Exclusives

EXCLUSIVE: Ukraine Is Building Drones In Days. America’s Defense Bureaucracy Takes Years

The Presidential Office of Ukraine/Wikimedia Commons

As conflicts proliferate globally, the Russia-Ukraine war appears to serve as a lesson for the U.S. about economical and efficient warfare.

A fireside chat about drone warfare hosted by the nonprofit, Razom for Ukraine and attended by the DCNF featured exhibitions regarding procurement, training, and even the use of shotguns as an anti-drone measure.

“When you are talking about drones, you are implicitly talking about electronic warfare, detonation protocols, the use of AI, and procurement systems,” Razom for Ukraine’s advocacy director, Daniel Balson, told the DCNF. “These are all pieces of a much greater puzzle that when assembled effectively, allows you to compete on the drone battlespace and the US needs to be ready for this chapter of warfare.”

Drones continue to retain prevalence on the battlefield. As of 2025, 70-80% of kinetic operations in the Russo-Ukrainian war involved drones, according to Geopolitical Intelligence Services (GIS Reports) . The unmanned aircraft are also prevalent in conflicts ranging from Mexico to the Gaza Strip.

Compared to conventional warfare, the window for technological advantage is narrow, as adversarial states vie for dominance.

“There’s absolutely an arms race and the innovation cycle is measured in days,” Balson explained.

“If you are out of the game for a few months, then return, the game is almost unrecognizable,” Dr. Paul Schwennesen, an Air Force veteran and analyst providing aid to Ukrainians added. 

The American defense acquisition system is a multi-phase, years–often decades-long process often limited to big-label contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Boeing. This fundamentally limits the high-speed innovation of drone warfare.

“In the US/Western/NATO system, we are used to innovation being a call and response type process. You’ll see a call from a centralized bureaucracy to fill a predetermined need within the defense system,” Schwennesen told the DCNF. “What we see in Ukraine is what we call horizontal decision making–a very robust system of innovation happening at a kind of a kitchen table level of design.”

While American defense procurement operates within decades, Ukrainian operates within days, weeks, and months. Balson explained that drone manufacturers will get notes from frontline commanders describing needs, problems, and fixes. The manufacturers will innovate and deploy the new drones within four to seven days.

As seen in the Iran war, drones are a method in which lower GDP countries or non-state actors can wreak havoc against countries such as America with sophisticated defense systems.

“We’ve got F-35s, 142 of them sitting brand new on the tarmac at Luke Air Force Base outside of Phoenix right now because they just transitioned out of F-16s. Each one is sitting at $85 million or whatever it is, so you’re looking at over $1 billion on the tarmac. But it doesn’t matter because Iran who doesn’t have F-35s and who has no hope of ever reaching that level of technological sophistication,” Schwennesen said. “All it needs is $500 drones and a cell.”