ODESA—This week, Trump-aligned Republican Congressman Pat Harrigan made a 𝕏powerful statement in favor of Ukrainian ingenuity.
“There is a reason the best fighter in the room is the one who has actually been in the fight, not the one who trained the hardest in the gym,” he wrote on X. “Ukraine has been the most intense drone battlefield in history.”
What prompted his clarity: Skyfall-Skycutter, a joint UK-Ukraine drone project, had just 𝕏won Gauntlet 1 of the U.S. War Department’s Drone Dominance Program.
Harrigan, a North Carolina congressman, is a knowledgeable, combat-decorated Green Beret and West Point alumnus. But four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, even savvy folk in Washington are still only now learning about Ukraine’s strengths.
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Ukraine has come a long way since the humble beginnings of the first days of the invasion, when Ukrainian grandmothers made Molotov cocktails to throw against Russian tanks, and soldiers were ambushing Russian columns with a handful of donated Javelin anti-tank missiles.
Ukraine did not simply acquire new tools but built an entirely new way of fighting.
Today, more than half of the weapons on Ukraine’s front lines are domestically produced—up from roughly 40 percent a year ago, and climbing fast. In 2025, 75 percent of Ukraine’s weapons procurement budget went to Ukrainian manufacturers. For drones, the figure is 96 percent.
Ukraine is reducing reliance even further on cheap Chinese parts. From our reporting, it is clear that even once American experts finally accept that Ukraine has a great mil-tech innovation scene, they almost automatically say next, “Well, it’s too bad all the parts are Chinese.”
The reflex is out of date. Ukraine’s newest systems are being built specifically to remove Chinese components—and the Pentagon’s Gauntlet result proves the work is paying off. All that’s needed is more investments so that cheap Chinese parts will not be needed.
In fact, two days ago, speaking in Berlin alongside Chancellor Merz, President Zelenskyy noted that Ukraine’s production capacity is now twice what its military can afford to field. The constraint isn’t capability. It’s money.
While Ukraine crucially still relies on Western-made interceptors in its fight against Russian ballistic and cruise missiles, the country has made remarkable progress toward making its own weapons, which, because they are domestically produced, can be used without Western restrictions to strike deep into the Russian War Machine.
Whatever the problem, it seems there is a Ukrainian company that will find a solution for it.
Ukraine realized early on after the invasion that the wars of the 21st century would be, in part, unmanned systems wars, and started organizing its military and society around that fact.
Knowing that Russia would share its knowledge about unmanned system strategies and technologies with its allies—especially Iran and China—Ukraine tried to warn its own Western partners about these developments too, urging them to learn from the Ukrainian experience and inviting them to work on unmanned technology together—and to understand the constant need for human innovation behind the unmanned tech.
Drone warfare is not a problem to be solved once, but
an environment to be managed continuously.
Out of ignorance or arrogance, Ukraine’s warnings went unheeded. With the Middle East now on fire, the West is paying the price for not listening. What went wrong?
