Eurasia Press & News
And What America Should Learn From It
The war between Russia and Ukraine began with an unprovoked combined air and ground assault, then settled into a mid-twentieth-century-style artillery standoff, and has now evolved into the world’s first conflict waged largely by drones.
Last year, Ukraine launched a series of successful long-range drone strikes against ammunition depots hundreds of miles inside Russian territory. Such strikes have been ongoing ever since. Every day, the Ukrainian military deploys thousands of shorter-range drones to defend against Russian ground assaults, largely replacing the Howitzer shells that were previously the lifeblood of the conflict. Kyiv is locked in a technological and production arms race to ensure that its drones are both sophisticated enough and plentiful enough to overcome Russian jamming and other countermeasures. Ukraine’s innovators are still reaching new heights: in June, Ukrainian drones caused billions of dollars in damage to advanced military aircraft in remote parts of Russia.
The United States has played an important role in this Ukrainian success, seeding the expansion in this key area of the country’s defense industrial base and financing the most promising Ukrainian drone manufacturers, to help Ukraine reach a level of production once unimaginable—millions of autonomous systems per year. Today, the remarkable pace of this innovation, forged by necessity under battlefield conditions found nowhere else on the planet, presents an opportunity for the United States. To seize it, the Department of Defense and U.S. industry must learn from Ukraine’s drones and other defense technology. The war between Russia and Ukraine is not perfectly analogous to contingencies that the United States may face in the future, and not every lesson in Ukraine is applicable to U.S. military planning, but this war is nonetheless full of instructive technological innovations and breakthroughs.
Over the past three and a half years, Ukraine has developed a cutting-edge defense industry. The Ukrainian military still depends on the United States for high-end conventional capabilities such as Patriot air defense missiles, as well as certain staples, including rockets and associated launchers. But within its own borders, Ukraine is now producing novel and inexpensive short- and long-range drones, counterdrone systems, robotics, and tactical air defenses. While serving in the Biden administration, we toured Ukraine’s drone facilities, met with their manufacturers, and watched Ukrainian businesses, frontline forces, and pilots work together to upgrade those systems, hour by hour, in response to battlefield feedback.
Having never experienced this form of combat, most countries in the world, including the United States, are now far behind the Ukrainians in this regard. Neither the U.S. military nor any European military can produce mass quantities of such low-cost and adaptable capabilities. Nor is it clear that the U.S. military is moving rapidly enough to incorporate battlefield lessons into its own doctrine. Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia are innovating further as they gradually integrate AI into their drone and other defense technologies. AI promises to remake modern warfare, just as it will remake so many other aspects of society—but unlike with large language models, Kyiv, not San Francisco, is where cutting-edge systems are being developed and deployed first.
This opportunity to learn from Ukraine provides, among other things, a powerful counterargument to those who question the merits of continuing to support Ukraine: the United States can benefit from Ukraine’s unique technological capabilities and knowledge of U.S. adversaries. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to pause critical security assistance deliveries to Ukraine should be reversed for many reasons, including because a sustained pause will make it more challenging to deepen U.S.-Ukrainian technological cooperation.
To its credit, the Trump administration has said it is committed to defense innovation. Ukraine is perhaps the leading laboratory for such innovation today. Russia’s key backers—China, Iran, and North Korea—are surely drawing their own lessons from this war, and from their contributions to Russia’s military campaign. Iran is learning how its drones and missiles perform; North Korea is doing the same with its munitions and soldiers; and China is assessing the efficacy of its inputs into Russia’s defense industrial base. To stay ahead and enhance its readiness for potential conflicts in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and elsewhere, the United States must expand its technological partnership with Ukraine.
That means continuing Washington’s support for Ukraine’s military, with the understanding that Ukraine will, in turn, share its technological know-how and expertise, including the designs for its most effective drones, its strategy for upgrading those designs in response to Russian countermeasures, and data on the strengths and weaknesses of Russia’s defensive and offensive weapons systems. This approach would be mutually beneficial: Ukraine would help the United States build world-class drones and other cutting-edge capabilities, and the United States would continue to help Ukraine defend itself. But the inverse is also true—less support for Ukraine will mean it will be less inclined to share its expertise and data with the United States.
A REVOLUTION FORGED IN FIRE
Ukraine developed its drone industry as part of a national struggle to survive. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainian military repelled the Russian assault on Kyiv and went on to retake more than half the territory that Russian forces initially seized. At the same time, in factories and labs far from the frontlines, Ukrainian entrepreneurs and engineers began to pursue another critical mission: to build drones that could be deployed against Russian forces.
These innovators had the same fervor as their countrymen on the battlefield, but they needed financing and materiel. The U.S. government quietly provided this assistance. In the fall of 2022, the Biden administration began efforts to improve Ukraine’s drone manufacturing, which at that time was nascent. A turning point came in the summer of 2023, when Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed to break through Russian lines and exposed the limitations of conventional capabilities in this conflict. Ukraine’s brigades were unable to overcome Russia’s rudimentary but effective minefields and other physical barriers, while Russian drones wreaked havoc on Ukraine’s armored vehicles. In response, the United States decided to turbocharge support for Ukraine’s drone industry. The White House worked with Congress to secure additional funding in the April 2024 national security supplemental for this effort, which was used both to finance select Ukrainian drone manufacturers directly and to provide Ukraine with key components needed for drone production. In all, as we briefed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a visit to Kyiv last fall, the United States directed more than $1.5 billion into Ukraine’s drone industry, and other countries followed suit in supporting Ukraine’s defense industrial base.
Ukrainian partners generated an enormous return on this investment: Ukrainian production of both short- and long-range drones increased exponentially in 2024. According to the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian military’s monthly supply of drones rose from 20,000 at the start of 2024 to 200,000 a year later, a tenfold increase. As Russia improved its counterdrone capabilities, Ukrainian manufacturers learned to update their software and designs to defeat Russian jamming and other countermeasures. By January 2025, Ukraine had scaled its ability to use long-range drones against military targets deep inside Russia and to use shorter-range drones against Russian units across the frontlines. Ukraine was also producing impressive counterdrone, missile, robotic, and tactical air defense systems.
WHAT UKRAINE CAN TEACH
The opportunity to learn from Ukraine’s cutting-edge capabilities still exists today, although the window is closing. Ukraine’s drones have proved both effective and affordable. Ukraine is building millions of short-range FPV drones this year at a cost of roughly $400 per unit and tens of thousands of long-range drones at a cost of roughly $200,000 per unit. By contrast, shorter-range U.S. drones such as the Switchblade 600 are estimated to cost more than $100,000 per unit, and longer-range U.S. drones can cost millions. Ukrainian drone operators report that U.S.-made drones have been less effective, reliable, and rapidly adaptable to Russian countermeasures than those produced inside Ukraine.
These differences are in part a matter of circumstance. Ukraine is fighting for its survival with limited resources against a larger adversary, while the Pentagon has historically been cautious about investing in emerging technologies and startups, preferring instead to partner with established contractors on legacy systems. Part of the problem is that these contractors have incentives to build more limited numbers of expensive, higher-margin weapons. But the Ukraine conflict has also addressed a legitimate concern for the Pentagon—uncertainty about which technologies will prove effective in the real world—by providing billions of dollars in R & D and weapons testing under unprecedented battlefield conditions.
Although there will remain a role for more advanced and expensive autonomous systems in which the United States retains an edge, the sheer scale of Ukraine’s mass production yields an important and complementary advantage. Ukraine can iterate rapidly—and discard older models with such frequency—precisely because companies are closer to the action and its systems are cheap and disposable. As Ukraine and Russia deploy AI-enabled drone technology, China, Iran, and North Korea will be watching, and learning. As AI-driven swarming technology develops, the advantage of sheer numbers will only deepen.
U.S. allies and partners threatened by stronger adversaries are particularly in need of the kinds of asymmetric capabilities Ukraine is developing. Consider Taiwan, which could use scalable and cheap drones to help defend itself if Beijing were to escalate. Washington should provide such partners with similar capabilities and help them develop their own domestic production. But for the United States, this opportunity is about more than just helping friends. Ukraine’s offensive success against Russia, such as the recent drone attack conducted from trucks positioned deep inside Russian territory, reveals potential shortcomings in U.S. defenses, as well, including in the homeland. Ukrainian expertise could help close the gap.
SEIZING THE OPPORTUNITY
Learning the right lessons from Ukraine to strengthen U.S. capabilities should involve a few key steps. As a starting point, the U.S. Defense Department should work with Ukrainian companies to manufacture drones in the United States, with the understanding that those drones would then be provided to both the Ukrainian and the U.S. militaries. This type of partnership, known as coproduction, would be a win-win: the United States would learn from Ukrainian manufacturers firsthand, and both Ukraine and the United States would receive these drones. The Pentagon should also strike a deal with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to license drone technology and designs to the United States. With this intellectual property, the U.S. military could independently build inexpensive and battlefield-tested drones and develop the domestic infrastructure needed to scale production.
The United States could take the same approach with additional Ukrainian technologies, including counterdrone systems, by coproducing these capabilities with Ukraine and acquiring the associated intellectual property. Ukraine’s defense industry has succeeded in part because its manufacturers can engage in rapid iteration based on real-world results. The United States should also take advantage of the opportunity to provide Ukraine with experimental U.S. technologies, assess their performance on the ground, and then make updates accordingly.
The primary risk of this approach is that the United States could become dependent on a foreign partner for some of its defense production, akin to Russian dependency on Iranian drones in the current conflict. But the alternative is worse given Ukraine’s current knowledge and production advantage, and the focus should be on closing this gap. The United States should view its collaboration with Ukraine as a short-term technology accelerator rather than a long-term solution. The Department of Defense, working with U.S. industry, should aim to learn from Ukrainian expertise rapidly, begin to produce these cutting-edge systems, and then transition away from licensed models and toward their own independent designs. Should the United States instead back away from supporting Ukraine, it would risk losing access to proven defense technology, battlefield expertise, and data on Russia’s military performance.
Europe, meanwhile, should look to the United States and Ukraine as complementary models for defense production. As European leaders invest in their own defense industries, the United States can offer guidance on how to build higher-end autonomous systems, as well as conventional capabilities such as artillery, rockets, and strategic air defense at scale. Ukraine can do the same for mass-produced drones and associated technologies.
Ukraine’s fight represents a watershed in modern warfare. Kyiv has shown that it is possible to hold a stronger adversary at bay with advanced, affordable, and adaptable drones and other defense technologies. The United States must continue to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression, and as the Trump administration seeks more in return, Ukraine should help the United States turbocharge its own innovation. Both countries will be better and stronger for it.
