[helsinkiandrew]

Units can also collect e-points to purchase more equipment:

> The allocation changes regularly, but as of June 2025, Business Insider reported that destroying a tank was worth eight points. A multiple launch rocket system counted for 10. Killing a regular Russian soldier earned 12 points. Wounding a drone pilot was valued at 15 and eliminating him netted 25. In the final step, the payoff, units use the points they’ve earned to purchase equipment—drones, drone jamming devices, ammunition, and other goods—on Brave1 Market, an online shopping platform not unlike Amazon.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tamarjacoby/2025/09/19/kyivs-e-...

[edg5000]

Wow, very interesting fact. If a unit is performing badly due to lack of equipment, they won't get the points to get the equipment they need. I wonder if that's a problem in practice. I'll read up on it, very interesting stuff.

[throwaway85825]

Basically yes. Ukraine has a big problem with soviet commanders who waste lives needlessly. The post Soviet younger commanders have much better reputations and use that to recruit, ie 'you can join my unit and won't be conscripted'. The popular and successful units grow and split into sub units. This way they dont have to fire the unpopular soviet era but politically connected commanders, they just slowly lose relevance.

[opscure]

I often think about how culture impacts efficacy. Hindering individuals through reconditioning of a hierarchical top down structure (follow orders unconditionally) limits collaboration, cohesion, and creativity often in situations where it's needed most. I understand the advantages of rapid decision making, but I often think about how if any leader in the chain makes a poor decision it loses the trust of those below. Tactical, creative, non-conforming, and adaptive reduces single points of responsibility and failure. While this might exist in pockets, it's far from the norm in most traditional environments and I'm curious what a culture shift like this might yield at a wider scale.

[pheaded_while9]

Gameification of war is the literal worst thing I ever heard. Lords of War, eat your heart out.

[wahern]

There's nothing new about earning "points" for kills. Warriors have always tallied their kills and displayed their numbers, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_marking or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalping, though the rewards were typically accolades, and only indirectly access to more materiel.

[pheaded_while9]

There is nothing new under the sun. You fail to address my clear moral objection with these irrelevant historical instances. It has no rhetorical value in this context.

[wahern]

The point was just that gameification is just a modern word that doesn't reflect any change in behaviors. Presumably you were familiar with these practices under previous descriptors. And your moral objections would have been shared by many millions before you, long before gameification was coined.

On the other side of the coin to thinking there's something new about the way war is waged are the people who think they can wage war without the same consequences as befell nations before. It's fundamentally the same err, IMO. So I take moral objection to the pretense that there's something morally novel to criticize. This stuff is what happens in war, always. And things can get way worse than this, and will get worse the longer we tolerate open hostilities among nations.

[rng-concern]

I think the difference is between: 1) me doing a nice thing and them reciprocating later, possibly. Others may or may not see this display of niceness. 2) me doing a nice thing, getting karma points my friend and other sees, which I can possibly use to get perks of some kind.

Gamification is not a new word for an old idea. It's a new thing, at least in many contexts.

#1 seems a lot more human to me.

[marcosdumay]

#2 is basically money.

[user_7832]

I think something fundamentally new is not only the incentivisation directly affecting kills - as a top team/unit can iterate up much faster, unlike a soldier who could boast more kills, but still have the same rifle as his colleagues - but the layers and desensitisation overall.

Part of this probably admittedly isn't new, and likely started with drones, where you could kill someone in Iraq sitting in DC, on the other side of the world.

But now with both, being separated from the physicality, and the incentives via points (the same way arguably in app currencies are used in gacha games - "20 tokens for this character!" feels better than $40), this is way more similar to CoD or any other shooting game than it has ever been in human history, and by a significant amount.

Sorry for the rambley and extremely verbose reply but tbh it's absolutely horrifying and sickening to see as a fellow human, and I just wanted to get it out. (I'm obviously not saying Ukraine is wrong for wanting to protect territory - but it's the other aspects that are "awesome" (or awe-full?), in the wrong way of awe.)

[wahern]

Nobody in Ukraine is separated from the carnage, least of all the soldiers. The value in the points system is in communicating target priorities down the line. It's just another technological improvement in the vein of, say, the radio. All technological improvements will seem to have the effect of dehumanizing people. But war is fundamentally dehumanizing. In fact, for most soldiers dehumanizing the enemy is a necessity, because otherwise they can't pull the trigger. The dehumanization to be worried about is the dehumanization of people from the perspective of non-combatants, especially those isolated from the war, like Americans.

Where technology creates greater moral hazards in war is when it helps insulate the leadership and population from the consequences of war, and so lowers the sociological and political costs to violence. In that sense having a professional rather than conscripted army should be much more morally repugnant than e-points. Again, no one in Ukraine is isolated from consequences in any meaningful way.

The Ukraine War is the most televised war in history. Especially in the beginning I forced myself to watch the videos, just so I wouldn't get lost in abstraction. The human suffering is gut wrenching. You can watch men getting shredded down; soldiers embracing each other in fear and helplessness moments before they're killed or maimed. Debates over e-points, to me, reflect a failure to appreciate the reality, a reality which is only hidden from one's view by choice. (After a few videos that left me crying, I figured I saw enough to ensure I was dutifully more engaged with the reality than the typical non-veteran at a comfortable remove.)

If anything drones and the necessity of having to record a kill for "points" is arguably an improvement over traditional aerially bombardment. Being forced to watch people injured and killed comes with a greater cost, even for veteran soldiers. On HN we take for granted that, e.g., Facebook employees forced to sift through child porn continually pay a price no matter how long they've been at the job, yet seem to assume soldiers watching a drone video feed feel no different than playing a video game. That perspective betrays a certain callousness that is in some respect even more worrisome than these technological advancements on the battlefield.

[godwinson__4-8]

This post is so insanely out of touch with reality. What an irony. Their country is being invaded. Their families are being affected and killed. Their land is being taken. The goal is to end their country. Trying to project criticisms of the American drone program onto Ukraine in such an openly transparent and uncritical manner is the only thing sickening here. For your platitudes about humanity you clearly care so little about such a deadly conflict to have clearly done no research into the basic facts. The comparison to CoD in particular is so deeply egregious. But really it's the arrogance of this post paired with the professed humanity that is so unnerving. It's like you took an essay about America's drone program and just copied it into the Ukranian context with no critical thought or self reflection. That seems the most charitable way to interpret your post. And I'm really trying.

[user_7832]

I'm intrigued (but unfortunately not surprised) by the downvote.

I suspect it's primarily due to folks missing nuance/misinterpreting thing (and/or getting emotional and running off with it).

I ran a thread to analyse hidden/missed nuance - where I tried to be as "neutral" as possible (by never identifying myself), if someone's genuinely interested I can share the link. (Hint: Gemini 3.1 Pro at max thinking mode in AI Studio says others are missing a point/some nuance.)

[weard_beard]

War is inherently amoral and in an argument about its efficacy I don’t understand what your argument is?

[harimau777]

Can you expand on that? There is a long history of warrior codes, just war theory, war crimes, etc. Certainly they have virtually always been followed imperfectly, but I'm not sure that means that they don't exist.

[squidbeak]

> Gameification of war is the literal worst thing I ever heard. Lords of War, eat your heart out.

What 'clear moral objection' did you make? You talk in cliches so it's hard to tell.

[szopa]

Note that capturing a live Russian soldier is worth 10 times more than killing one. Think about how that affects the incentives of Ukrainian soldiers. Avoid committing war crimes, get better gear for your team.

[helsinkiandrew]

> Gameification of war is the literal worst thing I ever heard.

Is this much difference from a combat mission being written up and soldiers being promoted/awarded medals.

The point of this is to see who is successful and what drones/weapons are the most effective. With a limited budget and much larger enemy it comes down to kills per dollar.

[skolos]

It sounds more like market based allocation than gameification.

[idiotsecant]

This is silly. Elite units have always gotten better gear. If this is the part of war that causes you moral outrage I think you've got some rexamining to do.