Inside the Ukrainian drone factories prototyping the free world’s next arsenal 

I left my phone on overnight with the air raid alert active, expecting it to give me a blaring warning. 

I woke up at 3:58 a.m. to a sound I had never heard in my life: the heavy, shuddering concussions of ballistic missiles and attack drones slamming into buildings near my hotel in Kyiv. But ballistic missiles travel at many multiples of the speed of sound. By the time the siren actually went off, the impacts had already struck their civilian targets. 

In the shelter, I lay awake wondering what the night had cost the people I had come to meet. People died in the city that night. The reality of what Ukrainians have been living with for years hits you fast. 

I went to Ukraine because I needed to see the fastest-moving combat innovation ecosystem in the world for myself. As an investor and co-founder in the defense ecosystem, my work is centered on delivering critical tactical systems to protect the U.S. warfighter—a mission we’ve been on since even before Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine began. But you cannot truly grasp the pace of modern combat innovation from a boardroom thousands of miles away. You have to see it on the ground. 

My first stop was General Cherry, a Ukrainian defense-tech company that develops and mass-produces FPV strike drones and interceptors, serving over 200 Ukrainian military units. 

By 10:00 a.m. that morning in Kyiv, the General Cherry executives—most of whom I learned had slept straight through the attack—were at the factory pounding coffee and doing the exact opposite of what Russia wants them to do: building the future with relentless, defiant energy. None of the defense tech ecosystem runs without the soldiers holding the line to the east, and everyone I met said some version of the same sentence: Thanks to the Armed Forces, we get to build. 

Ukrainians have learned how not to stop… no matter what. 

Under martial law, I expected wartime unity to mean silence. Instead, the soldiers on the billboards are recruitment campaigns, brigades competing for volunteers the way brands compete for customers. And the protests that filled the streets in July over the defense minister’s dismissal were not disorder. They were the same dignity reflex that filled the Maidan in 2004 and 2014, still working, mid-war: an existential fight conducted while keeping a democratic pulse. It felt as though the very thing they were fighting for was right there on display. 

Twelve years of war, four at full scale, have produced something close to unbreakable. In Lviv and Kyiv, parents were out everywhere with strollers. Not because the alert app makes anyone safe; as that night proved, the missiles arrive ahead of the sirens. On the road outside the cities, I remember being hurried out of a gas station because Russian strike drones now use automatic target recognition trained on civilian infrastructure imagery to attack them indiscriminately. Something as mundane as getting gas could mean the end of your life, yet I never saw a flicker of panic on anyone’s face. It is something deeper: a collective realization that if you stop living, if you let the mundane things we take for granted be interrupted, then Russia has won. Cafes were full. Their resilience is real. And the atmosphere in Ukraine hums with absolute optimism. 

Making this trip was also about cutting through the noise. Back in the U.S., I had heard several persistent myths about Ukrainian defense tech: that their products are merely “hobby-grade,” inexpensive because safety standards are lax, or cheap solely because most of their components are sourced from China. 

I found those claims to be reductive and superficial. What these detractors miss is perhaps the defining characteristic of Ukraine’s defense innovation ecosystem: its extraordinary ability to adapt, iterate, and execute in real time. Innovation born from insight often results in unconventional solutions. I watched as Ukrainian engineers shifted the operating frequencies of their drones to account for Russian electronic warfare. 

As the cat-and-mouse game escalated, Ukrainian forces pivoted to fiber-optic FPVs, drones that unspool kilometers of fiber-optic cables to maintain a physical connection that electronic warfare cannot jam. But as adversaries adapt, so too must the engineers. In recent months, advances in thinner, lighter, bend-resistant fiber and precision-wound spools have dramatically extended the drone’s reach. Systems that were once constrained to shorter distances are now being developed with fiber links approaching 50 kilometers, pushing unjammable FPVs even deeper into enemy territory. 

Every new capability produces a countermeasure, which produces a counter-countermeasure all happening in weeks, far faster than traditional procurement cycles allow. But beyond the nonstop iteration itself, a few other things about Ukraine’s defense industrial base stayed with me: 

Mind-Blowing Scale & Automation: The production volume is staggering. A single General Cherry factory in Ukraine has the capacity to produce roughly 100,000 drones a month. To put that scale into perspective, the entire United States produces roughly 300,000 drones – in a year. 

Distributed Manufacturing: Their structural secret sauce is decentralization. By spreading production across a distributed network, they are far less vulnerable. Like a lobster that can regenerate a claw, if one node is disrupted, the broader network keeps moving seamlessly. 

3 Months, Not 3 Years: They are completely unshackled from traditional defense procurement cycles that dictate things must take three years. They operate with an absolute expectation that solutions will be built in three months, and that velocity informs everything they do. 

Aggressive Vertical Integration: Defense tech companies are aggressively vertically integrating to minimize supply chain dependencies, increase performance, and build bespoke, superior products that solve immediate tactical problems. 

The Birth of a New Startup Nation: Ukraine isn’t just surviving; it is inventing the future of the free world’s arsenal even before the war ends. These capabilities will inevitably bleed into adjacent fields like robotics, agriculture, demining, AI, and advanced aviation, cementing a thriving, highly resilient post-war economy. 

What I saw in Ukraine reinforced what America is already putting into motion. The work this administration is doing right now on rare earths, drones, and critical supply chains will be felt for generations. In some future conflict, American lives and American victory will stand on the industrial foundation being built today. 

But for all we can learn from Ukraine’s defense innovation ecosystem, the most powerful thing I brought home had nothing to do with technology. Observing their relentless adaptability, ingenuity, and spirit on the ground made one ultimate truth crystal clear: 

Ukrainians will never be defeated. 

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com