Defence companies looking to sell into Ukraine should stop treating the country’s military as a testing ground and start treating Ukrainian units as partners, military leaders told attendees at Resilience Conference London.
Speaking on stage, representatives of Ukrainian military units described a defence technology market in which products can become obsolete within months and companies can waste soldiers’ time by arriving with technology that does not address an immediate battlefield problem.
The names of the soldiers have been redacted for their own safety.
The panel began with a simple question: what separates companies that successfully work with Ukrainian forces from those that do not?
One Ukrainian soldier described a recent partnership with a domestic manufacturer developing an alternative reconnaissance drone for tactical operations at distances of up to 20 kilometres. Instead of arriving with a finished product and asking the military to test it, the company worked directly with the unit to develop the system around its requirements.
The result was a reconnaissance platform that the unit is now using on the battlefield. More important than the particular technology was the way the relationship worked.
“It started with empathy,” he said. The company cared about the military’s immediate problems and asked soldiers to help it build the right product.
That distinction came up repeatedly during the discussion. Ukrainian units are receiving large numbers of requests from defence companies that want their products tested under battlefield conditions. Providing that feedback, however, requires soldiers and military engineers to spend time away from fighting an active war.
“We only have so much resource to dedicate to helping you build your technologies,” one said.
Successful partnerships have included companies providing equipment for testing, paying for integrations and, in some cases, supplying other equipment that units need immediately, he said. The goal is a two-way relationship rather than simply extracting battlefield feedback.
The speed of technological change makes that relationship important. Companies can arrive with equipment that may have worked several months earlier only to find that Russian electronic warfare, tactics or countermeasures have already changed.
“The timing is critical,” one panellist said, arguing that the best form of cooperation involves company engineers working directly with Ukrainian military engineers on the ground. Sending sales representatives or establishing a presence in Ukraine is not enough.
That creates a different model for defence development from the long procurement cycles traditionally used by European militaries. One speaker pointed to FPV drones as an example. European countries are beginning to buy them, but by the time a polished system completes development and procurement, the frequencies, countermeasures and battlefield requirements it was designed around may already have changed.
Stockpiling large quantities of current-generation drones could therefore create its own problem. Equipment purchased today may offer little value in a future conflict if it is not continuously used, tested and updated.
The panellists also pushed companies to think less about individual technologies and more about battlefield problems.
One officer said the first question he asks a company is about its goal, not the specifications of its product. If a company can explain what military problem it solves and how the system would actually be used, his unit may work with it even at an early stage. A technically impressive system without a clear battlefield application is unlikely to get the same attention.
Autonomy was one area the panellists identified as increasingly important. Ukraine needs systems that allow fewer operators to control more platforms, particularly as militaries try to deploy unmanned systems at greater scale. The discussion also touched on cheaper missile systems and AI tools that can help military staffs process growing amounts of battlefield data and make decisions more efficiently. They are also looking for systems that can “penetrate through the ground.”
The real message for European defence companies was that Ukraine should not be viewed simply as a test bed. Real people are facing real danger and to come in, drone in hand, is not useful. One panellist asked companies to view Ukrainian forces as partners who can provide knowledge of how modern technologies perform against an enemy that is constantly adapting.
“The rules of warfare are written right now in Ukraine,” he said.
