The chairman and CEO of Rheinmetall, one of the world's largest weapons manufacturers, has waved off the threat that Ukrainian drones pose to his industry. When The Atlantic's Simon Shuster visited the company's headquarters in Germany and raised the subject of drones destroying Russian tanks, Armin Papperger responded with contempt. "This is how to play with Legos," he said.
Papperger insisted that Ukrainian drone technology fell short of real innovation, "Hvylya" reports, citing The Atlantic's investigation. When pressed on the matter, Papperger demanded to know who the biggest drone producers in Ukraine were. After hearing the names Fire Point and Skyfall, he scoffed. "It's Ukrainian housewives," he said. "They have 3-D printers in the kitchen, and they produce parts for drones. This is not innovation."
For a taste of what he considers genuine innovation, the CEO directed Shuster to tour his newest factory in northern Germany. The plant, designed to produce artillery shells under a contract worth nearly $10 billion, was still being assembled. Some of the labor was done by hand: one worker used a blowtorch to bend shell casings, while another scraped explosive residue from grooves with a wooden stick. Automation remained months away.
When asked during the factory tour whether Rheinmetall had developed any protection against drone strikes for its tanks - such as the improvised nets and turtle-shell cages that soldiers in Ukraine have rigged themselves - the company's press officer answered plainly. "No," Jan-Phillipp Weisswange said. "We don't have something like that." Any adjustment to a German weapons system requires recertification by the procurement agency, a process that can take at least a year even for a change in barrel material.
Papperger's empire spans 180 factories across the globe, including eight in the United States, producing tanks, artillery, warships, missiles, and fuselages for the F-35 fighter jet. His personal security now resembles that of a head of state after Russia placed him on an assassination target list in 2024. Rheinmetall's stock price has risen more than 15-fold since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the company's market value stands at roughly $80 billion - far exceeding Volkswagen or Mercedes-Benz.
Lieutenant General Steven Whitney, a senior Pentagon official, testified this week before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Ukraine's drone innovation is "out of this world." Ukraine now produces more drones than any democracy on Earth, having scaled output from fewer than 150,000 in 2023 to 4 million last year.
"Hvylya" earlier reported on how Ukraine's unmanned ground vehicle revolution has transformed the front line beyond aerial drones alone.