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“By 2024, drones began to evolve as a counter to drones. So people were using drones to intercept other drones, and you started to see drones being used as a way of negating drones.”

“There need to be some kind of drone units. There need to be people whose job it is to use these systems. It's very manpower intensive if you look at the Ukrainian-Russian armed forces. If you look at any Western military, you cannot fight in this way or adapt it to how you currently fight without force design changes.”

“If you want to get your system certified by Ukraine's MOD, it actually would take on a fast cycle, something like six months. And by the time it gets certified, it will already be obsolete in this war. So that is also true, okay? And lots of folks have challenges working through your bureaucracy. And this is why the common advice is find whoever has a problem first and foremost needs solving that your kit can solve and work directly with those people.”

“The feedback loop and the cycle that I see isn't very good, which is, you know, if you want to improve the kit, most Western kit that shows up there doesn't work out of the box or doesn't work very well. That's just the reality. And it needs modification. It needs improvement. The first versions of whatever gets deployed often don't do that well. And the improved versions do a lot better. But you have to work closely with the folks who are using it.”

“I learned from this war now something that we'll never forget, which is no matter what went wrong, did you fail to properly calculate the grids? Did you, 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 something went wrong, just say it was Russian EW, because that's what a lot of people do in Ukraine.”

“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.”

“So we saw last fall, a great contest, which was F-35 versus Gibera Styrofoam drone, okay? And this is not quite what the F-35 was really built for, but we saw how cost-ineffective that is the solution to that problem. So modern ground-based air defense and current aircraft that we have are not optimized for that mission.”