Why Do Many Western Defense Tech Firms Struggle in Ukraine?

**Ryan Evans** (0:11)
You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the founder of War on the Rocks.
This episode was recorded live at an event earlier this year, sponsored by our friends at Leonid Capital. Mike Kofman sat down with me to talk about why American defense companies, particularly newer defense tech companies, have not always delivered on the battlefield in Ukraine in the ways that we all hoped. There are various reasons for this, and very few people are as well equipped to understand this issue as Mike. He visits directly with units using American defense tech and has some unique insights.
Enjoy the conversation.
Thanks, everyone, for coming tonight. We're going to have a very senior army official who had to back out, but then I thought, what could actually be the most provocative conversation that we could have in front of an audience full of people from, you know, not just the executive branch in the military, from the defense industry, an important conversation, a hard conversation. And I thought, I called up my friend Mike. If you are a War on the Rocks member, one of the main offerings we have, of course, is the Russian contingency with this gentleman right here. Mike and a team of military analysts go to Ukraine every quarter, and they don't just go to Kyiv, like a lot of people, or some people don't even make it that far east as to the capital, but they go to the front. Although that's harder these days because of FPV drones, but they go pretty close to the front. They talk to units involved in the fighting, they do real military analysis. One of the things that Mike has a lot of familiarity with is the performance of American defense kit. Old stuff, new stuff, everything in between in Ukraine. Some of you may have seen some press reporting recently about how some companies have struggled to effectively support Ukraine, or Ukrainians don't really like their products very much. And this is something that Mike and I talk a lot about privately, is how these companies succeed, how they fail, what the reasons are for that. So I thought it would be great to convene a conversation for that. So Mike, when the war started, and you went on your first research trip there, you were really focused more on legacy systems. I think the newest kit we saw was a Starlink terminal on a drone doing some reconnaissance for an artillery cannon. But this was really before drones were being used for kinetic operations at scale. So when did you first start focusing on this and zeroing in on this as an important thing for analysis?

**Michael Kofman** (2:32)
All right, so initially drones in this war were basically being used for reconnaissance ISR for traditional weapon systems, right? And at a certain point, you saw drones emerge as a form of light bomber and mortar carrier. And then in 2023, we started to see first-person view drones being used as a strike drone. And that expanded over the course of the summer of 2023 So if you think about Ukraine's offensive in the summer of 2023, early on in June, there were a few FPVs on the battlefield, but they weren't the principal problem. I remember by end of the summer, around August, September, FPV drones were really shutting down the space to conduct any kind of maneuver or for folks to even get to their positions within about five kilometers of the front line. And then if we fast forward to today, now the danger zone is more like 20, 25, and it really depends on where you are. So there's lots of things that you can't do today that you could have done in 22 and 23 and 24
Drones started in some ways, right, as a big force multiplier for traditional weapon systems. Then they were used to offset Ukraine's material disadvantages and manpower and material.
And then they emerged as kind of one of the principal weapon systems, and then you saw a lot of the force being built more and more around the use of drones. Like force structure modifications, doctrine modifications and what have you. And so I started focusing on this much more in 2023 I would say by fall of 2023, it was clear that drones had really emerged as something else. And by 2024, you also saw a big shift.
Drones started co-evolving with electronic warfare. Their natural kind of one was a natural counter to each other, and they co-evolved together very quickly in the war.
And by 2024, drones began to evolve as a counter to drones. So people were using drones to intercept other drones, and you started to see drones being used as a way of negating drones.