“Ukraine’s leaderboard may be a crude way to run a war, but it is at least a rule. Public, legible, the same for every unit.”
Ukraine ranks drone teams on a public leaderboard and converts performance into purchasing power across dispersed manufacturers. The June 2026 executive order does the opposite, restricting frontier AI to unnamed trusted partners through a classified process with no published criteria. A country under invasion runs procurement more transparently than the Pentagon runs a software policy. Undefined trusted partners is not a security posture, it is a list of who already has lobbyists.