Ministry of Defence and Defence Industry: Does it Make Strategic Sense?

Over the past week Kyiv has pushed through several cabinet‑level reshuffles that many observers dismissed as symbolic. Yet one decision—in practice, the abolition of the Ministry for Strategic Industries (Minstrategprom) and the transfer of its mandate to the Ministry of Defence—deserves a far sharper lens. Critics call it “re‑arranging the deck‑chairs”. They are probably wrong.

For a nation fighting an existential war, the performance of its defence‑industrial complex is a matter of survival. At this decisive phase the very matrix that links design bureaus, factories and front‑line units will determine whether the Ukrainian Defence Forces can outpace and out‑innovate the Russian military machine.

Ukraine’s resilience is rooted in private enterprise and volunteer ingenuity—actors that generate asymmetric solutions at break‑neck speed. But today the priority is large‑scale replication of the most successful prototypes. Without coherent state backing the leap from 3‑D‑printed demonstrator to mass‑produced weapon is slow, often impossible. Russia’s surge in fibre‑optic drones and Shahed‑type loitering munitions has exposed the weaknesses of our current institutional architecture.

The Ministry of Defence is understandably focused on urgent procurement for the front, yet it lacks a deep‑cycle mechanism for nurturing future technologies. Minstrategprom, for its part, became a patron of legacy state enterprises, skewing resources away from high‑impact private programmes. In reality it is private firms that possess the decision‑making speed and risk appetite to shape the combat environment. What Ukraine needs is a proactive coordination centre that fuses public and private resources, sets clear technology priorities and scales winning solutions at pace.

Folded into the MoD, the remnants of Minstrategprom could become exactly that. The ministry would no longer merely place orders; it would steer technological policy, orchestrate R&D, shepherd key weapons programmes through production and—crucially—act as a single export champion for Ukrainian industry, regardless of ownership type.

But form follows function. Kyiv must choose the right operating model. Several allies provide templates:

• France. Here the Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA) sits inside the defence ministry and fields some 10,000 engineers, auditors and financiers who manage everything from requirements and tenders to certification and export. Nested within the DGA is the Agence de l’Innovation de Défense (AID), a “tech hub” that funnels rapid‑cycle grants—up to €2 million, delivered within 6–12 months—into start‑ups and universities, all anchored by the multiyear Defence Programming Law (LPM‑2030).
• United States. The Pentagon eschews production monopolies and instead engineers an ecosystem of competition. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Sustainment sets the rules; DARPA pursues high‑risk, game‑changing science; the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) pulls dual‑use tech into uniform via streamlined contracts; and the Office of Industrial Base Policy stitches gaps in capacity. Incentives, not ownership, do the heavy lifting.
• United Kingdom. Policy and budget come from the MoD, but Defence Equipment & Support runs cradle‑to‑grave acquisition. In 2025 London created the National Armaments Director to collapse bureaucratic stovepipes—reinforced by a new Procurement Act that hands the MoD far greater agility.
• South Korea. Strategy is set by the MoD, yet the Defence Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) is the autonomous engine that handles R&D, contracting and exports, embedding mandatory offsets into every foreign buy. Long‑range science lives with the Agency for Defense Development, tightly coupled to DAPA.

An integrated Ukrainian model must absorb these lessons—but tailor them to a nation at war. Kyiv could establish a “Ukrainian DGA” inside the MoD, built on digital‑first procedures and tight partnership with the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Parallel to that, a Ukrainian DARPA‑style unit would scout, test and de‑risk breakthrough ideas before handing them to the DGA for industrial scaling—whether intercept‑drones, ballistic missiles or autonomous ground systems.

Executed correctly, this defence‑industrial matrix will be laser‑focused on front‑line needs, able to evolve technology in months, not years, and to mass‑produce new weapons at the speed of relevance. The concept is sound. Now it must be driven into reality—before time, and our window for technological dominance, runs out.