UKRAINE – In a forest somewhere between Kyiv and the front line, nine men are learning how to stay alive. They are literal graybeards; all of them look older than 40, if not 50. Under the watchful eyes of a mixed team of army instructors and civilian volunteers, the men execute a “drunk drill.” Rifles elevated skyward, they spin slowly in circles. When they are sufficiently dizzy and disoriented (in order to simulate head wounds), a sharp command drops them to the ground, where they each scramble to apply a tourniquet to one of their limbs.

This is one of dozens of tasks they will need to master to fight and survive on the deadly battlefields of the Donbas. Success at turning these civilians into soldiers is the hinge between victory and defeat in Ukraine.

A few hours east of the training camp, in Kharkiv, a brigade mobilization officer tells me about finding the raw material to feed the training camps and then the frontline forces. His unit, though one of the most elite in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, now relies on conscripted soldiers for 80 percent of its manpower. Recruited volunteers and transfers of men who have gone SZCH (the Ukrainian acronym for AWOL, absent without official leave) from other brigades account for the remainder. At least 20 percent of the entire Ukrainian military is estimated to be SZCH at any given time.

Absent true machine autonomy, drone tactics don’t remove the need for troops; they simply move manpower around.

Finding enough men to man the 1,200-kilometer front line is a ceaseless struggle for Ukraine. The country has more than ten million military-aged men but is struggling to keep an army of one million in the field. There is no meaningful reserve and no ability to give soldiers the clarity and hope of a fixed term of service. Ukraine’s soldiers are serving until death, severe wounds, or the war’s end. Many soldiers are exhausted after years of war without rest.

Deployments to the messy, mingled frontline “gray zone” are measured in months, not days. The manpower crisis exacerbates this grim situation. Fearing that their men will disappear into the ranks of the SZCH once they are out of the frontline kill zone, commanders are incentivized to keep them out even longer. Doing so heightens the danger to soldiers and their units: A new study by Ukraine’s military ombudsman found that after 40 days of frontline duty, soldiers become apathetic and ineffective. The commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, has just decreed that no soldier should serve more than 60 days straight in the front line. Whether Ukrainian units can adhere to this order is an open question.

Policy decisions also contribute to the manpower crisis. Fearing postwar demographic collapse, Ukraine still refuses to draft men under 25. Many others have exemptions for critical civilian work, family circumstances, or health issues.

The draft officers, despised and increasingly subject to physical attacks, meet their quotas through public roundups on the street or public transport. This practice is called busifikatsiya—“busification.”

Victims of busifikatsiya who are handed over to the brigades are often a sorry lot. The mobilization officer decides to both show and tell me. Pulling out his cellphone, he scrolls through pictures and write-ups of ten men who had been offered to him the day before, when he visited a mobilization office. One man had an injured back. Another had “sat”—done a lengthy prison sentence—three times. One was 4′7″. The officer left with three new soldiers for his brigade. He has his own monthly quota to make, but he won’t provide his unit with new recruits who can’t fight.

Russia has its own problems. Unlike Ukraine’s defenders, Russia’s troops are not conscripted. They are volunteers, but predominantly drawn from peripheral regions and ethnic groups, and lured into service by enormous signing bonuses. For that money, they take a bet on their lives with very bad odds. One Ukrainian formation told me they were killing 20 Russians for every soldier they lost.

Russia’s bonus payments continue to rise, while the number of soldiers being recruited dropped in 2026. Ukraine’s new defense minister, the data-driven Mykhailo Fedorov, has proclaimed that Ukraine can kill or cripple 50,000 enemies a month, more than Russia can recruit. But killing its way to victory is a questionable proposition for Ukraine. Russia has a deep well of marginal men. Vladimir Putin mobilized 300,000 reservists in September 2022, albeit at some cost in short-term stability. He could do so again if necessary. Ukraine is more likely to bring Russia to acceptable cease-fire terms through economic pressure, but this strategy also requires a stout, stalemated front line.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE ANALYSIS and commentary on the war in Ukraine focuses on drones.

Unmanned systems now account for more than 80 percent of the casualties on both sides, dwarfing the toll from traditional arms like artillery, machine guns, and small arms. Commentators have been quick to herald this as the next revolution in military affairs. The provision of Ukrainian expertise to the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, their own lands now battered by Iranian drones, has further fueled this narrative. Trump’s Defense Department is all in on drones: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promises to “unleash drone dominance,” while his potential successor, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, sees success as killing at least one of the traditional defense contractor “primes.”

Drones are taking on a lengthening list of tasks at the front: reconnaissance, strike, mining, resupply, even casualty evacuation. But the reality is that manpower is still the critical ingredient in war. Ukrainian and Russian drones don’t fly themselves. In fact, it takes a team of three to four soldiers, with months of training and experience, to competently put each first-person view (FPV) drone into position to kill the enemy. Though they work a few kilometers farther from the line of contact than the infantry, drone teams are still in daily danger. In some sectors of the front, they are dying in higher numbers than the infantry. Absent true machine autonomy, drone tactics don’t remove the need for troops; they simply move manpower around.

When one looks past its drone war, with its admirable innovation and grim kill videos, Ukraine offers a stark warning to the West. All the attention now being paid to drones and munitions production suggests that war can be undertaken without sacrifice. Ukraine’s messy partial mobilization bears witness to the cost of failing to prepare the public for war: a broad loss of trust in the army, widespread draft evasion, an army forced into a war of attrition by its lack of manpower for assault and maneuver. NATO nations, most still wedded to a brittle all-volunteer force model, need to honestly grapple with what a protracted war would demand of their armies and societies.

The War’s Winners: Putin and Netanyahu

Northern and Eastern European NATO members increasingly grasp what is required. All Nordic nations have conscription systems, highlighted by Finland’s universal male service and societal concept of “total defense.” The Baltic nations have returned to the draft. Germany, the continent’s sleeping dragon, is ramping up military recruitment while considering a return to conscription if volunteer incentives prove inadequate.

In the United States, though, the draft is a distant memory. Though America won its major wars with a draftee force, the “all-volunteer force” (AVF) is inexplicably considered a success, despite being nearly winless in war (Desert Storm is its only real victory). Any major war would quickly exhaust the AVF, as was acknowledged when America shelved the draft in 1973. Though Selective Service remains on the books, and has just added automatic registration, the mobilization muscles are severely atrophied. A 2024 war game found that an attempt to activate the draft for a major war would yield barely 10 percent trained soldiers after an initial call-up of 500,000 men, and potentially far fewer.

Many Americans might recoil at the idea of providing more resources to a government that is launching wars of dubious legality and unquestioned immorality. But 50 years of the AVF has yielded a less accountable, if more professional, military. It is a force that is good enough to start wars but rarely large enough to successfully finish them. The lingering admiration most Americans have for their post-Vietnam military is both the mark of a guilty conscience and inimical to republican virtue (ossified though that concept may be).

Ukrainian resilience has been extraordinary, but it is not bottomless. After four years of fighting, the likeliest outcome is that both the Ukrainian and Russian armies continue to find just enough soldiers to fight, and continue to slug away for the foreseeable future. Historically, very few armies are totally annihilated in battle. Instead, armies break after being subject to enough pressure, attrition, and defeat. They break the way Ernest Hemingway’s Mike Campbell described how he became bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

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Gil Barndollar is a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at The Catholic University of America and a nonresident fellow at Defense Priorities. He served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps from 2009 to 2016.