Ukraine war forcing U.S. defense companies to rethink how weapons are built
by Guillaume Ptak · The Washington TimesKIELCE, Poland — This year, Ukraine is on track to produce between 6 million and 7 million small first-person-view drones. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s $1.1 billion Drone Dominance program expects to have ordered fewer than 200,000 by February of next year.
The gap has caught the attention of U.S. military planners. But addressing this difference might require more than a mere increase in factory capacity: After more than four years of high-intensity war, Ukrainian companies now operate in an environment in which battlefield feedback can reach engineers within hours, weapons can be modified in weeks and military units often have a much greater say in what gets bought.
For American defense companies accustomed to programs stretching over years or decades, that model has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
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The Pentagon has begun bringing Ukrainian firms into its own drone programs. Six Ukrainian companies were invited to take part in the latest Drone Dominance trials at Fort Carson, Colorado, with future U.S. orders tied to partnerships and manufacturing arrangements with American companies.
BlueBird Tech is participating with U.S. partner Zaruba Inc. Ukrainian producer F-Drones is represented in the United States by Ukrainian Defense Drones, which has announced an $18.4 million manufacturing center near Toledo, Ohio. General Cherry, another Ukrainian drone manufacturer, has entered a joint venture with New Hampshire-based Wilcox Industries.
The aim is increasingly to combine Ukrainian designs and combat experience with American capital and manufacturing capacity. But Ukrainian executives say the more important lesson might prove harder to import.
“The important thing is not only to transfer specific answers but to recreate the mechanism that continuously generates new answers,” Vadym Stepanchuk, head of business development at BlueBird Tech, told The Washington Times.
In Ukraine, that mechanism has been shaped by an ever-evolving technological contest in which successful systems can quickly become less effective.
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“Three or four months later, a significant part of that experience may already be outdated,” Mr. Stepanchuk said. “Ukraine makes a step, Russia makes a step, and then the technology changes again.”
That has pushed manufacturers closer to the troops using their equipment.
When The Washington Times spoke earlier this year with Iryna Terekh, CEO and chief technology officer of Ukrainian drone and missile manufacturer Fire Point, she described a development cycle tied directly to what Russian forces were doing on the battlefield.
“Each and every countermeasure that we meet from our enemy, information about this countermeasure becomes our technical task the same day or the same night,” Ms. Terekh said in the March interview.
The pressure has also forced companies to rethink what a weapon actually needs to do.
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Ms. Terekh said Fire Point has been willing to strip away requirements that do not affect immediate battlefield performance if doing so saves money, speeds production and makes a system easier to manufacture at scale.
That fast-paced approach is now at the heart of Ukraine’s procurement model, as rapid engineering changes matter little if a new product then spends years moving through a labyrinthine military bureaucracy.
Kyiv has therefore tried to push some purchasing decisions closer to the units actually fighting.
Under the Defense Ministry’s DOT-Chain Defence marketplace, brigades can select drones according to their battlefield needs. The ministry said this summer that 95% of drones bought through its main procurement agency were Ukrainian-made.
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Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and now non-executive chairman of Ukrainian autonomy company Swarmer, argued in an interview with The Times earlier this year that this decentralization may be one of the war’s most important lessons for Washington.
“The Ukrainians have changed their procurement system from what was a very Soviet and centralized system to one that is truly democratized down to a brigade commander or lower to buy what he needs in his area,” Mr. Prince said in May, on the margins of the Black Sea Security Forum.
“That is truly revolutionary,” he said. “The United States still has the same centralized Soviet-style control system that we’ve had for the last 80 or 100 years.”
His language is deliberately provocative, but the underlying question is familiar to people working at the Pentagon: how much authority should be pushed down to commanders and users if the technology they need is changing faster than the acquisition system can respond?
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“If you’re trusting a ship commander to take a warship to sea, if you’re trusting a brigade commander to take his troops into battle, then trust them enough to buy their own stuff,” Mr. Prince said. “But hold them to account if it goes wrong.”
The Pentagon is already experimenting with ways to shorten that distance.
Drone Dominance has been organized around rapid competitions and soldier evaluations rather than the traditional model of selecting a platform years before it reaches users. The Army has also expanded shorter development events that bring troops, engineers, acquisition officials and private companies together to test and connect new systems.
An executive at Ukrainian ground-robotics company Ark Robotics said that American procurement officials appeared increasingly willing to experiment with faster programs, in some cases more aggressively than their European counterparts.
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But changing individual programs is easier than changing the system around them.
“There is so much inertia in the industry,” the Ark executive told The Times, arguing that companies still need ways to maintain short development loops outside traditional government contracts rather than waiting for procurement reform to happen across the board.
That is one reason U.S.-Ukrainian defense cooperation is increasingly moving toward joint production rather than simple weapons transfers.
Washington and Kyiv’s bilateral security agreement calls for co-development, co-production and joint ventures in areas including drones, munitions and air defense. Programs such as Drone Dominance are beginning to give that idea a more practical form by asking Ukrainian firms to pair combat-tested technology with American manufacturing.
For U.S. companies, however, the collaboration also exposes a basic difference in how the two defense industries have evolved: American programs have traditionally placed a premium on systems that can be certified, standardized, stored for years and supported through tightly controlled supply chains.
Ukraine has often needed equipment that can be changed within weeks, even if that means accepting shorter product lives and greater risk.
Mr. Prince pointed to that tension when discussing U.S. missile procurement.
“The American way has been to buy a Tomahawk missile and it has to last on the shelf for 30 years,” he said. “Technology is accelerating so fast that you can’t buy something and expect it to still be relevant in 30 years.”
He argued that troops should have more freedom to modify equipment after it is fielded.
“The government, the troops, have to have a right to repair, or a right to upgrade,” he said.
Not every part of Ukraine’s wartime model can or should be copied by the United States. Many of the shortcuts tolerated by a country fighting for survival would be politically, legally or operationally difficult to reproduce in peacetime.
Nor does Ukraine have an answer to every problem: Its defense sector still depends heavily on imported components, foreign financing and Western weapons for some of its most demanding missions. What the war has demonstrated, however, is the cost of allowing the development cycle to fall too far behind the battlefield.
“A lot of innovation comes directly from the battlefield and from ideas developed by people serving on the frontline,” Mr. Stepanchuk said.
For U.S. defense companies, the challenge is increasingly to preserve the scale and sophistication of the American industrial base while shortening the distance between those soldiers and the engineers designing what they will fight with next.