Three Excuses That Are Slowing Down Defence
I've spent the last two years talking to military officers, defense officials, and industry people across Europe about adapting to what drones are doing to warfare. In 2025 alone: four trips to Ukraine, more than ten defense expos, NATO exercises, EDF proposal work. Hundreds of conversations.
And I keep hearing the same three excuses for not moving faster.
I don't say that to mock anyone. I said some of them myself. But I've spent years helping organisations read their strategic environment through Wardley Mapping — understanding not just what is changing, but why people resist the change, and what to actually do about it. And when I map these excuses, a pattern emerges that's worth examining.
What's happening
Drones are a forcing function. Not because they're new — the technology has existed for years — but because they've made the battlefield transparent and changed what works. Concealment is harder. Massed armour is a liability. A €500 FPV drone kills a €5 million vehicle.
This isn't just a technology shift. Technology and practice are co-evolving — changing together, each driving the other. When compute became a utility, DevOps emerged. Not because someone decided it should, but because the old way of working stopped making sense. The resistance was enormous. It happened anyway.
The same thing is happening in warfare. Ukrainian brigades are simultaneously building tech and rewriting doctrine, under fire, because the old playbook stopped keeping people alive.
NATO allies are watching this and trying to decide what to do. And three excuses keep coming up.
Excuse 1: The Old Man of Ülemiste
"Why buy this now? It'll be obsolete in six months."
In Estonian legend, the Old Man of Ülemiste Lake appears and asks whether Tallinn is finished yet. The answer must always be no — because the day the city is finished, he floods it.
This excuse treats technology like a building that should be completed before you move in. But the sword-shield cycle never ends. It just gets faster. Drones evolve. Counter-drone evolves. Counter-counter-drone evolves. Waiting for the final version is waiting for a day that never comes.
In Wardley's framework, this is suitability inertia — doubting whether the new thing is ready enough to commit to. It also touches investment in knowledge capital — the quiet fear that adopting now means admitting current skills are depreciating.
What to do about it. Don't buy a ready-made omelette. Buy eggs, butter, and a pan — and learn to cook. In practice: buy components, build engineering know-how, develop the capacity to assemble and reassemble fast. Stop buying things. Start buying the ability to keep buying things. Modular, open, replaceable. The unit of procurement isn't the platform — it's the refresh cycle. If your procurement cycle is longer than the technology cycle, you've already lost.
Excuse 2: The Special Snowflake
"Not everything in Ukraine will apply to our next war."
This one is true. And completely beside the point.
Of course your terrain, doctrine, and threat environment are different. But the underlying pattern — that cheap, disposable, software-defined systems are making expensive, exquisite platforms into targets — that's not Ukrainian. It's physics and economics.
This excuse is really about political capital. If Ukraine's lessons apply broadly, then careers built on legacy doctrine and billion-euro programmes need rethinking. That's threatening. So the lessons get qualified into irrelevance. It also protects barriers to entry — if cheap works, the expensive procurement ecosystem that keeps certain people powerful becomes less relevant.
The tell is the word "everything." Nobody said everything applies. But "not everything" becomes a reason to adopt nothing.
What to do about it. Stop debating whether Ukraine is your war. Start identifying which patterns are universal — transparency, attrition curves, software-defined adaptation — and which are contextual. Test the universal ones. You don't need a war to run exercises.
Excuse 3: The Gym Excuse
"What if the war pauses or ends? What happens to our investments and companies?"
This one appeared around December 2025. I call it the Gym Excuse because it's the strategic equivalent of "I can't start lifting — I might get too muscular."
The fear: if we spin up drone production and the conflict winds down, we're stuck with capacity nobody needs. Better not to start.
This is business model inertia — fear that the new model (fast, cheap, many) will disrupt the current one (slow, expensive, few). It's also the kind of risk aversion where trial is acceptable but error is not. So nothing reaches scale.
Think about what this excuse actually says: what if we become too strong? What if we build too much capability? The problem it fears — overcapacity in defence production — is the kind of problem you'd be lucky to have. Meanwhile, the actual problem — undercapacity, slow adaptation, single-supplier dependence — goes unsolved.
What to do about it. Treat defence industrial capacity like insurance, not inventory. You don't cancel fire insurance because your house hasn't burned down. Frame investments around optionality: dual-use production, convertible facilities, export potential. The question isn't "what if we don't need it?" It's "what if we do and we don't have it?"
The pattern underneath
These three excuses aren't random. They map to different faces of the same resistance:
- The Old Man of Ülemiste is about the new thing not being ready
- The Special Snowflake is about the old norms still being valid
- The Gym Excuse is about the business model being threatened
Simon Wardley identified 16 types of organisational inertia — the ways institutions resist change even when the strategic environment is shifting beneath them. These three excuses, between them, touch 15 of the 16. Each sounds reasonable in isolation. It's only when you see all three together that you recognise the pattern: not a series of rational objections, but a system protecting itself from change.
This is natural — and it's not just an army problem
Inertia is not the only explanation for why defence adaptation moves slowly. But mapping it reveals the resistance isn't only in uniform — it runs through procurement bureaucracies, parliaments, and industry boardrooms. Armies fight battles. Societies fight wars.
And the consequences aren't abstract. During last year's Hedgehog exercise in Estonia — 16,000 troops, 12 NATO countries — ten Ukrainian drone operators mock-destroyed 17 armoured vehicles and conducted 30 strikes in about half a day. Two battalions, effectively eliminated.
The troops had been parking armoured vehicles in the open. That sounds like negligence until you understand: those were among the few areas CIMIC had gotten landowner approvals to use. You can't destroy people's fields during a peacetime exercise. So you park where you're allowed — and where you're allowed is predictable. And predictable, against a drone-equipped opponent, is dead. This is Estonia — a country with extraordinarily strong societal buy-in for defence compared with any NATO ally. If the most permissive country in the alliance still funnels armoured columns into supermarket car parks, the constraints elsewhere are worse. That's not a troop problem. That's a system problem.
The old man keeps asking whether the city is finished yet.
Hanno Jarvet is a strategy consultant based in Tallinn, working at the intersection of defence, dual-use technology, and strategic adaptation. He uses Wardley Mapping and situational awareness frameworks to help organisations see their strategic environment clearly — and act on what they see.
P.S. — For those familiar with Wardley's work
Here's how the three excuses map onto Simon Wardley's 16 types of organisational inertia. Three excuses, 15 out of 16 types. The coverage is the point.
| Category | Type of Inertia | Tactic to Counter | Excuse | |---|---|---|---| | Disruption of Past Norms | Change of business relationship (loss of social capital) | Vendor Management | 🔵 Snowflake | | | Loss of existing financial or physical capital | Future Planning | 🟢 Gym | | | Loss of political capital | Modernisation | 🔵 Snowflake | | | Threat to barriers to entry | Unavoidable Change | 🔵 Snowflake | | Transition to the New | Investment in knowledge capital | Training | 🔴 Ülemiste | | | Cost of acquiring new skillsets | Organisational Development | 🔴 Ülemiste | | | Investment in new business relationships | Vendor Management | 🟢 Gym | | | Changes to governance, management and practices | Awareness of Co-evolution | 🔵 Snowflake | | Agency of the New | Suitability | Weak Signals & Prior Identification | 🔴 Ülemiste | | | Lack of second sourcing options | Supply Chain Management | 🟢 Gym | | | Lack of pricing competition | Market Analysis | — | | | Loss of strategic control | Strategic Planning | 🟢 Gym | | Business Model | Declining unit value | Awareness of Evolution | 🟢 Gym | | | Data for past success counteracts | Portfolio Management | 🔵 Snowflake | | | Resistance from rewards and culture | Human Resources | 🔵 Snowflake | | | External financial markets reinforce existing models | Analyst Relationships | 🟢 Gym |
Framework: Simon Wardley's 16 types of organisational inertia. Source: wardleymaps.com/glossary/inertia