What I saw in Kyiv should change how every Western nation thinks about defence innovation

The missile sensed it was being engaged and pivoted. That late-stage manoeuvre is the reason Kyiv’s air defences, as effective as they are when they have interceptors, cannot stop everything. I stood there for a few more seconds, then did what everyone else in the hotel was already doing: I went downstairs to the shelter.

Russia launched 70 missiles and 611 drones at Ukraine that night. In Kyiv alone, five people were killed and 35 injured. One of those strikes hit the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, an 11th-century monastery that has survived Mongol invasions and World War II. The roof was burning.

The next morning, I watched the hotel staff mow the lawns outside. By 8am, office workers were at their desks. By 9 am, the meetings I had scheduled were running on time.

I have spent more than 20 years in defence innovation, working across government, industry and research in Australia, the United States and Europe. What I saw during my time in Ukraine in June 2026 was something I was not fully prepared for: an industrial revolution in defence innovation, happening in real time, under direct threat and at a scale the West has not yet grasped.

An industrial revolution on the factory floor

The visit that stopped me in my tracks was not a briefing room or a policy meeting. It was a manufacturing floor.

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I was given full access to Skyfall, one of Ukraine’s leading drone manufacturers, and to Greentech, another top-tier producer. These are not small workshops. They are sophisticated operations producing at scale, inside a country absorbing ballistic missile attacks while the machinery runs.

What struck me was not the product. It was the system.

In the West, a new capability requirement typically moves from the field to a report, through an acquisition process, past a legal review, into a contract, through testing and back to the field. That cycle takes years. In Ukraine, the equivalent cycle takes days. Sometimes hours.

Front-line operators identify a problem. That information flows directly to the engineering bench. A modification is made. A test is run. The updated system goes back to the front. This is not an exception to the rule. It is the rule. Ukraine has built a front-to-factory innovation loop. It did not build it because of good policy. It built it because the alternative was losing the war.

The numbers that should sharpen every minister’s focus

Ukraine has production capacity for more than 8 million drones per year. That figure comes from Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, published in January 2026. It reflects over 160 companies, from large factories to small specialist engineering teams. Ukraine produced over 4 million drones in 2025. In 2026, it is on track to exceed 8 million.

The United States Department of Defense currently operates approximately 16,000 unmanned aerial vehicles across all categories. The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program is working urgently to scale that toward 200,000 to 300,000 systems by 2027. That push is serious, backed by real funding and represents an explicit acknowledgement that the West started well behind.

Now ask yourself: how many does Australia have? And more importantly, do we have the doctrine, tactics, training, testing framework and industrial base to procure more and use them effectively when we need to?

I am not making this point to suggest we should simply buy more drones. Numbers without the institutional machinery to iterate, to test in realistic conditions and to learn fast do not produce combat power. Ukraine shows that you need all of it together. The battlefield feedback loop into the factory is the system. The drones are just the output.

The people who made this trip possible

My access to Ukraine was made possible by people I want to acknowledge publicly.

Major General Duane R Miller, Deputy Commanding General of the US Army Security Assistance Group Ukraine (SAG-U), arranged introductions and access I could not have secured independently, including a direct meeting with Ukraine’s Deputy Minister responsible for counter-drone warfare. Her message was unambiguous: Ukraine needs allies to bring engineering capability, not just financial support.

Lieutenant General Buzzard, Commanding General of SAG-U, made time for an unscheduled meeting. The US commitment to Ukraine at that level of seniority, operating that close to the fight, is genuine and substantial.

Colonel Rachael Hoagland, SAG-U’s science and technology division chief, has been a critical bridge between allied innovation communities and Ukrainian military and industry. She spent seven months embedded in Ukraine. When she says the Western acquisition system cannot survive contact with this fight, she speaks from direct observation.

Ambassador Vasyl Myroshnychenko, Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia, provided support before and during the trip that opened doors which would otherwise have taken months. His personal engagement on defence innovation has been both generous and strategically significant for DIN and for Australia’s standing in Ukraine.

I also met with Colonel Pavlo Khazan, responsible for Ukraine’s electronic warfare effort, against whose real-world operational requirements the Defence Innovation Network has funded problem statements through our SAG-U partnership. His recommendation that Australia join Ukraine’s EW coalition was direct and deserves a serious response from government.

Speed is the new stealth

I have used this phrase before and I will keep using it, because it is the most precise description I have found for what is happening in Ukraine.

In a drone and electronic warfare environment, the side that adapts fastest wins. Not the side with the best equipment from three years ago. Not the side with the most expensive system per unit. The side that can see what the enemy changed on Tuesday, redesign on Wednesday and have it in the field by Friday.

Ukraine has that capability. It built it under fire, stripping out the bureaucratic layers that most Western nations have treated as necessary overhead. Accountability is pushed down to much lower levels than we would accept in peacetime. Mistakes are expected. They are treated as information, not scandals. What is not acceptable is slowing down.

I watched a country in its fifth year of resisting one of the world’s largest armed forces and still gaining ground. What Russia expected to take in three days has not been achieved in five years. That is not luck. That is a functioning system built on determination, ingenuity and a culture that has replaced process with purpose.

The lesson China is taking from all of this

There is a dimension to this conflict that Western audiences are underestimating.

Russia does not fight without China. Chinese commercial supply chains sustain Russian production. Chinese political cover sustains Russian diplomacy at the UN and elsewhere. This is documented and widely understood.

China is also watching. China’s military and technology establishment is studying what Ukraine is doing to Russia: what Russian capabilities are being degraded, what Western systems are performing and under what conditions and what the counter-EW and counter-drone landscape looks like in a high-intensity peer conflict. Ukraine is an intelligence and adaptation signal to China and China is not wasting it.

If we are not drawing the same lessons from this conflict that China is drawing, we are starting behind. That matters not only for Europe or for Ukraine, but for every scenario in the Indo-Pacific where Australia and its allies may one day need to operate.

The allies who are in the loop are acting

The allied nations with the most to gain from this conflict are not simply funding Ukraine. They are sending systems to Ukraine for battlefield validation, co-developing solutions with Ukrainian industry, embedding people near the fight and bringing what they learn back into their own acquisition systems and doctrine.

Ukraine’s Brave1 defence tech cluster runs a formal testing program for exactly this. If a Western system cannot perform against advanced Russian electronic warfare and jamming in a live operational environment, it is not ready. The testing environment exists. The data exists. The access is available.

The Defence Innovation Network has funded two problem statements through SAG-U, sourced directly from the Ukrainian military’s operational requirements on electronic warfare and visual navigation in GPS-denied environments. Those projects are in progress. The solutions will be tested in Ukraine before they return to Australia.

That is the right model. I believe more Australian institutions should be doing the same.

What this means for us

I want to be clear about what this article is not. It is not a critique of Australia’s defence establishment. It is a firsthand account of what I saw in Ukraine and what I believe it means for Western nations, including our own.

The conflicts multiplying around the world, from the Middle East to the South China Sea, share a common characteristic: they demand more capability, more innovation and faster decision making than the systems we built in a different era were designed to provide. Ukraine has shown what is possible when the stakes are existential and the old playbook is no longer an option.

The morning after the heaviest attack I witnessed in Kyiv, the city was open. People went to work. The Ukrainian government held meetings. A country fighting for its survival in its fifth year of war got up and kept going.

That tells you something about the people. The question for the rest of us is what we are prepared to learn and how fast we are prepared to change before the stakes become that clear at home.

“Speed is the new stealth. In a drone and EW environment, the side that adapts fastest wins.”

Lincoln Parker is head of strategic partnerships at the Defence Innovation Network (DIN), a university-led network established by the NSW government and DSTG. He delivered the keynote at the International Drone Show 2026 in Odense, Denmark, and conducted senior-level engagement with US Army SAG-U, the Pentagon, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence during the June 2026 Europe and Ukraine program.