What Ukraine Is Teaching America’s Defense Manufacturers

The war in Ukraine is forcing a fundamental reassessment of how modern militaries design, build, and deploy technology. The shift from “exquisite technology” to “attritable systems” has been stark – and for United States defense manufacturers, watching these innovations has revealed opportunities to change products and processes to better align with modern warfare.

That transformation was the focus of “Innovation in the Arsenal,” a recent live panel discussion held at the Build Better Conference in Alameda, California. Leaders from Anduril, Firestorm, and AWS discussed the new defense manufacturing paradigm.

From Ukraine’s Front Lines to America’s Industrial Base

“Ukraine is a war of one day ideas” – a quote credited to “army chiefs in the Ministry of Defense in London.” New drones, new sensors, and new countermeasures — designed, built, and flown one day, will be obsolete tomorrow. Dan Magy, the CEO and founder of Firestorm, a company that provides modular drone technologies that can be manufactured in a mobile microfactory, shares some firsthand perspective. “On Ukraine’s front lines, commercial and military equipment alike are tested, jammed, or destroyed within days. What endures are the systems that can be rebuilt and modified immediately.”

One of the main challenges to modularity and adaptability today is what Magy calls “vendor lock” – where different components are purposefully designed not to interoperate. Magy explains, “If the radio gets jammed, you should be able to hot-swap a new [radio] without rebuilding the whole aircraft.”

Another core learning is how things are produced. If units are only good for a few days before they must be redesigned, the feedback loop between the frontline and the factory needs to be super short. Factories in nearby cities will be targeted, and those in distant lands will be too far away to be effective. Magy’s solution involves industrial-scale 3D printers – whether leveraging pre-existing networks already in place or redesigning them to work in frontline micro-factories. “It takes us less than ten hours to build a Group 2 drone,” he said, referring to the type of drones used on the Ukraine frontline.

“Contested logistics and building things at the point of need are massive issues,” Magy said. “Especially as we look toward the Pacific.” China has been the world’s workshop for several decades – and has a huge industrial base and armies of engineers to direct it. The United States is woefully unprepared to compete on these axes.

Rapid innovation and extremely short supply chains need to become the new standard. As Magy put it, “We’ve spent years building exquisite systems for stable conditions. But we’re not fighting the Taliban anymore. We’re fighting armies of PhDs.”

Innovation and Speed Require Greater Collaboration

Keith Flynn, SVP of Manufacturing at Anduril, sees the same forces reshaping the defense sector that once transformed the automotive manufacturing industry. Having spent years at Toyota and Tesla, he argues that the next generation of defense systems must marry the precision of industrial production with the iteration speed of software.

“To build at [high] volumes, the techniques we have today don’t solve everything,” he said. “Every meaningful change in the [manufacturing] process of the build is enabled by an extremely creative design change that allowed it to happen. You don’t get one without the other.”

As the defense industry shifts from building a few highly capable systems to producing thousands of modular ones, design and manufacturing can no longer be separate disciplines. The new advantage comes from iteration and flexibility. Traits that define companies like Tesla far more than traditional defense primes.

Tim Murnin, a former Boeing executive, now Head of Industry and Partner Strategy at AWS, agreed that interdisciplinary collaboration will be critical. “Technology itself doesn’t add value,” he said. “It’s the impact on the business results that drives value,” Murnin argues. He believes that innovation in defense must be led by operators and business leaders, not just technologists.

Not only would innovation require internal collaboration, but all three leaders emphasized that it would also take external collaboration. The defense industry has coined the term “co-opetition” (cooperating with the competition) – and thought that American startups, primes, and even the government must work together.

“If primes are open to working with startups and pushing new technologies through their channels, that’s going to be the unlock,” Magy said.

Flynn echoed the sentiment. “It’s going to take everyone working in concert, pushing each other further,” he said.

Murnin concluded, “It’s never going to be one entity driving this. It’s the ecosystem, each part forcing the others to move faster.”

Reinventing the American Arsenal

The war in Ukraine has made one thing clear to defense manufacturers: winning the battle requires rapid iteration, creative production methods, and tight feedback loops between warfighters and manufacturers. Today, the United States’ defense industrial base is designed for exquisite technology: the five largest companies win nearly all of the contracts, but still take many years to deliver.

“Somewhere out there,” Flynn said, “there’s a Marine in a foxhole you’re building something for. Nothing is more important than whether that product does what it’s intended to do, and gets there in time.”

What is considered “on time” used to be years – but ideally it would be days. A wave of new defense companies, led by Anduril, but including others like Firestorm, Archer, Hadrian, Epirus, and Saildrone are innovating quickly to meet this new reality. They’re putting pressure on the old way of doing things to ensure that the United States can remain competitive.