The West's drone tech risks becoming irrelevant if it's not tested daily on the Ukrainian battlefield, defense exec says
Ukraine has become ground zero for developing cutting-edge drones.
UK-Ukraine tech-sharing aims to enhance military capabilities and retain an edge.
The dizzying pace of drone development is now part and parcel of the war in Ukraine, where the fastest-moving companies are battle-testing their products in real-world combat.
Increasingly, Western militaries understand that their drone tech will be functionally obsolete unless the technology they import or develop is field-tested in conflicts like Ukraine.
"If your system is not in day-to-day use on the frontline of Ukraine, it becomes very quickly out of date," Justin Hedges, a former Royal Marine and cofounder of military intelligence company Prevail, told Business Insider.
Prevail has partnered with Ukrainian drone company Skyeton to bring Raybird, a small surveillance and targeting drone, to production in the UK.
It's being done with a shrewd eye on the British Army's plans to replace its troubled Watchkeeper drone program with an uncrewed surveillance and targeting capability more suited to the scenarios playing out in Ukraine.
More broadly, a recent data and drone tech-sharing agreement made between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the UK's Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that Ukrainian insight is to be "plugged into UK production lines."
It chimes with a drive across the West to see the Ukrainian battlefield as a live laboratory — out of necessity for the country's defense, but increasingly, as a crucial way for smaller companies to develop systems and services that have a technological edge.
The UK armed forces minister Luke Pollard underscored the point at a drone conference in Latvia in late May, saying, "If you are a drone company and you do not have your kit on the frontline in Ukraine, you might as well give up."
Raybird, Skyeton's drone, has a combined 350,000 hours of flight time on Ukraine's front line, in use "from the Black Sea to Kharkiv," Skyeton's founder Alex Stepura told BI.
Per Stepura, Raybird can fly more than 28 continuous hours and uses an array of sensors — including optical, electromagnetic, and various radar capabilities — to collect data from "far behind" the front line, sometimes from more than 125 miles away.
Many of its sensors can be swapped out in a minute, enabling forces to react quickly.
Ukraine's Ministry of Defence has hailed the drone as being capable of tasks normally reserved for much larger models. Its size — just 25kg, or 55 pounds — gives an added advantage: it's "relatively stealthy," Hedges said.
Small, advanced drones are crucial to spotting enemy movements and high-value targets like vehicles and air defenses.
In response, Russia has deployed an ever-evolving array of electronic warfare tactics that aim to scramble signals, spoof GPS positions, or overwhelm radio frequencies.
Hedges said that Skyeton's engineers are continually adapting to these tactics. "The proof is in the data," he added, saying that Ukrainian forces are getting more than 80 missions out of each drone before they're lost.
In contrast to the cumbersome procurement processes of major companies, the Ukrainian drone industry is peppered with small, fast-moving producers who iterate quickly and often interact directly with forces on the ground.
Milrem Robotics, an Estonian company, is creating autonomous ground robots that are being regularly battle-tested in Ukraine.
Its CEO, Kuldar Väärsi, told BI that the conditions in Ukraine are "totally different" to those found in peacetime exercises.
Milrem's THeMIS robot had been designed to be simple to operate, but after a stint in Ukraine, the company's engineers realized they needed it to be even simpler, Väärsi said.
Kit might be designed for use by soldiers trained on how to use it, he added, but in actual war, "anybody who needs that equipment will use it."
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