Ukraine turned drone warfare into a video game. Confirmed strikes earn points. Points buy better drones. Better drones earn more points. There is a leaderboard, and units study it the way raid guilds study damage rankings.
Ever since The New York Times, The Guardian, and half the defense press covered the “Army of Drones” bonus system, people have been messaging me with some version of the same question: “This has your fingerprints all over it. Did you build this through reSTATE?”
So let me put this on the record: I didn’t.
Speed Run Notes
- Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” bonus system awards e-points for video-verified strikes; units spend them on better drones in the Brave1 Market, the “Amazon for war.”
- I didn’t design it. Minister of Defence Mykhailo Fedorov and his team did. He showed it to me before launch, and I have no problem with gamifying war efforts.
- The argument I made during the 2012 IDF controversy still holds: gamification is a tool. Judge the war and the application, never the tool.
- Points that buy Boosters make this a complete Game Loop, the structure most corporate gamification never achieves. Fedorov’s own summary, to The Guardian: “The more infantry you eliminate, the more drones you acquire to continue the fight. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle.”
- The tell of real design maturity: the competition suspends during major offensives. The score stays subordinate to the mission.
In This Article
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Nationcraft Framework, applying behavioral design to the hardest motivational problem there is — getting an entire population to move through structural reform without losing momentum. As of 2026, the framework has informed advisory work with eight governments: Taiwan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Bahrain, South Korea, Singapore, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The same 8 Core Drives that have driven design at Microsoft, Porsche, and MrBeast now anchor nation-scale reform sequencing — diagnosing where motivation is broken, which Core Drives to lean into for each phase of reform, and how to sequence the political asks so the public stays bought in.
Published Nationcraft analyses include diagnostic playbooks for Venezuela’s post-Maduro reform window and Thailand’s reset-vs-cycle election dynamics, alongside cabinet-level advisory work on post-conflict recovery, reform-sequencing, and public-policy gamification. Chou also teaches the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Google, BCG, and IDEO — institutions where the human-systems lens applies whether the system is a product, a company, or a country.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Mykhailo Fedorov and his passionate team designed and built this system. Fedorov did show it to me before it launched, and I offered some light advice, the way you’d comment on a colleague’s nearly-finished work. The design, the courage to ship it, and the results belong to him and his team.
And here is the part some readers will find controversial: while I wasn’t responsible for this system, I don’t have any problems with gamifying war efforts.
I’ve held that position publicly for over two decades. Let me explain it, and then let me show you something stranger: this system, built by a defense ministry at war, runs the exact game loop structure I’ve been teaching designers for years.
The position I took in 2012 (and still hold)
Back in November 2012, the Israel Defense Forces added points, badges, and ranks to their public blog during Operation Pillar of Defense, and the gamification industry lost its mind. I wrote a post defending the principle when almost nobody else would put their name on that position.
The argument rests on one distinction: the difference between a tool and an application of the tool. Gamification is a tool, like cars, radios, or the Internet. Countries at war use all of these, and we don’t call the tools immoral. We reserve moral judgment for what the war itself is. If you accept that a nation has the right to defend itself, there is no special reason the motivational layer of its defense must stay bland.
There’s an irony most critics miss: modern games borrowed their mechanics from war in the first place. Points, ranks, medals, capture the flag — the military had them before game designers did. Gamifying war is less an invasion of gaming into warfare than mechanics returning to where they came from.
The tool-versus-application distinction cuts both ways, though. It means I can analyze Ukraine’s system as design without that being a judgment about any specific operation. My view of Ukraine’s defense is no secret; I co-founded reSTATE to help rebuild the country. But the analysis below is about the design.
What Fedorov’s team actually built
Here’s how the Army of Drones bonus system works, per the public reporting:
A drone unit destroys a target and uploads video confirmation through Ukraine’s DELTA battlefield system. The strike is verified, and the unit earns e-points. Killing a Russian infantry soldier: 12 points. Wounding one: 8. Killing a Russian drone operator: 25, because operators are force multipliers. Destroying a tank: 40. A rocket artillery system: 50. And the highest common bounty, 120 points, goes to capturing a soldier alive with a drone, because Ukraine needs prisoners to exchange for its own people.
Here is a morbid detail from the pre-launch version Fedorov walked me through: a Russian soldier is worth more points than a North Korean soldier. In the build I saw, the split was 8 points versus 6. The exact numbers have moved since (Russian infantry now pays 12, and I honestly don’t know today’s North Korean rate), but the hierarchy itself tells you what this table is. Point values track strategic priorities, and the designers reprice them the way game designers patch a live economy: when Moscow flooded the front with infantry, Kyiv raised the infantry bounty. Patch notes, but for war.
The points are not decorative. Units spend them in the Brave1 Market, an online catalog participants describe as an “Amazon for war,” on new drones, robots, electronic warfare kits, and components. Roughly 400 units compete on a leaderboard. Top units like Achilles and Phoenix become case studies that other units learn from. And in September 2025 alone, units in the system reportedly killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers, double the rate of the previous year.
The complete game loop, straight from my framework
For twenty years I’ve taught that most gamification fails because it builds an Activity Loop and calls it a Game Loop. In my game loop series, the distinction is one sentence long: a Game Loop is an Activity Loop with Boosters.
An Activity Loop repeats: do the action, get the reward, do the action again. Email inboxes are activity loops. Most corporate gamification is an activity loop with confetti. The 100th cycle feels exactly like the first, and that is why people quit.
A Booster is anything that changes how the next loop can be played. New weapon, new route, new capability. Boosters recruit Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback of the Octalysis Framework, the drive behind strategy and experimentation. When players can invest rewards into changing their own capabilities, every loop feels different, because the player is different. That’s what racing games figured out decades ago: you grind races for the turbocharger that changes how the next race feels. Battle spaceship games run on the same skeleton.
Now run Fedorov’s system through that definition. Fly the mission, confirm the strike, earn points: that’s the activity loop. Spend the points in Brave1 Market on a better drone, a jammer-resistant receiver, a thermal camera: that’s the booster. The upgraded unit flies missions the old unit couldn’t fly, which earns points the old unit couldn’t earn. Part 4 of my series covers the last requirement, closing the loop with value and currency, and e-points close it perfectly: the currency’s entire purpose is reinvestment into the loop.
Fedorov summarized his own system to The Guardian: “The more infantry you eliminate, the more drones you acquire to continue the fight. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle.” I have read hundreds of textbook definitions of a compounding game loop. None is cleaner than that one, and it came from a defense minister, not a game designer.
The system layers on more Core Drives than CD3. The leaderboard and point totals feed Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. Peer-to-peer learning between units feeds Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness. The shifting point economy creates Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience around high-value targets. And underneath everything sits the most powerful White Hat drive of all, Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling, because these units are defending their own homes. That is the deepest source of meaning any designer could ever point a system at.
The detail that proves it’s design, not decoration
My favorite operational detail from the reporting: during major Russian offensives, the competition is suspended so all units coordinate without worrying about their scores. The commander of the Achilles unit says the best drone pilots are, above all, “disciplined people.”
That is exactly right, and it’s the tell that this team understands what they built. A gamification layer must always stay subordinate to the real mission. The moment optimizing the score conflicts with winning the war, the score loses. Most corporate gamification never even asks that question, which is how you get support agents gaming ticket counts while customers rage. Ukraine asked it, answered it correctly, and wrote the answer into the rules.
There are also real risks. Verification requirements can be gamed; any currency invites farming; and analysts at RUSI have warned other militaries not to copy the system blindly. Those are real design risks, the same perverse-incentive stress tests I run on any client’s metric system. From the public evidence, video verification through DELTA, dynamic repricing, and the suspension rule show a team already stress-testing its own economy. That is more discipline than I see from most Fortune 500 engagement programs.
What I walked away thinking
The specifics of that pre-launch conversation are confidential. What I walked away thinking is simple enough to share: the era when gamification meant badges on a marketing site is over.
The same month pundits were still asking whether gamification was “manipulative,” a nation at war used a complete game loop to double its battlefield output, procure half a million drones, and build the world’s most detailed dataset on what actually works at the front. Fourteen years after the IDF controversy, the tool-versus-application distinction has never been easier to see.
In 2012 I defended a blog with ranks on it. In 2026 the conversation is a procurement economy with a leaderboard. If reSTATE gets its way, the next iteration of these mechanics won’t be aimed at soldiers at all: the same loop that helps Ukraine defend itself can help it rebuild — points, boosters, and all — for veterans returning home, cities coming back to life, and a diaspora deciding to return. Same tool. Better application. That’s the game I want to play.