WASHINGTON, May 2 : Ukraine manufactures approximately 4,000 drones each day, compared to just 5,000 purchased annually by the United States, Director of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit Doug Beck said on Thursday.
“What I saw there was very impressive, because you’ve got literally in basements printers, developers, together, war fighters coming up an incredibly iterative process to move,” Beck, who visited Ukraine, said during testimony at the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. “Our system is not built to do that, which is why we right now buy 4,000 or 5,000 drones a year in our system, and there are 4,000 a day being produced over there.”
Beck pointed out that the United States is operating on an entirely different level.
“I think that we need to be able to scale at a whole other level of scale,” he added.
US defense startups are turning to Ukraine for help in producing drones for the US Army amid failures of Western unmanned aerial vehicles on the battlefield, The Wall Street Journal reported in March.
The startups have reportedly spent billions of dollars trying to create small drones that the Pentagon says will be useful in future conflicts, but most of them are simply expensive aircraft that do not fly very well. At the same time, Ukraine has managed to master the mass production of drones, according to the newspaper.
(UNI)
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