After decades of relying on the U.S.-made Patriot interceptor system and its hit-to-kill PAC-3 munition as the most proven air defense against ballistic missiles, three new tracks are now leveraging international cooperation and a dire global need to develop and manufacture cheaper interceptor platforms.

Some officials, meanwhile, are hoping the sense of urgency leads to the fielding of the first new prototypes by the end of 2026 — years faster than today’s Patriots can be made.

It’s an ambitious ask.

The missile defense world has long described the mechanics behind anti-ballistic defense as akin to hitting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet, multiplied in difficulty by the number of simultaneous air threats coming in — a stark reminder of the mass air raids seen today in Iran and Ukraine that stretch air defenses to the breaking point.

Today’s anti-ballistic momentum began with U.S. President Donald Trump’s seemingly off-the-cuff comment at the NATO summit in Ankara earlier this month, when he pledged to grant Ukraine permission to produce Patriot missiles for the first time.

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ‘em enough,” Trump said, adding that the companies that make the system’s components, primarily Lockheed Martin, had not yet been consulted on the plan.

Five days later, Ukraine and nine European countries launched a coalition in Paris to field Freyja, an entirely new anti-ballistic system centered on a Ukrainian interceptor priced at roughly one-fifth of a Patriot round.

A week after that, Lockheed Martin unveiled a cheaper, faster-to-produce Patriot missile of its own. And on Wednesday, the company announced the Pentagon had awarded it another $53.86 billion for PAC-3 production, bringing its multiyear deal up to $58.62 billion and aiming to triple production capacity by the end of 2030.

The new anti-ballistics arms race has manifested largely as a result of the munitions shortage created by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, during which American forces have fired at least 1,060 to 1,430 Patriots at roughly $3.9 million apiece, draining an estimated two-thirds of America’s pre-war Patriot inventory, according to a new analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The diminished stockpile is compounded by the ongoing war in Ukraine, where ballistic missiles are the only threat Kyiv still needs help taking down and the one munition it has completely run out of.

With three new anti-ballistic tracks opened in July alone, NATO and its allies are aiming to shore up air defenses as quickly as possible.

Here is where the primary Patriot interceptor stands, and how the three new alternative pathways in the arms race stack up.

The standard: The Patriot interceptor

The Patriot, the U.S.-made gold standard of ground-based air defense, pairs a radar, a command post and launchers with two families of interceptor missiles, each fielded in several variants.

Lockheed Martin builds the PAC-3 MSE, the hit-to-kill round that rams ballistic missiles out of the sky, while Raytheon, which also makes the Patriot’s radars and ground systems, builds the older PAC-2 GEM-T, a round that explodes near its target and works best against aircraft and cruise missiles.

The MSE is the only Western munition that has reliably killed Russian ballistic missiles — from Iskanders to modified S-300s — in Ukrainian service. It has even downed the air-launched Kinzhal, which flies at hypersonic speeds.

That record is why the Pentagon on Wednesday awarded Lockheed a multiyear deal now worth up to $58.62 billion to triple production capacity by the end of 2030. Today, each round costs roughly $3.9 million.

“This is a once-in-a-generation moment, and we are moving with wartime urgency to deliver the Arsenal of Freedom,” Lockheed chairman and CEO Jim Taiclet said in a statement.

The grant: Ukrainian PAC-3s under US license

Trump’s pledge in Turkey would make Ukraine only the second country outside the U.S. licensed to build Patriot missiles, after Japan, which has produced them under license for decades.

Germany, the Netherlands and Spain are only now standing up a joint production line. Berlin is negotiating a license of its own and Germany’s existing GEM-T work runs through a joint venture with Raytheon rather than a national license, according to The Associated Press.

The license under discussion for Kyiv would likely cover the missiles — rather than complete batteries — and could mean final assembly from imported component kits instead of production from scratch, the AP reported.

Poland has offered to host the joint production on its territory for safety and security reasons, according to Polish news agency PAP.

“It is about securing this production, so that this production takes place in a safe location,” Polish Deputy Defense Minister Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka said in Washington on July 23.

Zelenskyy said he met with Lockheed Martin representatives while visiting the U.S. for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral on July 28, posting on Telegram that “Our teams are already working on specific solutions to move to joint production as soon as possible.”

The cost of the licensed PAC-3, meanwhile, would stay the same at close $4 million per round.

Yehor Chernev, deputy chairman of the Rada’s committee on national security, defense and intelligence, estimates Ukraine needs at least 18 to 24 months to launch a first pilot production line, “followed by more time to complete the first weapons,” per The Associated Press.

Zelenskyy is pushing for even faster joint production.

“We expect that by the end of 2026, our Ukrainian team will have the technical capability to produce U.S. missiles,” he said on July 15.

The analogue: Freyja

Freyja is a full Patriot-style anti-ballistic system that includes an interceptor, launcher, radar and command-and-control network.

The system, designed by Kyiv startup Fire Point, is built around its FP-7.X interceptor missile and various capabilities supplied by European partners.

Zelenskyy called Freyja “an analogue of Patriot, but a system for more mass production and a cheaper system.”

His comments came as he formally launched the Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition in Paris on July 13 alongside nine other countries, including Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The FP-7.X flew for the first time in early June and is built to kill ballistic targets at roughly 15 miles up using a high-explosive fragmentation warhead rather than the PAC-3’s hit-to-kill collision — which may come in later versions — at a target price of approximately $700,000 per interceptor, or roughly one-fifth the price of a PAC-3.

The company says it will build three interceptors a day starting in August. Zelenskyy wants the system up and running within 12 months, and the coalition is targeting its first real ballistic intercept for the end of 2027.

“We have an ambitious goal: to have an MVP ready by the first half of next year,” Davyd Aloian, deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told Reuters on July 27. “That is a prototype that can already demonstrate its first practical results.”

The Lockheed cost-cutter: PAC-3 ACE

Lockheed unveiled the PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector, or ACE, at the Farnborough International Airshow on July 20.

Built on the PAC-3’s fire-control system and fully linked to the Patriot and the Integrated Battle Command System that allied air defenders already run, it is designed to counter airbreathing threats — meaning weapons that rely on oxygen for propulsion — along with cruise missiles and close- and short-range ballistic missiles, a tier below the high-end targets the MSE was built to counter.

“American and allied warfighters need a solution that is battle-tested and budget-smart, and PAC-3 ACE delivers exactly that by building on the unrivaled performance of the PAC-3 MSE,” Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said in the announcement.

Lockheed says it will develop and produce the round jointly with American and European industry partners.

International manufacturing is also under consideration, with the munition’s first flight expected in early 2028.

The company advertises ACE at less than half the price of an MSE, or roughly $2 million a round, without disclosing an exact figure.

“Expertise is not a drone, but a skill, a strategy, a system where a drone is one part of the defense,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Reuters on Monday.

Ukraine now produces roughly 1,000 interceptor drones a day through hundreds of vetted manufacturers, deliberately dispersed so that no single strike can cripple the supply chain, Zelenskyy reported last month. The country has the technical capacity to double that figure, he said, but lacks the budget to do so.

While Ukraine has built that infrastructure gradually over the last few years, most countries now trying to integrate interceptors into the air defense have not invested in building the necessary logistical framework needed to effectively build, arm or deploy the cheap flyers.

Some countries have already learned this lesson the hard way.

After some Ukrainian companies built interceptor drone factories abroad without state approval, multiple buyers complained because the drones were sold without the warheads or expertise needed to operate them properly, Zelenskyy said on Friday, per Ukrainska Pravda.

“They had also been sold a certain number of interceptors — again without explosives,” Zelenskyy said about a European country he visited recently. “And they asked me whether we could send more operators. I said no.”

The bottleneck isn’t the interceptor itself, but the logistics infrastructure to produce and sustain them at scale, officials said.

“It seems there is still a misconception,” Artem Moroz, head of investor relations at Brave1, wrote on LinkedIn last month.

Brave1, Ukraine’s defense-tech accelerator, has worked with more than 500 defense startups since 2023 and now serves as the primary gateway for foreign governments seeking access to Ukrainian drone technology and production partnerships.

“Many believe Ukraine could simply send a few hundred interceptor drones to the Middle East and stop the Shahed drones currently hitting critical infrastructure,” Moroz said. “Drone warfare is far more complex than that.

“Yes, hardware matters. And Ukraine knows how to build drones at scale. But the real advantage lies in the infrastructure behind them.”

Companies launch drone-production innovations

The gap between buying a drone and building the system to sustain it is the market several defense companies are now racing to fill.

A handful of defense companies from Helsinki to San Francisco are offering the production line, the detection system and the supply infrastructure compressed into a portable unit that can be shipped anywhere to produce up to dozens of drones a day.

Sensofusion, a Finnish defense company founded in 2016, sells a full-cycle drone production chain as one of the latest innovators in this arena.

The company’s $2.4 million (€2.1 million Euros) Tactical Drone Factory is a standard 20-foot shipping container equipped with industrial 3D printers, an electronics assembly station and enough spares to run around the clock with a crew of three, producing up to 50 interceptor drones a day, according to the company.

What sets the Finnish system apart from its competitors is that it’s not just a factory: It ships as a package with Sensofusion’s Airfence radio-frequency detection and tracking platform, designed to detect a hostile drone, cue an interceptor and guide it to the kill — a full sensor-to-effector chain in a box.

The company says each interceptor costs less than $580 (€500) and is built to chase targets at speeds up to 310 mph (500 km/h).

Although Sensofusion boasts some of the highest production numbers on the market, it’s not the first company to market the concept of a portable all-in-one drone production hub.

Firestorm Labs‘ xCell system, the most tested U.S. equivalent to Sensofusion, uses two containers and works at a significantly slower pace by producing roughly 50 drones per month. Its newly announced SQUALL airframe is the first drone purpose-built to come off a mobile factory line, according to the company.

Founded in 2022, Firestorm’s biggest selling point is its testing and validation. The company holds a $100 million U.S. Air Force contract, has run field exercises with Air Force Special Operations Command and the Air National Guard and raised $47 million in Series A funding.

Per Se Systems, a French firm, operates in a middle ground by building micro drone factories on trailers — instead of shipping containers — that produce up to ten drones per hour on a generator with 19 hours of autonomous operation.

Per Se has been field-tested with 12 French Army regiments and is embedded in four active development projects with the French military, according to Army Recognition.

The drawbacks of production containers

Some logistics and strategy specialists say the all-in-one package wrapped into the portable factory concept ignores some critical battlefield questions that could render the projects useless.

A container full of printers, raw materials, sensitive electronics and proprietary design files concentrates exactly the kind of capability an adversary would want to destroy or capture, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis that identified several strategic vulnerabilities in frontline drone production.

And the problems compound from there.

Airframes can be printed, but the motors, batteries, electronic speed controllers, radios and sensors that make a drone combat-capable cannot, and those components must be trucked to the container through the same supply chains the factory is supposed to bypass.

Quality control under field conditions remains untested. Vibration, temperature swings, dust and intermittent power degrade the dimensional tolerances that 3D-printed parts require, and no company has demonstrated sustained production outside a controlled environment.

“Industrial resilience is combat power,” the CSIS experts concluded. “The next war will not be won by who initially fields the most drones, but by who sustains building them at scale.”

Several countries are catching on to the growing need to invest in drone production logistics.

Five NATO nations — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Poland — launched a joint initiative in February to develop affordable interceptor drones within a year under a program called LEAP, explicitly drawing on Ukrainian battlefield know-how to do it.

Ukraine’s experts say they are ready and willing to share their hard-earned lessons with allies, including the strategies to build a new layer of defense alongside the new weapons themselves.

“What Ukraine has built is a deep operational ecosystem across multiple domains, designed for conflicts where entirely new types of threats appear,” Brave1’s Moroz said.

“And ecosystems like this are extremely hard to copy,” he explained. “Even investing hundreds of billions or a trillion today would not easily replicate the experience, integration, and speed of iteration built over years of real combat.”

His final words of advice to allies?

“Drones are the tool. The infrastructure is the weapon.”

The school building sat fewer than 100 yards from a long-time Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval installation and was previously located within the IRGC compound perimeter until a wall appeared between 2013 and 2016, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by Amnesty International.

By the time the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes on Feb. 28, the school had been established several years prior. It was active on social media and had its own website, a Reuters investigation found.

So what went wrong?

“Was artificial intelligence, including the use of the Maven Smart System, used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target?” more than 120 House Democrats asked in a March 12 letter to the Pentagon, just days after 46 Senate Democrats sent a similar request demanding clarity on the deadly hit.

The Maven Smart System, a targeting and intelligence platform built by data analytics company Palantir Technologies under a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract, was built to solve a problem that has grown exponentially in recent years: information overload — with artificial intelligence as its secret weapon.

Maven fuses satellite imagery, drone feeds, radar data and signals intelligence into a single interface, then classifies targets, recommends weapons systems and generates strike packages in near real time, compressing kill-chain reasoning and decision making into the fastest timelines ever seen on the battlefield.

And it uses Anthropic’s Claude AI model, embedded in its system, to semi-autonomously rank targets by strategic importance, drafting automated legal justifications for each strike along the way.

The software generated hundreds of strike coordinates in the first 24 hours of the Iran campaign, enabling the U.S. to hit more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the war, according to The Washington Post.

After sources briefed on preliminary findings told CNN that U.S. Central Command had created targeting coordinates using outdated intelligence provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency that had not been updated to reflect the school’s presence, one question became central to the inquiries: “If so, did a human verify the accuracy of this target?” they asked.

They are still waiting for an official explanation.

Ukrainian drone operators who build and deploy semi-autonomous targeting systems on the front line told Military Times they recognized the likely culprit immediately.

Ihor Matviyuk, the director of Aero Center, a Ukrainian drone company that builds and deploys semi-autonomous drones on the front lines of the war with Russia, said he can imagine exactly how the failure happened.

Although he has no inside knowledge of the Minab strike specifically, earlier this month he said that it bears the hallmarks of a targeting failure — not an AI malfunction.

“It was almost definitely a strike on the [given] coordinates,” Matviyuk told Military Times. “The main problem was not the AI — it was how close the military object was to the school.”

Last week, former military officials speaking to Semafor confirmed Matviyuk’s early assessment: “Humans — not AI — are to blame” for the school strike, they said, pointing to stale human-curated data fed to the Pentagon’s Maven targeting platform.

Matviyuk recognized the pattern because he’s had to decide how much AI to use in his own semi-autonomous weapon systems again and again as drone warfare and software capabilities have rapidly evolved on Ukraine’s battlefield.

“Automatic targeting allows us to capture less than half of the targets, not more,” Matviyuk said. “Because they are all still camouflaged.”

The Defense Department’s own data bears that out. Maven can correctly identify objects at roughly 60% accuracy overall — compared with 84% for human analysts.

But that rate drops below 30% in adverse conditions, such as bad weather or poor visibility, according to Pentagon data published in a 2024 Bloomberg report.

The risk of “collateral damage,” as the strike on the Minab school might be categorized in military terminology, is too high — that is why Aero Center and every other Ukrainian drone company that spoke with Military Times says they always leave the final strike decision to a human operator.

“The direct impact is always carried out by the operator’s command,” Matviyuk said, “to prevent civilians from getting under the blow.”

In 2021, an experimental U.S. Air Force targeting AI scored roughly 25% accuracy in real conditions, despite rating its own confidence at 90%, then-Maj. Gen. Daniel Simpson, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, told Defense One.

“It was confidently wrong,” Simpson said, summing up the program’s problems. “And that’s not the algorithm’s fault. It’s because we fed it the wrong training data.”

The situation is not expected to improve. Last month, Hegseth slashed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence workforce by approximately 90% and cut CENTCOM’s civilian casualty assessment team from 10 to one, Politico reported.

Then, after leaving a skeleton staff to oversee the guardrails of the biggest expansion of AI in the military, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg signed a memo earlier this month formalizing AI’s role in military decision making — designating Maven an official program of record and pushing adoption across all U.S. military branches by September, Reuters reported on Friday.

Ukrainian weapon makers like Matviyuk are not shying away from giving AI more autonomy, but they’re using it strategically.

Autonomous targeting is effective for “massive offensive operations, where targets are not camouflaged,” he said, a description that may fit Iran’s fixed military installations, which are far less concealed than most positions on the Ukrainian front.

“We support the idea of using the human element less and less in the drone operator job,” Matviyuk said. “Autonomy, autonomous elements of drones — that’s the stuff we are working on.”

The problem, in his view, was not that the Pentagon used AI. It was that the data behind the target had not been updated since a girls’ school replaced a military headquarters on the same coordinates — and the people whose job it was to verify that data had already been cut from the chain.

AI systems are only as reliable as the people who build, feed and oversee them, Matviyuk emphasized.

When the human link fails, whether through bad data, gutted oversight or compressed timelines — the machine will continue to execute the error with precision.

Former CENTCOM director of intelligence, Lt. Gen. Karen Gibson, was unequivocal about where accountability for lethal strikes lies, regardless of weapon autonomy, at a Center for Strategic and International Studies panel last week.

“I will always come back to the fundamental principle of human responsibility and accountability,” she said. “A commander somewhere will ultimately be held responsible — not a machine or a software engineer.”

The Ground Truth Symposium will be hosted on March 25 by the Peace Through Strength Institute, a foreign policy and defense think tank based in Washington.

The event promises to translate “Ukraine’s frontline reality into clearer congressional understanding of the war, the capabilities shaping it and the conditions required to help bring it to an end on terms consistent with both Ukraine’s survival and United States strategic interests,” according to a release.

Representatives from several Ukrainian drone units will participate in the symposium, including soldiers from the country’s most effective UAV squads like Lazar Group, the 12th Special Forces Brigade and the 414th UAV Brigade “Magyar’s Birds.”

Discussions are expected to focus on Ukraine’s expertise in drone tactics and technology, along with the best practices for integrating the newer class of weapons into countries’ existing air defense systems.

The heavy use of several types of drones by multiple countries since the start of the recent conflict in the Middle East, currently involving about a dozen countries, will be a major talking point.

“Ukraine’s experience offers critical lessons for the United States and its allies — lessons the United States and our allies need now in the Iranian conflict,” the event’s press release stated.

Ukraine first made the shift to cheap interceptors not by choice, but because Russia’s nightly Shahed waves were burning through Western-provided missiles faster than allies could resupply them.

Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70% of incoming Shaheds over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot missiles for the ballistic threats they were designed to stop.

Interceptor drones are small, fast, semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft — often costing between $1,000 and $2,500 each — designed to hunt and destroy incoming drones by ramming into them or detonating alongside them at altitude.

Compact enough to fit inside a duffel bag and fast enough to chase a Shahed in the dark, Ukraine’s interceptors can fly at speeds between 195 and 280 miles per hour, depending on the model.

Most combine thermal imaging with radar tracking and AI-assisted guidance, with a human operator taking manual control for the final seconds of the intercept.

“You don’t have time,” Andrii Hrytseniuk, the CEO of Brave1, recalled telling officials in recent years. “Shahed [drones] will come not only to Ukraine, but to other countries. You need to use your time not to stick to previous conventional warfare, but to work on the new era.”

Brave1 was established in 2023 as Ukraine’s state-backed defense innovation hub, which funds, tests, and fast-tracks new military technology from hundreds of Ukrainian startups.

Three years after Brave1’s formation, the Iran war has made Hrytseniuk’s warning prescient.

In the first week alone, the U.S. and Israel struck more than 3,000 targets across Iran while Tehran fired over 500 ballistic missiles and nearly 2,000 drones at U.S. bases and Israeli cities across 12 countries, burning through over 800 Patriot interceptor missiles in three days — more than Ukraine received from allies throughout four years of war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pointed out on Thursday.

“And we are not slowing down,” U.S. Central Command posted on X the next day.

The conflict has since drawn in at least a dozen countries and put Ukraine’s counter-drone expertise at the center of a global scramble, with the Pentagon and at least one Gulf state now in active talks to buy Ukrainian-made interceptor drones, according to Financial Times. An EU envoy, meanwhile, is reportedly brokering introductions between Gulf governments and Kyiv’s manufacturers.

“They are really asking for some help with interceptor drones specifically,” Hrytseniuk told Military Times on Friday.

Ukraine first made the shift to cheap interceptors not by choice, but because Russia’s nightly Shahed waves were burning through Western-provided missiles faster than allies could resupply them.

Last month, Ukrainian interceptors destroyed more than 70% of incoming Shaheds over Kyiv, freeing scarce Patriot missiles for the ballistic threats they were designed to stop.

The irony is hard to ignore: the besieged country that spent four years begging for Patriot batteries to combat a nuclear power 10 times its size has quietly built a new layer of air defense at a fraction of the cost, according to The New York Times — and now Washington, which spent roughly $4 billion on missile defense interceptors in the first week of the Iran war alone, is calling Kyiv for help.

Interceptor drones are small, fast, semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft — often costing between $1,000 and $2,500 each — designed to hunt and destroy incoming drones by ramming into them or detonating alongside them at altitude.

Compact enough to fit inside a duffel bag and fast enough to chase a Shahed in the dark, Ukraine’s interceptors can fly at speeds between 195 and 280 miles per hour, depending on the model.

Most combine thermal imaging with radar tracking and AI-assisted guidance, with a human operator taking manual control for the final seconds of the intercept.

Ukraine now has more than 20 companies producing interceptor drones, the National Security and Defense Council announced in January.

“The most impressive thing is how far we have technically advanced,” Roman Yeremenko, a director at Aero Center, a Ukrainian full-cycle manufacturer that builds both drones and their ammunition, told Military Times earlier this week.

Modern Ukrainian interceptors started with Mavic scouts dropping jerry-rigged grenades — simple, improvised.

Then came FPV drones: first 7-inch frames, then 10, then 12. Aero Center’s first munition, Malyuk (“Baby”), weighed just 450 grams — enough for one or two Mavic drops.

“But the troops kept asking for more capabilities,” Yeremenko said.

Then came “1 kg payloads, 1.5 kg, even bigger,” he said.

Engineers working long into the night learned to wire warheads directly to flight controllers, built initiation systems and moved into producing kamikaze FPVs.

What’s getting developed now? Heavy bombers carry 5–10 kg of ammunition and fly 25–35 miles regularly, according to Yeremenko.

“This is a war of technology,” he said. “And the one who is ahead will win this war.”

Several Ukrainian companies are now fielding systems with combat records no Western manufacturer can match.

Wild Hornets‘ Sting has been in combat longer than any other Ukrainian interceptor.

A spokesman for the group told CBS News last week that the $2,500 FPV drone has downed 3,900 drones since May 2025 — including, the company says, the first confirmed downing of Russia’s jet-powered Geran-3 and a Shahed fitted with an air-to-air missile.

Reaching 195 mph with a thermal camera and AI-assisted terminal guidance, it can engage targets up to 15 miles away and fits in a standard duffel bag.

At the lowest price point is SkyFall’s P1-SUN, a fiber-optic Shahed hunter on a 3D-printed modular airframe that costs Ukrainian units just $1,000 a pop.

A company representative recently told Reuters that the drone, which SkyFall says has been upgraded to 280-mph capabilities with computer vision and thermal imaging, has downed more than 1,500 Shaheds and 1,000 other drones in four months — and is a hot ticket item internationally since Iran came under fire.

Then there is Ukrspecsystems‘ Octopus, now built under license by more than 15 Ukrainian manufacturers and, since November, at a new factory in the United Kingdom.

It flies at night, cuts through electronic jamming at up to 4,500 meters, and locks onto targets autonomously — the kind of all-conditions reliability that made it the MoD’s pick for mass production.

The UK deal marked the first time a Western government licensed a Ukrainian-designed interceptor for domestic production, a model that five NATO countries — Germany, France, Italy, Poland and the UK — have since agreed to build on by jointly developing affordable interceptor drones of their own, per Militarnyi.

Not every system follows the same blueprint. Aero Center is teaming up with Dwarf Engineering, a software company focused on creating multiplatform mission control systems for UAVs, to build a comprehensive interceptor drone package for Ukrainian units and international partners that includes the drone, payload and software needed to integrate it into current air defense systems.

It’s a different approach to development entirely, Ihor Matviyuk, who heads Aero Center Drones, Aero Center’s subsidiary UAV division, told Military Times.

“An extra 100 grams [on a combat drone] can mean minus two kilometers range,” Vladyslav Piotrovskyi, Dwarf Engineering’s CEO, told Military Times on Friday.

Piotrovskyi added that the trade-off only works if all three components are optimized as one.

But every groundbreaking interceptor system in Ukraine’s arsenal faces the same expiration window.

Russia’s latest strike drone, the feared Geran-5, can reach speeds up to 370 mph — technically fast enough to outrun every Ukrainian interceptor currently in service, according to Business Insider — and they grow deadlier every day.

“The Russians are trying. They are not as stupid as they look,” Yeremenko told Military Times. “They are adapting to our means of destruction.”

Ukrainian and Russian tech becomes outdated every six weeks on average, the drone experts explained, so Ukraine cannot stand still.

Aero Center is now building medium-class drones with payloads up to 10 kilograms and ranges of roughly 25 kilometers — “middle-sized drones, but with the functions and features of big bombers” — designed for a battlefield where the threat evolves faster than any single airframe can answer, the company’s UAV expert said.

Ukraine has already learned how to build and integrate an entirely new air defense system in an asymmetric war. Now, it’s offering the playbook to allies — in exchange for the kind of help Kyiv still cannot produce on its own.

“We are ready to help. We are suggesting help,” Brave1’s CEO told Military Times. “For us, it’s important to have an alliance that is strong — to stop the war and prevent the start of new wars.”

Alongside an image of a burning Shahed posted Friday on X, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense spelled out its current offer to the West:

“We can help you fight against Shaheds. Help us fight against ballistic missiles.”

Over the capital, the new class of interceptors is even more effective. Drones were credited with more than 70% of Shahed downings in February, Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi announced on Tuesday.

The math tells the story: A single Patriot interceptor costs over $3 million, a NASAMS round slightly over $1 million — and each Shahed costs Russia as little as $35,000 to manufacture, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That puts Ukraine on the wrong side of an approximately 85-to-1 cost exchange every time it uses a Patriot to defend against a drone.

But at $3,000 to $5,000 apiece and an average success rate over 60%, interceptors are now changing the calculus of war, Zelenskyy told Fox News late last year.

These drones, a weapons category that barely existed a few years ago, have become the fastest-growing layer of Ukraine’s air defense.

“We are the first in the world to have a system of destroying drones with drones in the air,” Col. Yuriy Cherevashenko, deputy commander of UAVs for air defense of the Ukrainian Air Force, said in a video marking the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Facing an unrelenting adversary whose economy dwarfs its own by nearly tenfold, Ukraine had no choice but to outthink rather than outspend, and interceptor drones — mobile, cheap and scalable enough to answer Russian mass production with Ukrainian ingenuity — have emerged as their biggest bet.

Now, what began as battlefield improvisation has become a deliberate war strategy.

“Drones now occupy a wide segment of the air defense system,” Cherevashenko said. “In the future, they will be perhaps the most numerous means of destroying aerial targets.”

Their rapid development over the last year tracked Russia’s escalating use of Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones, which by mid-2025 were arriving in record-breaking waves that overwhelmed Ukraine’s missile-based air defenses faster than Western allies could resupply them.

“We needed to supply a lot of interceptors this year, because without them, the winter would have been even harder for Ukraine,” Alona Zhuzha, director of digitalization at Ukraine’s newly established Defense Procurement Agency, told Military Times.

The National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) said the country produced 100,000 interceptor drones in 2025 and reported that production capacity has grown eightfold compared to the prior period.

Frontline units received an average of over 1,500 interceptor drones per day in December and January — up from about 1,000 per day during the previous period, the MOD said at the beginning of the year.

That supply is translating into operational tempo: Last month, interceptor drones flew approximately 6,300 sorties and destroyed more than 1,500 Russian UAVs of various types, Syrskyi said.

Interceptors are now a top priority on the DOT-Chain Defence marketplace, the digital platform through which units order directly from manufacturers.

“They are very critical for our defense,” Zhuzha said.

Russian tech continues to evolve, too.

Moscow’s drones have been equipped with rear-facing infrared spotlights designed to blind interceptor pilots, and some have been armed with air-to-air missiles to shoot back, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, a radio expert and early advocate of interceptor tech who was recently appointed as an adviser to the Ministry of Defence, wrote on Telegram in January.

Russia has also expanded its use of decoy drones — foam-and-plywood models including the Gerbera and Parody — which now constitute roughly one-third of all Russian mass attacks, specifically designed to exhaust interceptors and overload the detection layer, according to Defence-UA.

Ukraine now flies several distinct classes of interceptors: cheap FPV airframes built for last-kilometer kills — the kind that catch a Shahed before it reaches a substation or apartment block — and faster pursuit systems tied to forward drone lines, designed to launch immediately upon detection, climb fast, and intercept before the threat crosses into civilian airspace, according to the NSDC.

Higher-speed interceptors designed for targets like the jet-powered Geran-3 variants, where the old FPV chase math breaks, are emerging now too, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

And networked defense systems are beginning to link interceptor nodes across sectors, sharing tracks so a single incoming target can be handed off from one crew to the next as it crosses boundaries.

One unit trying to push forward the development and use of interceptors is Lazar’s Group — a drone formation within the National Guard’s 27th Pechersk Brigade known as one of the most effective interceptor units in the country.

Phoenix, who commands the group’s drone operations, told Military Times that the group has destroyed more than $15 billion in Russian military equipment since the full-scale invasion — part of Ukraine’s broader shift away from infantry warfare. Military Times agreed to refer to all active duty soldiers by their nom de guerre for operational security.

Strike drones, not interceptors — still account for “60 to 70% of confirmed hits” on Russian equipment and personnel across the battle zone. “Interceptors take out most of the rest.”

Lazar’s Group utilizes both. Fixed-wing strike models can engage deep targets and conduct reconnaissance well beyond the battle’s edge, while interceptors are optimized for counter-UAV work at shorter ranges and higher closing speeds.

For example: Ukraine’s Wild Hornets “Sting” interceptor — a quad-rotor designed to chase and collide with enemy drones — is reported to reach speeds over 300 km/h and operate out to roughly 25 kilometers in interception missions, with altitude service up to several thousand feet, while fixed-wing interceptor variants such as the VB140 Flamingo are designed with extended pursuit profiles that can engage reconnaissance drones at ranges up to 50 km.

The real challenge slowing interceptor innovation now? Sensors.

“We just need better radar,” Phoenix said. “It allows you to see your enemy and your plane. You understand where you are and where your enemy is, and you can fly to that position.”

Ukraine’s most common intercepts still start with cueing: radar tracks, acoustic spotters and stitched feeds from Ukraine’s master “Mission Control” battlefield management system that put a pilot in the right place at the right time.

“Without good radar — durable sensors, strong [electronic warfare] defense, etc. — it’s very difficult,” he told Military Times.

To counter Russian electronic warfare, another persistent problem, the unit builds its own interceptor drones with proprietary remote control and video transmitter systems designed to resist jamming.

“We create our own models because we understand the technical specifications that we need,” Phoenix said. “So they’re not immediately jammed or located.”

Illustrating the problem, SpaceX cut off Russian forces’ contraband Starlink terminals at Ukraine’s request last month — but the disruption also knocked out feeds for Ukrainian units sharing the same network, leaving parts of the front without connectivity or intercept capability, according to CNN.

Artificial intelligence has not yet come to dominate interception missions — today it is still manual ramming or close-in detonation.

“Our pilots mostly operate manually,” Phoenix told Military Times. “Because AI features are nice, but sometimes they just aren’t working.”

Finding solutions to the other common hurdles beyond radar — like battery endurance in freezing conditions or operator fatigue on overnight shifts — tends to be simpler, Phoenix said.

“After that, they just keep flying.”

Lazar’s Group’s strategy has become a national model for how to institutionalize a new layer of air defense into the existing military structure, both in Ukraine and abroad.

The 1,700-strong group is helping construct the country’s Drone Line — an unmanned kill zone stretching 15-kilometers deep across the front, announced by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense a year ago.

In Brussels, officials have been pushing their own version of a drone wall to bolster defenses along Europe’s eastern flank, but the effort has run into political and technical hurdles, according to Reuters.

Kyiv has taken note, and begun leveraging its country’s battlefield tech, skills and data as a major benefit of remaining its staunch ally as peace trilateral negotiations to end the war continue between Ukraine, Russia and the United States.

“As we work together to protect lives in Ukraine, we are building a new system – a new security and response architecture, new approaches – to protect lives in any European country when needed,” Zelenskyy told his counterparts at the Munich Security Conference in February.

“Our wall of drones is your wall of drones.”

Typically a buzzing university town of about one million people, the streets here have been almost empty since the bombing began last week. The exception has been long lines wrapping around banks, pharmacies and supermarkets or the thousands of people at the train station trying to find a way out of the country.

Over the weekend, security around the town visibly increased. Roadblocks popped up near refugee welcome and logistic centers as well as transportation hubs such as the airport and train station. Some of the city’s popular cafes, restaurants and stores have been turned into bomb shelters with armed guards at the door requiring entrants to show their passport and to leave any weapons they may be carrying at the door — even to pick up a coffee.

More men in military fatigues can be seen everywhere — at new checkpoints, in public squares, sitting inside cafés. But not everyone dressed in a uniform is necessarily part of the country’s formal military. After Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy imposed martial law and issued a general call to arms of all men aged 18 to 60 Thursday, any man or woman willing to fight can sign up to receive a weapon and fatigues, when available, to join the mobilization.

Some are trained soldiers with years of experience fighting Russians in Crimea or the Donbas regions, where Russia invaded in 2014. Others are newly minted militiamen and women who have been attending weekend combat trainings as members of the local territorial defense forces formed in preparation for a worst-case scenario — precisely like the one the country faces now.

“We are waiting for a train south,” said a member of the Ukrainian army speaking under the condition of anonymity because he lacked official permission to speak to the press. With piercing blue eyes, a well-worn uniform and a cigarette dangling nonchalantly from his lips, he said “we will not come back to Lviv until Russia leaves our country. Every part of it.”

Ukraine has been at war with Russia since President Vladimir Putin sent in troops in 2014, but the fighting and devastation were almost completely limited to the areas of Crimea and the Donbas. Over the last eight years, more than 14,000 people were killed in the fighting in those regions. Since last week, many more have died and countless Ukrainians are displaced throughout the country or have fled across the border into neighboring Poland and Hungary.

While most of the country had been unhappy with the stalemate, they were still able to maintain a sense of normalcy outside of the disputed territories. Now, many expressed a new determination to not only stop the current Russian invasion, but also push back those forces who have occupied Crimea and the Donbas for years.

And still there are more fighters from this city and every region of Ukraine that are lining up to join their compatriots in the regions of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa, where the bulk of Russian forces have amassed, to engage in street warfare with a global superpower that outmans them and outguns them by almost every measurable standard.

“We will fight and we will win,” a reservist said, also speaking under the condition of anonymity because he lacked official permission to speak to the press. He was waiting in line beside a long queue of buses waiting to bring hundreds more fighters to the area. Like many of the men there, he said he had helped the women and children in his family escape to safety before presenting himself for service. And although he hadn’t seen combat for years, he said he was eager to get to the front and help stop the attacks on his beloved Ukraine.

When asked about the United States’ response to the war, he grinned and said, “American javelins are good,” before turning more serious. “Thank you, President Biden, for your support. It is helping.”

The movement doubled the number of NATO troops typically stationed here and is now the highest concentration of American forces to move into Poland since the end of World War II. But the Polish people have greeted the visitors less as liberators and more as a welcome curiosity.

Only small groups of the soldiers could be seen based near Rzeszow in camouflaged tent cities in the last week. Many American troops have been staying in the conference center, usually a venue for concerts or events but now a de facto military base hidden behind metal blockades meant to both hide the soldiers’ activities and keep onlookers out.

But the Americans are making themselves known in other ways, especially as security tightens and the situation along Ukraine’s eastern, northern and southern borders deteriorate. Troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, 435th Air Wing and other divisions are now located across the country on a mission to “deter and assure” according to official sources.

The owner of a gastropub in the center of town reported having to search the entire town for a replenishment of pork ribs after the American soldiers cleaned them out last week. Some local hotels have been completely booked up, while a surprising number of large buses can be seen parked en masse or driving across the region with an American soldier sitting in front with presumably many more in the back.

A new pastime for families this month became going to one of the region’s two airports to get a look at the American machinery and manpower arriving daily in the country.

Security around the U.S. troop deployment to Poland noticeably tightened in the last week as the situation in Ukraine deteriorated, with more fences being installed to block the soldiers’ activities from view and a more aggressive military police presence to scare away onlookers.

Several local people reported hearing and occasionally seeing F-15 jets fly over the city in the last week.

While hosting thousands of foreign troops could seem like a possible threat to some, the American troops appear to be largely welcomed in the southeastern region of Rzeszow. As one of the most staunchly conservative and anti-immigrant regions of Poland, the troops may be seen as saviors in the event Ukrainian refugees attempting to cross into Poland and directly into the Rzeszow region.

“Rzeszow does not want migrants here,” said a local English teacher who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the community. “And some people think the Americans are here to protect the refugees, which they like because it takes the responsibility from them,” the teacher said.