David Axe

David Axe is a defence correspondent and analyst who has written extensively for Forbes, The Daily Beast, and War Is Boring, specialising in military operations, weapons procurement, and open-source battlefield assessment. In April 2026 he published an analysis for the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) assessing that Ukraine's 130 refinery and port strikes in 2025 delivered only a 6% export reduction against 2024 volumes, with total damage estimated at $863 million against approximately $189 billion in annual Russian oil revenue — equivalent to 0.46% of the base. The analysis drew on RUSI research and established a widely-cited benchmark for evaluating the economic effectiveness of Ukraine's deep-strike campaign.

Axe's analytical method combines open-source intelligence with traditional reporting on defence acquisition. His Ukraine strike-campaign work concluded that Ukrainian targeters had been selecting lightly-defended terminals for visible damage, leaving hardened core infrastructure intact. At the 2025 strike tempo, he calculated that Ukraine would require over two centuries of operations to match a single year of Russian oil revenue — a finding that reframed the strategic rationale for the campaign from economic attrition to political signalling and operational disruption. The CEPA piece also noted that Fire Point, manufacturer of the Flamingo cruise missile, was reportedly under a NABU corruption investigation, with only nine Flamingos fired in six months. May 2026 data from Lowdown Update #17 shows the Syzran refinery strike achieving 800 km range and halting a quarter of Russian refining capacity at that facility, a single-strike result that exceeds the cumulative economic impact Axe documented for the entire 2025 campaign.

Axe's positioning as a sceptical analyst of Ukrainian strike efficiency has made his work a reference point in Western debates over the strategic value of deep-strike operations versus front-line materiel supply. His CEPA affiliation gives the analysis institutional weight beyond independent commentary, and RUSI's parallel research on the same campaign validated his core methodology.