War on the Rocks

“The bureaucracy in Ukraine is quite complex. While there is this whole story that Ukraine is a country of numerous defense startups where military units have their own defense labs and their own contractors and manufacturers, that is true. But if you want to get your system certified by Ukraine's MOD, that actually would take, and then on a fast cycle, something like 6 months. And by the time it gets certified, it'll already be obsolete in this war.”

“A lot of people that end up being there in Ukraine itself are usually on the contract support or sales side. They're not on the R&D side. They're not the engineers that actually know the product that are going to tinker it. There's no way to tinker with it there. So, unlike Ukrainians who have a very tight loop where the people who made it can be right there next to the unit, then go back and fix it, then see the improvements, test it again, and go through a cycle very quickly, a lot of times you don't see Western companies being able to do that.”

“The companies going there are looking primarily to Western defense sectors as the people they want to sell their products to. What people are willing to buy here are not necessarily the same things as what Ukraine needs right now, or vice versa, right? So, there is a mismatch to some extent of incentives. And there could be really great technology solutions, but they're not solutions to problems that Ukraine has on the battlefield. They're solutions to problems we might have, you know, in our perspective fights.”

“No matter what went wrong, did you fail to properly calculate the grids? Is the product fail half the time coming out of the tube? You can safely blame adversary EW for the problem and I suggest the rest of you using this in your life. Like, if you Something went wrong, just say it was Russian EW. Because that's what a lot of people do in Ukraine. And then when you get into the details of the story, the thing fails to activate, you know, out the tube 30-40% of the time. It's not Russian EW.”

“I remember by end of the summer, around August, September, FPV drones were really shutting down the space to conduct any kind of maneuver or for folks to even get to their positions within about 5 km of the front line. And then, if we fast forward to today, now the danger zone's more like 20, 25, and it really depends on where you are. So, there's lots of things that you can't do today that you could have done in '22, in '23, and '24.”

“It is people who have a whole innovation unit within their military unit who have specific contractors and manufacturers that they work with who use funding to procure from them without going through the Ministry of Defense, without going through the regular military, and that's why to some extent a lot of Ukrainian military units in of themselves are kind of defense startups. And there are plenty of the best units where I know that the unit is both a large military formation that is a drone regiment or drone brigade or whatnot.”

“Modern ground-based air defense and current aircraft that we have are not optimized for that mission, and that is simply one subset of the problem that drones pose. If you look at high saturation one-way attack drones that Russia launches at a rate of 5,000 plus per month against Ukraine, and if you look at all the drones that operate within a few hundred feet on the battlefield, it's not immediately obvious how air power solves this. Like, it just not. Okay? I mean, yes, air power is still the best combination of mobility and firepower on the battlefield.”