learning in war is the institution itself. Militaries, as noted, are hierarchical and culturally conservative. Rapid change is uncomfortable and chaotic for them, even when it’s desperately needed. There are countless anecdotes of high command initially rejecting or downplaying innovations that junior ranks discovered. The Israeli security establishment provides a cautionary tale: in the early 2000s, when Hamas militants in Gaza began firing improvised Qassam rockets, some Israeli officials dismissed them as trivial “flying pipes.” This arrogant neglect allowed Hamas to improve these rockets from crude nuisance to a strategic threat capable of striking cities. It was a failure to learn and adapt until reality forced Israel to invest in countermeasures (like the Iron Dome system) belatedly. Similarly, before October 2023, drone attacks by Hamas were not a top focus; then Hamas surprised Israel by using small explosive-laden drones to knock out border security cameras and defenses during its assault, achieving tactical success that stunned the Israeli military. Only after this “drone Pearl Harbor” moment did the Israeli army urgently ramp up its counter-drone efforts – a grim example of learning the hard way.
In summary, war’s early phases often reveal that much of the peacetime preparation was misaligned or insufficient. It’s during war that militaries either adapt bottom-up – or pay the price in blood and failure.
Drones: A Case Study in Bottom-Up Innovation
A Ukrainian drone operator in Bakhmut attaches grenades to a small quadcopter, February 2023. What began as off-the-shelf hobby drones have been modified on the front lines to drop munitions – a grassroots innovation born of battlefield necessity.
Perhaps the best illustration of bottom-up learning in recent conflicts is the rise of small drones on the battlefield. For years, military planners and procurement departments largely ignored or underestimated small, commercially available drones. High-ranking officers tended to fixate on traditional big-ticket assets – fighter jets, tanks, advanced missiles – while dismissing quadcopters as
glorified toys or niche tools. In many armies, there was a clear top-down bias: a multi-million-dollar aircraft or an exquisite “smart” munition simply felt more like a war-winner than a $1,000 drone you could buy online.
Then came real war, and the soldiers proved the brass wrong. In the ongoing war in Ukraine (and in recent flare-ups involving Israel), small drones have become game-changers – thanks largely to bottom-up adoption. Ukrainian troops, faced with Russian forces, quickly realized that off-the-shelf drones (like DJI quadcopters or racing FPV drones) could be repurposed for reconnaissance and even as mini attack aircraft. These inexpensive drones can spot enemy positions far beyond a soldier’s line of sight, direct artillery fire with precision, or drop grenades on trenches and vehicle hatches. They essentially give poor-man’s air support to small units. And they’re cheap and plentiful: a rugged commercial drone rigged with a tiny bomb can be had for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, a rounding error in military budgeting. In fact, a common hobby-type drone with a small payload costs under $1,000 to build and arm, whereas a single 155mm artillery shell can cost $2,500–$4,000 from Western factories. The economics alone are eye-opening – for the price of one artillery barrage, you could field a swarm of drones.
It’s no wonder that frontline soldiers embraced drones even when their institutions did not. Early in the Ukraine war, many unit commanders and defense officials were reportedly skeptical; they hadn’t integrated lots of small drones into official force structure or doctrine. But the troops on the ground couldn’t wait. They began acquiring drones however they could – begging, borrowing, or buying with their own funds. Grassroots volunteer networks emerged to crowdfund and deliver drones to front units. By mid-war, “low-cost drones, proven to be effective on the modern battlefield, [had] become one of the hottest commodities among units” fighting Russia. Ukrainian fighters were desperate for more; civilian donors responded by raising millions of dollars weekly for drones, equipping soldiers with an ever-growing “army of drones” that the formal army had failed to procure . This bottom-up influx of technology happened at a speed that would make any bureaucrat’s head spin – and it had an immediate impact on the battlefield. Observers noted that a drone strike costing maybe $15,000 (including drone and munitions) could destroy a Russian tank worth many times more . That kind of return on investment was not lost on the Ukrainians.
Crucially, soldiers’ grassroots innovations forced the institution to catch up. Few top commanders initially believed in the power of first-person-view (FPV) attack drones – those nimble pilot-operated kamikaze drones – until troops started spending their own money to get them and achieved “considerable effect” against Russian targets . After soldiers demonstrated how useful these were (blowing up armored vehicles, trenches, and even electronic warfare systems), Ukrainian defense officials moved to ramp up domestic drone production. President Zelensky announced an ambitious program to build a fleet of drones, and by early 2024 Ukraine was manufacturing hundreds of thousands of drones, many of them designs that originated from field tinkering by soldiers and volunteer techies . What started as ad-hoc battlefield expedients – like taping a grenade to a hobby drone – evolved into formal military projects. In effect, the Ukrainian military learned from its troops and transformed that lesson into strategy.
The same pattern is visible elsewhere. In the 2023 Israel-Hamas conflict, Hamas fighters employed swarms of commercial drones to drop explosives, catching the vaunted Israeli Defense Forces off guard
. Rank-and-file Israeli soldiers soon themselves started using simple quadcopters for urban fighting in Gaza – for scouting booby-trapped buildings or tossing grenades on militants. Again, this wasn’t because their commanders taught them to (the IDF, like others, has advanced surveillance drones but hadn’t widely issued tiny quadcopters to infantry). It happened because soldiers improvised and saw what worked, especially after seeing the enemy do it. Wartime necessity drove both sides to rapidly
incorporate $500 drones into their tactics – something that might have taken years of committee meetings to approve in peacetime.
The drone revolution underscores a broader point: modern militaries that rely solely on top-down learning risk falling behind. Small-unit innovations – whether 3D-printing drone parts in a garage or coding a better targeting app on a tablet – can have strategic effect. But only if the organization is willing to listen and adapt. Ukraine’s military, to its credit, embraced the drone lesson relatively quickly (helped by a tech-savvy society and urgent survival instinct). More hidebound forces might have tried to quash such bottom-up experimentation for not fitting the “approved” way – and they would have lost their edge.
Historical Echoes of Bottom-Up Brilliance
While drones are a flashy contemporary example, history is replete with cases of bottom-up military learning saving the day (or at least mitigating disaster):
- Trench Warfare Innovations (WWI): When World War I devolved into trench stalemate, low- level officers and soldiers improvised solutions like periscope rifles (allowing firing from cover) and handheld grenades, even before generals fully caught on. The German Army’s famed 1918 stormtrooper tactics – small infiltration teams using grenades and light machine guns to bypass strongpoints – were developed by enterprising junior officers at the front, defying the old top- down tactic of mass bayonet charges. Only after these bottom-up tactics proved effective did high command formalize them across the army.
- The Chindits and Guerrilla Tactics (WWII): In the Burma campaign of WWII, British officer Orde Wingate led “Chindit” long-range penetration units deep behind Japanese lines, using guerrilla- style tactics that orthodox British commanders thought unconventional. The idea of hacking through jungle with light units supplied by airdrop was contrary to regular doctrine – yet it worked well enough to influence Allied jungle warfare doctrine. It was a wartime laboratory of new methods driven by frontline realities.
- Improvised Armor (Iraq, 2003–2006): As mentioned with MRAPs, early in the Iraq insurgency
U.S. troops faced a dire lack of armored vehicles against IEDs. Soldiers in the field welded makeshift armor (“hillbilly armor,” they called it) onto thin-skinned Humvees. They bolted on steel plates scavenged from scrap or rigged ballistic glass where they could. This bottom-up survival tactic was initially frowned upon by some superiors (concerns about vehicle warranties, weight, etc., because bureaucracy loves red tape even in war). But as casualties from roadside bombs mounted, that improvisation became standard – eventually pushing the Pentagon to fund proper armored vehicles.
- Adapting to IEDs and New Tactics: In Afghanistan, junior officers often adjusted patrol methods and engagement rules on their own initiative to counter Taliban tactics – for instance, using local cultural knowledge or setting up novel ambushes – sometimes ahead of any official counter-insurgency doctrine. Many effective counter-insurgency practices (like partnering with local militias or using biometrics to screen villagers) bubbled up from field experience, later codified by institutional directives.
The consistent thread is that the troops living the war often figure out the answers before the distant bureaucrats. This is not to insult every military leader – many senior officers in history have been quite innovative. But as a system, a military in peacetime tends to reward conformity and
following established training. War reverses that: suddenly the mavericks and problem-solvers stand out, because creativity means survival.
Embracing the Bottom-Up Without Losing Control
All this isn’t to say a military should abandon top-down structures or that every idea a private cooks up in a foxhole is genius. The challenge is finding a balance: maintaining order and preparedness in peace, while remaining flexible and receptive to feedback in war. The most successful militaries seem to be those that institutionalize adaptation mechanisms. For example, modern Western militaries have tried to get better at learning-in-war by creating special units and channels for frontline ideas – lessons learned cells, rapid procurement programs, soldier innovation workshops, etc. The U.S. Army’s now- defunct Asymmetric Warfare Group was one such effort: it circulated teams to identify field innovations and enemy tricks, then quickly spread countermeasures throughout the force . In theory, that helps bridge the gap between bottom-up and top-down. When done right, it’s like having an internal startup accelerator for warfighting ideas.
Yet, cultural issues remain. Many militaries pay lip service to ideas from the ranks but don’t truly act on them until a crisis forces their hand. There is often a “not invented here” syndrome – if a concept didn’t come from the elite staff college or R&D lab, it’s suspect. This mentality needs to change. The top brass should foster a culture where initiative is encouraged rather than punished, and where honest reports from the front (even if they contradict pre-war assumptions) are valued. In wartime, feedback from lieutenants and sergeants about what’s actually happening should be some of the most prized intelligence.
The uncomfortable truth is that militaries, as institutions, are often reactive learners. The old saying that “armies only learn when they lose” has a kernel of truth – a stinging defeat or high casualties are what finally spurs deep reforms. But waiting for catastrophe is a terrible learning model, especially when lives and national security are at stake. A smarter approach is to simulate and stress-test as much as possible in peacetime (through realistic exercises, red-team simulations, etc.), and to empower creative thinking at lower levels before the shooting starts. Encouraging bottom-up experimentation in peacetime – for instance, letting soldiers tinker with new tech like drones during training, or crowd- sourcing tactical ideas – could help avoid the shock that comes when war erupts. The goal should be to blend the strengths of both approaches: the foresight and resources of top-down planning with the ingenuity and realism of bottom-up adaptation.
Conclusion: War and the Wisdom of the Rank-and-File
At the end of the day, war has a brutal way of cutting through pretenses. A military can spend decades and billions of dollars preparing under one set of assumptions, only to have a scrappy adversary or an unforeseen technology make all that prep look foolish. The difference between an effective fighting force and a floundering one often comes down to learning speed. How fast can an army throw out its cherished but obsolete ideas and adopt new methods? How well does it listen to those creative corporals and captains at the front line who see what’s really happening?
The two types of military learning – top-down and bottom-up – will always be in tension. Top-down gives structure, strategy, and advanced capabilities; bottom-up gives agility, innovation, and realism. No healthy military can do entirely without either. But in many countries, the armed forces remain one of the most change-resistant institutions, prone to clinging to comfort zones of past wars. That’s why you see militaries brilliantly training for conflicts that never happen, or buying gold-plated weapons
systems ill-suited to the battles they actually face. And when war does come knocking, it’s the soldiers in the mud who scramble to jury-rig solutions because their leaders didn’t think of it first.
The ongoing drone saga is a perfect microcosm. The high command’s expensive toys weren’t enough; it took cheap quadcopters and frontline ingenuity to reveal a blind spot in modern warfare. Now, any army watching Ukraine (or even the Israel-Gaza clashes) knows that it ignores bottom-up battlefield lessons at its peril. As one Ukrainian drone unit volunteer put it, “We started using drones because of the lack of ammunition… to strike positions in the most effective and cheapest way.” When one side adapts and the other doesn’t, the outcome is almost predetermined. In Ukraine, the military that empowered its rank-and-file innovators has consistently outsmarted a larger enemy still stumbling with rigid Soviet- style top-down tactics.
For military leaders and policymakers, the take-home message is clear: never underestimate the insight of the people on the ground. Encourage a dialogue between the trenches and headquarters. Fund the small, nimble projects as much as the big shiny ones. Be willing to pivot when troops report that a tactic or tool isn’t working as expected. In plain terms, get comfortable with being uncomfortable – because war will surely make you so.
In the end, militaries exist to win wars and safeguard nations, not to preserve their own institutional ego. The armies that thrive are those that learn faster than their foes. And very often, the fastest lessons are learned bottom-up, amidst the smoke and chaos of battle, by the very soldiers whose lives depend on getting it right. The true art for a military is to capture that hard-won knowledge and push it back to the top, informing strategy and training henceforth. Peace time or war time, the soldiers’ perspective is gold – and ignoring it is how you get killed or defeated. Top-down and bottom-up learning will always coexist, but the edge in modern conflict clearly belongs to those who can integrate the field’s innovations into the fortress of tradition. That, more than any fancy technology, might be the decisive factor in the wars of the future.
Sources:
- van der Vorm, Martijn – The Strategy Bridge (2022) – analysis of peacetime vs wartime military learning .
- Brown, Askonas & Allen – War on the Rocks (2020) – distinction between institutional innovation and battlefield adaptation .
- Larson & Hill – WarRoom (U.S. Army War College) (2019) – on war’s nasty surprises for pre-war plans .
- American Heritage Magazine (2001/2025) – on the folly of “fighting the last war” and historical examples of failed adaptation .
- INSS Israel (2025) – notes on Israeli underestimation of early Hamas rockets (“flying pipes”) leading to later strategic threat ; Hamas drone use on Oct 7, 2023 .
- Help99 “Adopt a Drone” campaign – example of Ukrainian commanders dismissing FPV drones until troops proved their worth in battle .
- Business Insider (Dec 2024) – reporting on Ukraine’s crowdfunded drone effort: cost-
effectiveness of small drones vs. artillery 12 ; drones as “hottest commodities” on frontlines ;
civilian fundraising network for drones 14 15 ; drone usage born from ammunition shortages
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Fighting The Last War, and the Next One (Nov 01,Vol:52 Issue:8)
THE POWER OF NUMBERS: CHALLENGES OF RAPIDLY EXPANDING THE ARMY – War Room – U.S. Army
War College
Learning in Conflict #Reviewing Mars Adapting
How the Army Out-Innovated the Islamic State’s Drones – War on the Rocks
The Explosive Drone in Judea and Samaria: A Wake-Up Call for the Security Establishment | INSS https://www.inss.org.il/social_media/the-explosive-drone-in-judea-and-samaria-a-wake-up-call-for-the-security- establishment/
Ukraine’s Crowdfunded Dronemakers Say They Can Smash Russia for Cheap –
Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-dronemakers-war-unwinnable-dirt-cheap-crowdfunding-veterans-civilians- russia-2024-12
Adopt a Drone
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