“The defense acquisition system as you know it is dead,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared at the National War College in December as he addressed America’s top defense-industry leaders.
“Speed replaces process, money follows need, joint problems drive action, experimentation accelerates delivery, and the services move faster and smarter,” he continued. Large defense primes, he insisted, must shift their focus to speed and volume. Above all, “an 85% solution in the hands of our armed forces today is infinitely better than an unachievable 100% solution.”
There is one defense system on the planet that already operates exactly according to these principles: Ukraine’s wartime defense industry.
Now approaching its fourth year of full-scale war against Russia, the Ukrainian military fields a force in which more than half — approaching 60% — of the weapons in soldiers’ hands are domestically produced, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated last year: “The weapons in the hands of our warriors are Ukrainian. And these are powerful weapons with many modern capabilities.”
Ukraine does not yet build its own air-defense missiles (although it has created interceptor drones) or fighter aircraft. Where it has sprinted far ahead of every global competitor, however, is in long-range strike drones.
An industry that began in 2022 by producing hand-assembled one-off prototypes is now a mature business producing thousands of deep-strike drones per month. Ukraine’s average daily launch of long-range drones against targets inside Russia now exceeds 100; on some days it has surpassed 500. Models such as the FP-2, AN-196 Liutyi, and UJ-26 Bober have struck dozens of Russian oil refineries, pipeline hubs, ammunition depots, and fuel-trains.
In recent months, targets have expanded to include every major Russian oil-export terminal on the Black and Baltic seas, as well as power substations and thermal power plants. Range has grown steadily. Strikes are now routine deep into the Urals, nearly 2,000 km (about 1,250 miles) from Ukraine’s border, and warhead weight has increased from around 40kg (about 90lbs) to 100 kg and more.
Independent estimates credit the drone campaigns with reducing Russia’s refining throughput by 25–40 % at various points in 2025, triggering domestic gasoline shortages, a Russian export ban, and turning oil-rich Russia into a net gasoline importer from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and even China.
Unit costs for these long-range drones are reported to range between $50,000 and $150,000. That is orders of magnitude cheaper than traditional cruise missiles. This is precisely the cost President Trump highlighted during a business roundtable in Qatar, in May last year when he complained that the US defense industry could not deliver cheap drones at scale: “They came in two weeks later with a drone that cost $41 million . . . I’m talking about something for $35,000, $40,000, where you send thousands of them up.”
Both combatants have learned the same lesson: saturating defenses with thousands of cheap drones beats firing dozens of multi-million-dollar missiles. Russia itself has shifted from $3m–$15m cruise-missile salvos in 2022 to daily waves of 500–800 cheap drones last year.
A parallel story is playing out at sea. Ukraine’s Sea Baby and Magura V5 maritime drones have sunk or disabled a significant number of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet vessels and forced the remainder to flee from occupied Crimea to Novorossiysk, though they are unsafe even there, as demonstrated by a December strike on a Russian Kilo-class submarine by a new underwater drone. The use of drones also broke Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s grain corridor.
Emerging missile programs — including the Palianytsia, long-range Neptune, and others — remain classified, but open sources indicate they deliver comparable or greater range and payload than Western equivalents at a fraction of the cost.
President Zelenskyy has openly proposed a grand bargain to the United States: American weapons in exchange for Ukrainian drones and missiles. On September 30, Kyiv lifted its wartime moratorium on arms exports and announced that “managed sales” of certain weapons to foreign partners were now possible, with requests already received from European and American companies.
Europe, however, is moving faster. Denmark’s multi-billion-dollar “Danish model” now funds joint production of Ukrainian drones and missiles inside the country, with the output split between the Danish and Ukrainian armed forces. Copenhagen has dramatically simplified certification and procurement rules to make this possible, and has begun to establish Ukrainian defense plants on its territory.
The US must not let Europe lead this revolution alone.
Secretary Hegseth’s own words about change, including the need for speed to replace process, underline this. American acquisition teams should be on the ground in Ukrainian factories today, and Ukrainian engineers should be walking the floor at Lockheed, Raytheon, and Anduril tomorrow.
When inexpensive, battle-proven Ukrainian drones are paired with American satellites, battle-management networks, and precision-guidance packages, their effectiveness will multiply dramatically. As Hegseth concluded, the Pentagon must be “open to buying the 85% solution and iterate together over time to achieve the 100% solution.”
In an era of mass and attrition, Ukraine has built the world’s most agile, cost-effective, and combat-tested production system for war-winning weaponry. The United States now has the opportunity — and, frankly, the obligation — to plug that ecosystem directly into its own forces before competitors do.
Speed replaces process. The Ukrainian defense industry is ready. The only question is whether America’s acquisition system is.
Anatoly Motkin is president of StrategEast, a non-profit organization with offices in the United States, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan dedicated to developing knowledge-driven economies in the Eurasian region.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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