Ukraine technological flexibility reflects their organizational incentives. Front line users are in communication with the manufacturers; those same front line users choose the weapon (and vendor) they want, so feedback is rapid and since word gets around, good equipment is quickly adopted and becomes popular until something better replaces it.

The US military procurement is the opposite of this.

One reason procurement is slow is to avoid fraud.* Ukrainse hasn’t managed to eliminate that. Perhaps there is a balance, when you’re under fire at least.

* in the US, procurement fraud looks quite different (e.g. having anpart for your weapon made in every congressional district, a tactic developed for the B-1)

I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have a Lowe level of constant military spending and have the ability and reputation to be able to quickly spin up and scale military production, so that you don't need to maintain as much military spending 24/7

Matters of life and death, when there is (as you describe) direct contact between those whose lives are on the line and the industry, tend to prevent some of the usual corruption, I would think.

History has shown that countries at war become about an order of magnitude better at producing weapons than countries in peacetime.

Everything made in Ukraine is just assembled Chinese parts though (nothing wrong with that, entirely different difficulty however).

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