From Esports to Platform Warfare: The Platformization and Esportification of War

Research on digital warfare has concentrated on drones, artificial intelligence, and autonomous weapons rather than on the organizational transformation accompanying them. This article reads Ukraine's Army of Drones as a case of platform warfare, arguing that its architecture shares defining features with esports ecosystems: distributed expertise coordinated through digital infrastructures, continuous performance analytics, algorithmic governance, and rapid iteration. It proposes esportification of warfare to name the diffusion of organizational principles from esports into military institutions, and shows how the programme marks a shift from hierarchical organization towards hybrid platform ecosystems joining military units, volunteers, developers, and firms. The defining innovation of digital warfare, it concludes, lies less in new technology than in new ways of organizing military capability.