Yana Shkvarovska, Director of the Defence Builder Accelerator, has written for Defender Media on how Ukrainian defence companies operate day to day, and which functions become the constraint as those companies grow.
The op-ed describes an operating model that was never designed in advance. It was assembled over four years by teams running R&D, manufacturing and delivery at the same time, and it took Ukrainian manufacturers to a capacity of more than 8 million FPV drones a year.
Everything in the model is organised around one loop: a short feedback cycle between the product and the military unit using it, which in mature teams compresses to days or weeks. For modular products, the platform changes slowly, because every change means retooling and new documentation, while firmware and payloads change fast.
As companies scale, the bottleneck migrates. Quality and procurement break first: quality stops being an inspection of each unit and begins to require batch control, traceability and sampling on the production line; procurement stops working contract by contract, because lead times for critical components can exceed the horizon of confirmed orders.
Finance and planning may become the next constraint. In 2025, sector capacity ran at 56% utilisation in drones and 32% in ground robotics, according to Defence Builder and KSE Institute research. A production line built for peak demand continues generating fixed costs through every idle period, while larger production runs freeze more working capital in components and work in progress. As of June 2026, defence manufacturers had drawn UAH 9.8 billion across 162 preferential loan agreements.
The op-ed also examines three different procurement and market channels — brigade, centralised procurement and international — and why strong performance in one says little about readiness for another. On exports, it cites 156 international defence partnerships initiated to date, most in unmanned systems, per KSE Institute and Defence Builder estimates.
