Critical Weapons Development Lessons From Ukraine Are Not Being Learned By The West

Yahoo

6 days ago

Before Russia launched its full-on invasion, Ukraine's military-industrial complex was almost entirely directed by the government and large defense contractors. However, in the ensuing years, Ukraine has become a massive innovator in defense technology, especially when it comes to air, sea and ground drones, with small startups pushing the technological envelope alongside larger firms. This change, along with massive alterations to how weapons are procured, has come as a necessity as Ukraine fights for its life. The need to innovate and iterate at breakneck speed in order to survive is a critical lesson, among many others, that is lost on the West.
Deborah Fairlamb has had a front row seat to Ukraine's rapid defense technology growth. An American who has lived in Kyiv for years, she worked in several roles as a leader in the technology investment space. Fairlamb opted to stay in Ukraine after Russia's full-on invasion and co-founded Green Flag Ventures. The mission is to fund companies producing early-stage commercial products with military applications. To date, Green Flag has invested in companies developing swarming, counter-drone, navigation and communications technology.
In an exclusive hour-long interview with The War Zone, Fairlamb suggests that while these innovations have been a huge help to Ukraine's fight against Russia, the lessons of success are being lost on or ignored by the U.S. and NATO allies.
From swarming drones to concerns that foreign firms are making off with Ukrainian innovations and claiming them as their own, Fairlamb provides us with a deep look at how Ukraine became a defense technology innovator that global leaders can't ignore. She also provides a dire warning to Western militaries and governments that if they do not drastically change the way they develop and procure weapons, it could be too late.
The questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: What is the current state of Ukrainian weapons development from your vantage point as a U.S. venture capitalist working in Kyiv?
A: That is such a huge question. First and foremost, I would say that the speed of iteration of everything is just extraordinary. I know people think of Ukraine and drones. That tends to mean aerial drones, but Ukrainians have been innovating tremendously, also in ground vehicles and sea vehicles. And it's not just the drone bodies themselves, it's all of the components. It's navigation systems. It's resistance to electronic warfare. It's the ability to fly in GPS-denied environments. It's all of these pieces, in terms of the technology. The Ukrainians have really had this incredible focus on homegrown drones that they are building, the long-range drones striking deep inside of Russia.
Q: Talk about the importance of dual-use tech in military tech development.
A: We look at dual-use largely as a business development hedge for startups. Primes and big companies have the cash flow to wait it out, but most startups cannot cross the three- to five-year valley of death that exists for companies trying to get through the DoD and MoD procurement pipelines. If they have other markets – police, critical infrastructure security, port monitoring, border control – that they can sell into in the meantime, it gives them the revenue to survive until they get to the big leagues.
Q: President Zelensky talked about developing 1,000 interceptor drones a day. How can Ukrainian industry scale up to that? Is it a realistic number?
A: The Ukrainian ecosystem in terms of its scale-up capacity has been just extraordinary to watch. In 2022, the Ukrainians had almost no homegrown drones. These were all just Mavericks. They were buying off the shelf, making the changes that they needed. And that was sort of the evolution. Then in 2023 was really when you see the emergence of the FPVs [first-person view drones], and those are the ones that the Ukrainians have just been able to produce in mass quantities.
It is absolutely decentralized. There are little workshops all over Ukraine of people who just make the FPV frames and bodies. Then they get sent to what I call coordination points, where there are people who are putting additional capacity, be it in the form of electronics, cameras, whatever.
So it's sort of a strange decentralized production line, but so many people are involved in the FPV body production. Now this is different than the bigger, long-range, fixed-wings or the strike drones. Those are made by companies, and that is a very different thing. So, depending on the kind of drone you're talking about, there are different ways that they're being manufactured. In terms of the capacity to be able to ramp up to millions of interceptors. I think that is actually very probable and I actually do believe that they would be able to ramp up to the capacity level.
On that, an incredible number of things are being made by 3d printers here. You know, all of the FPV bodies are 3d printed. It's not true for the bigger fixed wings. If you look at what those little interceptors are, a lot of them are actually 3d printed. And so do I believe that they have the capacity to ramp up? Yes.
Today I spoke with the manufacturers of interceptor drones. I visited the facility, thanked the team, and saw firsthand how protection for our cities and villages, for our people, is being produced. Ukraine knows how to create outstanding things and maintains its technological… pic.twitter.com/PHVKbwGVCY
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) July 25, 2025
I also believe that the Ukrainians truly understand the way that the Russians have been using the Shaheds. It changed dramatically about three months ago, and with both the changes that they have made internally to the Shaheds, with the capacity for range, for the height that they now fly at, for the capabilities of them to be able to fly in more coordinated fashion, and the fact that we know that the Russians are mass producing these things. Now it is an existential issue for the Ukrainians to find a way to ramp up capacity of the interceptors. It's not like there's one magic bullet that's going to stop everything. This is a line of defense that is involved. And before the Shaheds had really changed both the structure as well as the flying patterning, it was fairly easy to take them down with machine guns. But those have just pretty much stopped working, just because the height at which the Shaheds are flying now is above the range of any guns, which is what is really driving the need for a different kind of interceptor. And whether it's ground-to-air or air-to-air, there are quite a few companies in Ukraine that are working on new solutions right now, and there are several that are already being used and have been fairly successful. It's just that they need more of them at them.
Q: Are any of the companies you invest in working on interceptor drones?
A: No. One of our portfolio companies is counter-UAS, but not Shaheds. It's more for [first-person view] FPVs. That's a company called Kara Dag. So that's both detection and mitigation.
We invested in a company called Swarmer that is doing autonomy and swarming capabilities. It is a software that can be plugged into a variety of drones, whether bigger or smaller or fixed-wing, that can then go out and perform the operations that are programmed into the software.
Q: Is the Swarmer software deployed in combat right now? And what is this technology capable of?
A: The way that Swarmer and a number of other component systems work – especially when it comes to navigation and being able to fly in areas with very heavy electronic warfare and GPS denial – is that they are largely software-based. But what they all have is some kind of hardware plug-in or middleware that essentially allows for these systems to then be incorporated into any number of drone body manufacturers. It's sort of a plug-and-play piece. There are an awful lot of benefits to that. Because you are not involved in the manufacturing, you have a much wider base you are selling to. You are actually selling [business-to-business] rather than [business-to-government]. So in terms of a business model, it makes a lot of sense, but in terms of being able to get these capacities out to a wider number of companies, it makes a lot of sense, too.
Q: Is Swarmer being deployed now, and if so, can you talk about in which kinds of systems?
A: It is in use. I am not positive I can say who is using them to tell you the truth, but yes, it is in use right now.
Q: What types of drones is Swarmer being used in? Just aerial drones? Ucrewed surface (USV) or ground vehicles (UGV) too?
A: To my knowledge, it is not sea drones or UGVs. Swarner is used for air drones, and generally, it is fixed-wing. But I believe that there is some capacity for FPVs as well.
Q: What does Swarmer bring to the table? How does the Swarmer help? And are there actually swarms of weapons flying together operated through the system?
A: That's actually a really good question. So people talk about drone swarms, but right now, for the most part, that is still one operator, one drone, but there is coordination at a unit level or something like that. If you look at what the Chinese do, for example, they have 1,000 drones up in the sky that is not one operator, one drone. That is pre-programmed. But they're all running off of GPS. So you can do a lot of the pre-programming.
When you're talking about swarm capacity in a battlefield environment, you have to assume no GPS connection. You have to assume very limited or no radio communication. So what that means is that when the drones are going out, there is autonomy within the system. It is one operator, multiple drones. There is autonomy, and there is actually capability for the drones to communicate as they are going on their mission.
Q: Is that taking place now?
A: It is.
Q: What kind of drones?
A: I don't know that I can give you the exact specifics.
5/ More than 100 Ukrainian companies are working on AI guidance systems. Some are testing drone swarms, which could overwhelm defenses in the future. But progress has been slow and costly. pic.twitter.com/FbBt1b47cx
— David Kirichenko (@DVKirichenko) June 19, 2025
Q: Is Swarmer's tech being used with repeater drones that extend the range of other drones? And how many drones can be operated by one operator on this system?
A: Swarmer is currently in battlefield operation with their product that allows for one operator to fly tens of simultaneously airborne drones. It is a product that is vendor-agnostic and relatively plug-and-play, which means it can integrate into most types of drones that drone manufacturers make. Swarmer maintains constant R&D to work toward scaling the product – specifically, this means increasing the number of drones per operator and the number of drones or platforms their product is integrated with. They are also working on multi-domain swarming capabilities, which means expanding beyond UAVs into UGVs and USVs.
Q: Are we talking about strike drones? Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) drones?
A: Not so much ISR. So ISRs and repeaters all have a place within the ecosystem, and they all sort of work together. So even when you have a guy on the front line who's got an FPV, very often he's got an ISR drone flying in combination that is giving him a bigger picture of the battlefield. Some of them definitely are using repeater drones that are up there just loitering. Those are all components. But to my knowledge, in the context of the software that is out there, it's not an FPV plus a repeater plus an ISR. Think of it as a line more or less with the same mission. Now, there may be an ISR or a repeater up there somewhere, but they're not necessarily all coordinated, at least not to my knowledge at this point.
Q: Talk a little bit about developing systems in combat and can you share any real-world examples of weapon systems tested in combat?
A: What is generally happening is that when somebody has an idea or somebody says, 'Oh, there's a need we're going to build to fill it,' before they ever go anywhere near the Ministry of Defense or anything for purchasing, they are working in tandem with a unit and constantly refining during the build process. And whether it's refining the hardware, whether it's refining the software, whatever it may be, all of this stuff is literally being built side-by-side with the military. So by the time it is ready to be purchased, it has already been fully tested. It's build, test; build, test; build, test. It's this constant cycle.
One of the challenges that Ukraine has seen is that a lot of systems that are being sold or are ready for sale, they've hit what they're calling their ready product. However, by the time they bring it to Ukraine, the systems have been closed. They did not build it in an environment that allowed for quick iteration, the fast changes that have to happen. So a lot of the systems that come in from the outside do not work. And it's not that it's bad tech in and of itself. It's just that, and so many of these builds outside of Ukraine, I think, for most people, it's just utterly unimaginable to build for the electronic warfare and the communications denied environment that exists here.
A behind the scenes look at an incredible Ukrainian Drone Factory owned by a company called SkyFall. They make over 4,000 drones per day with a drone being completed every 27 seconds. pic.twitter.com/yXuC9e0GgL
— Bricktop_NAFO (@Bricktop_NAFO) April 19, 2025
Q: What lessons does that offer for the U.S. when it comes to a potential conflict in Asia with China and the ability to adapt to what's happening there?
A: This is something that I am trying to talk about more, because it is so hard to understand from the outside and there definitely are implications for the United States. There are a couple of things. I think about this in four bullet points of things I really wish that the U.S. understood.
So one is just truly the speed of iteration that happens here, and it's both for the software and the hardware. And because you need to be able to adapt to everything that the Russians do – and I guarantee the Chinese would be exactly the same – in terms of the GPS-denied environments, in terms of being able to respond to the electromagnetic warfare that's going on. You have to start with systems that are adaptable, and that can be changed. And it's not going back to the factory that the soldiers themselves can do it. So that's the iteration part.
The second thing is, like you said, just the production, the scale of this stuff. Everything that the Ukrainians are using, for the most part, you know, the FPVs, maybe run $500 to $1,000, at most, if they've got really sophisticated components like nighttime cameras or something like that. The bigger fixed wings, maybe $10,000, though some of them are $30,000, but you know, those are even bumping up against the high point. And if you think about the scale, we're talking about millions and millions of drones that are out there that are being used. You can't have drones that are costing you $100,000. $200,000 a pop.
So the third point is price. It's the kind of production and the mass production, and also the price point that balances in that is extremely important.
And then the fourth point is really the whole procurement process. And this is not in the hands of the producers or anything. I mean, this sits with congressional committees. It sits with the budgeting process. It sits with the Department of Defense in terms of how they're going to buy things. But the traditional cycle for the DoD to be able to incorporate new technology is not speedy. It is not fast. It can take years. And even, like with Anduril and some of these new ones coming out, this is still not a super speedy cycle. The Ukrainians have done a couple of things that have just sort of been extraordinary and that I know can't necessarily be reproduced exactly. But Ukraine completely revamped its official MoD procurement cycle, and it's now down to three to four months. So once there is a product that has been battle tested, that they have proof from commanders out in the field that it works, they can now actually do procurement within about three months. The other thing is that they have given individual units – companies and battalions – their own budgets to be able to buy directly from an approved list of vendors that have already been put into the ecosystem. This speeds up the process because there's no procurement in there. It's a transaction that happens very, very quickly.
There are a lot of soldiers just buying things more or less off the shelf, or that they have got people doing fundraising for, or companies are donating equipment out to soldiers at the front for them to test. So there's even this third pipeline that's putting things out there very quickly, that I recognize is, again, not traditional procurement. But the West needs to understand that the combination of these things really changed the paradigm in terms of how things are getting out to the front. And so even if the U.S. can just pay attention to changing the procurement process and maybe letting units buy things directly once something is in an approved bucket, that would help enormously for the soldiers, because, again, this is so fast.
And I'll give you another example of what this is. So it's not just that software gets updated overnight. I was talking to a guy who had been essentially the head of technology for one of Ukraine's very successful battalions out at the front about their use of technology. And he said, 'you know, in 2022 if something was out there, it had maybe about seven months that it lasted before there was some new technology, or we had to change it, because the Russians had done something.' And he said, 'In 2023, it was like five to six months. We needed to change the hardware and make substantial changes.' In 2024 it was down to about four months, maybe three and a half. And he said, 'in this first half of 2025 we're changing things [faster]. Now it's a month and a half to a month sometimes.' So the speed at which things are happening is just completely and utterly incompatible with the processes that exist in most Western systems. And the advantage that any adversaries, say China and or Russia, would have is with their governments being able to…go to a washing machine factory and say, 'Okay, you're not making washing machines anymore. You're making FPVs and I want two million of them by next Tuesday. So in terms of the capabilities of potential enemies, to both create these things at mass and to create them at much, much lower price points is an issue that the United States really does need to be thinking about.
Q: Well, along those lines, the U.S. Army just put out a widely mocked video titled, 'Did you ever see a drone drop a GRENADE?' like it was something revolutionary. So, how does the U.S. scale up to produce the required mass of these kinds of systems, both in terms of numbers and in terms of capabilities, to keep up with the rapid technology advancements by Russia and China?
https://t.co/99cDSz7LEc
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) July 21, 2025
A: Somebody at the top has to make a decision that this is what they're going to do. DoD and Congress jointly have to reach a decision that maybe don't blow up the whole old system, because do you still need F-16 and F-35s? Yes, you need planes. Do you still need tanks? Yes. Do you still need the ships? Yes, you do. But maybe what the answer is actually to build a whole new line. Maybe reforming the old procurement system is going to be too hard. But maybe what they do is they create- let's call it a new drone wing. And it's got an entirely different purchase cycle. It's got an entirely different manner of purchasing. It's got very different price points. It's got entirely different everything. Because in some ways, the Ukrainians essentially have [done that]. They didn't try and change within their existing procurement system. Yes, they've made some changes, but for the most part, almost everything here is kind of new, in all honesty. And maybe trying to reform the old [system] – rather than maybe building a new…drone wing, or a drone arm – would allow the U.S. to buy UAVs, UGVs, USVs, and all of the components at a much faster speed. Maybe let the technology companies work directly with military units in terms of testing the equipment before it goes to DoD for purchasing. There are ways, in fact, that the U.S. could mirror some of the types of things that have happened here. There's no reason that the U.S couldn't do something like this.
Q: The Pentagon's Replicator program was created to purchase weapons at scale to counter China. The Switchblade 600 loitering munition was the first named weapon to be procured by Replicator. Is this program adequate to address the needs?
A: No.
Q: How come?
A: They are still working under the DoD framework for everything. I know a lot of the guys at the [Defense Innovation Unit] DIU. They're great guys. They all really are very earnest in what they are doing, but they are working within the confines of the old structure and the old framework. So I think that's sort of the hardest thing.
Q: Switching gears a little bit, talk to me about the concerns that Western nations are stealing Ukrainian tech, and that they're also falsely claiming that products have been tested in combat. Are these real concerns? And do you have any examples of how that's played out?
A: So there have been instances, and I am not naming names, and I don't know that you will find anybody in Ukraine who will name names. But yes, there are Western companies that have come to Ukraine under the guise of: 'hey, we would like to invest. We would like to partner. Can we spend a couple of days with you, learning what you're doing?' And I have to admit, most of this was earlier. It's not happening as much because Ukrainians sort of realized what was going on. But these companies would come in under the guise of: 'hey, we'd like to work with you and understand what you're doing.' And then they would essentially disappear. And six months later, they would come out with something that was very, very similar to what they wanted to partner with a company in about. There are at least four examples that I am aware of where that has happened.
Q: You won't name names, but can you say what kinds of systems?
A: It was mostly on the drones themselves.
Q: FPV drones? Other strike drones? ISR?
A: And fixed wing, yeah.
Q: What about situations where a product is tested in Ukraine, but the testing was far from the battlefield, yet the claim is that the product is battle-tested. How big a concern is that?
A: So the biggest concern – I don't care if anybody claims that it's battle-tested in Ukraine. But the problem is that most of the stuff that comes into Ukraine fails, and unless these companies come in, fail, but figure out why they failed, and then figure out how to fix it before going back and saying, battle-tested in Ukraine, that's where the danger and the problem lies. There are absolutely companies that have come in that failed, that went back and marketed it as tested in Ukraine, but we knew that it failed in Ukraine. Ukraine doesn't care. But the problem is if there's an MoD or a DoD that is buying tech with a made-in-Ukraine or tested-in-Ukraine [label], or if an investor is investing in something claimed to have been tested in Ukraine, but the testing did not actually lead to benefits in the product. There is a fair amount of false advertising that's going on in that context.
Q: Can you name any names?
A: I don't want to be sued.
Q: Can you talk in general terms about what types of products are being claimed as tested in battle, but were not?
A: It is mostly in the UAV space. So whether the small quadcopter. Or, maybe an octacopter that's big enough to do replenishing – bringing stuff out to the front line, dropping things. Or ISR and to some degree longer fixed range. So, yes, most of what we have seen in terms of the stuff that seems to be most egregious is with the companies making the drones themselves. And again, it's not that – I really want to emphasize this. It's not that the tech is bad, or it's they built it outside of Ukraine. They came in, it didn't work because of the electronic warfare, because of the GPS denial, and they're going back, and they still haven't fixed the problem. And the problem is just going to get worse, because it continues to happen here at the front and they're already back there selling to some European MoD.
Q: Let's talk about ground drones. I've interviewed drone operators in Ukraine who have some concerns about the way they're operating, that they are sort of flimsy, that the connectivity is a little difficult. The head of one unit I talked to is very reluctant to use ground drones with machine guns or other weapons, because of the potential for fratricide. Can you talk a little bit about the development of ground drones in Ukraine? Where do you see the best applications, and where do you see the best, biggest challenges to what can really be done?
A: The emphasis on ground drones really has increased in the last 12 to 18 months. And it came in the context that it was getting harder and harder to go out and pick up soldiers who were wounded, because every time somebody went out, they were being hit with an FPV from the Russians. So the physical space is so highly contested. Both the Russian and Ukrainian sides really started looking at ground drones to be able to do deliveries, to go pick up wounded soldiers, and move things across areas that they needed to move things across without wanting to send a human.
Just in general, ground drones are very difficult because you're not driving them down Route 95. You are going over terrain, up and down ravines, you are going around. So just in terms of finding new UGVs that have the stability to go up and down and twist and turn – I don't even know how many iterations companies have gone through trying to find ways to get these drones do the things they want them to do in very uneven terrain.
A couple of companies have started to sort of take the lead. There's a company called Tencore. Even though they make several different UGVs, one of them is called Termit, which has really proven to be very effective out on the front. They've sort of figured it out with the treads they have, [UGVs] that are now fairly well protected. If they have gone to pick out a wounded soldier, there's a covering. And so that provides protection from FPVs, hitting from above, that kind of thing.
Q: You posted a video on your LinkedIn page showing the Russians conducting testing of their equivalent of the Ukrainian Sea Baby USV. Ukraine has been a major innovator in this realm. How concerning is it to see Russia moving in this direction?
A: Well, Ukraine doesn't have a navy, so for Ukraine, it's not as concerning. For anybody with a navy. I think it's very concerning.
Q: What lessons should the U.S. learn in terms of being able to defend against USVs but also to produce them at scale with an eye toward something happening in the South China Sea or the Strait of Taiwan?
A: They really do have to think about this. In my LinkedIn post, I wrote that a lot of people are talking about drones in Ukraine, and they're all thinking little FPVs, but this is such a big world of robotic vehicles. Sets of different categories that we're talking about- the quad copters, the kamikazes, the ISRs, the repeaters, the long range, the very long range, plus the ground drones, plus the sea drones. The thing is, this is not just Ukraine in a vacuum. This is Ukraine against Russia, Russia who shares with China, China who does production with North Korea. North Korea has workers in Russia learning how they're building all of these factories. And so, I don't know how anybody could not be concerned. It's almost a funny question.
Q: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Is there anything you'd like to add before we let you go?
A: I have to tell you, the fact that the West is not paying a lot of attention to what's going on here is deeply alarming. The speed at which this technology is evolving, and that the U.S., Europe and NATO are all really slow. And the thing that people really have to understand is that this is how Russia and China are going to fight. It is going to be just vast numbers of relatively low-price-point things that are extremely destructive…But in the context of the damage, just even the psychological initial damage that Russia could do in Europe, or if the Chinese send something over the mainland United States – just thousands of drones that there's no good way to take down- as a preliminary start to some kind of a ground war. There are a lot of very scary scenarios that are out there that I am not seeing a lot of response to yet.
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