Ukraine

“And if we think of what's happening in Russia, Ukraine, while people often talk about AI and autonomy, the real narrative is about quantity. And so for us having a strong manufacturing base that can build a lot of things, that is the best way to be able to lea…”

“So in Ukraine, there was this, I think it was called Operation Spiderweb, where, ah, Ukraine snuck basically like under false floorboards of a truck. They snuck a million dollars of worth of drones into Russian territory. And then the drones basically took fli…”

“Ukraine was like the military industrial complex in production where it's like they're live testing stuff. Way more rapidly, even than, like, even the US at its best, even China or wherever. In Ukraine, it's just, we try something and we immediately field it, …”

“Palmer says that Anduril has had products on the ground in Ukraine basically since day one. They were over there pretty quickly, you know, deploying assets and stuff like that.”

“What DJI makes, which, you know, they make the best consumer drones in the world, but they also make the most commonly used reconnaissance drones for the battlefield. Like, Ukraine and Russia are using Mavic's, Matrice's, all these DJI products that are incred…”

“Ukraine is estimated to use seven million FPV drones this year”

“We intend to be deploying Bandit in Ukraine before the end of the year.”

“China is supplying drones and components to both sides. So to Ukraine and to Russia, and they have by far the strongest drone and just electronics industrial base.”

“I think that's one of the things that we've seen, especially with systems that went over and failed. I think it was a lot of the systems that are in theory supposed to be easier to use or more autonomous, but then they, like, met these edge conditions that exi…”

“I mean, I think, like, it's a morally corrupt approach but although it would also be far worse for Ukraine if they didn't have access to Chinese components.”

“And so that, that zone is now like, 30 kilometers wide when it used to be a few kilometers wide.”

“And there's very few defense tech startups that have a meaningful amount of equipment deployed in Ukraine. Like you can just go down the list and see.”

“The other thing I want to highlight there is we actually started working on this before the very, very first USV strike happened in Ukraine.”