Ukraine is not merely a battlefield that NATO should support. It is the war college NATO needs.
If Europe is to assume more responsibility for its own defense, it must learn modern war where modern war is being fought: from the commanders, soldiers, engineers, ministries, defense companies, and citizens who have adapted under fire. NATO should establish a European War College in Ukraine to turn wartime experience into allied deterrence before the lessons of this conflict decay into conference slogans and procurement buzzwords.
The United States and its allies already have institutions to teach war. They matter. But they are also vulnerable to a familiar peacetime habit of studying war from too far away, too late, and too safely.
Ukraine offers something different. It is not merely a case study waiting for historians. It is a living military laboratory. Ukrainian forces have fought a much larger adversary. They have done so by adapting faster than Russia across the system of national defense. As a result, they have fought that enemy to a standstill.
The popular shorthand is that Ukraine has produced an “army of drones.” That is true but incomplete. Ukraine’s achievement is not merely that it uses drones at scale. It has become a drone-centric, software-enabled, intelligence-saturated, civilian-supported, adaptation-driven military society, fusing commercial technology, open-source intelligence, electronic warfare, artillery, air defense, digital command networks, private-sector innovation, and civil resilience under existential pressure.
No NATO classroom can replicate that from a distance. A briefing on drone warfare in Brussels cannot teach what Ukrainian units learned while fighting through electronic warfare interference. A doctrine conference in London cannot substitute for walking the terrain at Hostomel Airport, Bucha, Irpin, and Kyiv with the people who fought there and adapted for the next phase of the war.
A European War College in Ukraine would be much more than a symbolic gesture. It would be a practical institution for allied military adaptation. Its purpose would be straightforward: bring European, American, and allied officers to Ukraine to study the most consequential land war of the 21st century from those who have lived it.
The model should begin with staff rides. Ukraine now contains the battlefields that will shape the next generation of military thought. Hostomel Airport — just outside Kyiv and the site of a key battle at the outset of the all-out invasion in 2022 — is a classroom in surprise, air assault, territorial defense, logistics, intelligence, and national will. Bucha and Irpin are places where officers can study urban defense, civilian resilience, information warfare, war crimes documentation, and the moral reality of defending a nation against conquest.
The Kyiv war college should also bring officers into direct contact with Ukrainian commanders, drone operators, air-defense crews, logisticians, medical teams, civil authorities, and defense innovators who have learned under fire. It should also include Ukraine’s defense-industrial base, where companies, software developers, volunteer networks, and ministries have often moved faster than traditional procurement systems would allow.
When a Russian tactic changes, the response cannot wait five years for a requirements document and a production decision. The loop between problem, prototype, test, fielding, and iteration has had to be compressed dramatically. That is what NATO must study.
Europe is now rearming. Defense spending is rising. Ammunition production, air defense, drones, electronic warfare, and industrial mobilization are all receiving overdue attention. But more money will not automatically produce military effectiveness (as NATO’s Operation Hedgehog brutally revealed last year). Europe needs institutions that teach its officers, defense officials, and industry leaders how to learn faster than the adversary.
The college should not be a drone school, but should teach military adaptation, including UAVs, but also broader reconnaissance-strike systems connected to artillery, targeting, electronic warfare, logistics, and command decision-making. They should study electronic warfare, air defense as national survival, open-source intelligence, civil defense, mobilization, casualty care, fortification, energy resilience, and critical infrastructure as integrated requirements of modern war.
Above all, they should study culture. Ukraine’s wartime innovation was not only technological. It was cultural and organizational. It required commanders willing to accept bottom-up adaptation, government officials willing to work with private innovators, soldiers willing to experiment, citizens willing to contribute, and institutions willing to change because the alternative was defeat.
The college could work with universities in Europe, the United States, and Ukraine, as well as NATO institutions, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Digital Transformation, and the defense industry. But its center of gravity should be Ukraine. Remove it from Ukraine, and it becomes another program about the war. Build it in Kyiv, and it becomes a mechanism for learning from the war.
This is especially urgent for Europe. If the US expects Europe to carry more of the conventional defense burden, then Europe must do more than spend more. It must build forces that can deter Russia and prepare to fight it if that fails.
The danger is that the West will do what it often does after wars: extract a few fashionable lessons, attach them to procurement agendas, and miss the deeper transformation. Ukraine will be reduced to drones. Drones will be reduced to acquisition programs. The living lesson will become a briefing slide.
Ukraine has paid for this lesson in blood. NATO should not waste it. The West should not wait for the war to end before studying it. By then, commanders may have moved on, organizations may have changed, improvisations may have hardened into mythology, and the clarity of survival may have faded. NATO needs a War College in Kyiv because the next war will not wait for NATO to finish learning from the last one.
Dr. Ryan Shaw is a managing director at Arizona State University, where he coordinates university support to Professional Military Education and directs Security & Defence PLuS, a partnership with King’s College London and UNSW Sydney. Ryan is a combat veteran and a graduate of West Point and Yale University.
Dan Rice is the President of the American University Kyiv, powered by ASU, and also the Co-President of Thayer Leadership at West Point. He is a West Point graduate, decorated US combat veteran and served as the Special Advisor to the Ukraine Armed Forces Commander for the first year of the war.
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