Shooting down a $35,000 Shahed drone with a $3.7 million Patriot missile is a losing proposition - and the math only gets worse when you have to wait in line for a costly replacement. Iran can draw from its own stockpiles - it produces hundreds of drones daily - or source additional ones from Russia. The United States and its allies, meanwhile, burn through scarce interceptors faster than they can be manufactured.
Ukraine has found a way out of that trap, Elina Ribakova and Lucas Risinger write in Foreign Affairs, as "Hvylya" reports. The solution is not a single weapons system but an ecosystem of cheap, rapidly iterated alternatives born from necessity and a fiercely competitive domestic market.
The most prominent example is the interceptor drone - a small unmanned craft designed to destroy larger, slower Shaheds in flight at roughly one-tenth their cost. Ukraine is also developing and deploying laser systems that offer a glimpse of what air defense with near-zero per-use cost could look like once the technology matures. These are not laboratory prototypes - Ukrainian forces are already testing them in real combat conditions.
The speed of iteration is what sets Ukraine apart. A drone that underperforms gets pulled from the field within days. A design flaw identified by a frontline operator reaches the engineering team the same afternoon. Many brigades run their own repair facilities, small R&D units, and 3D printing stations, allowing soldiers and engineers to make adjustments on the spot. The result is a defense industry where market pressure and battlefield reality eliminate ineffective products with a speed that procurement bureaucracies in Brussels, Berlin, or Paris cannot match.
Ribakova, a nonresident fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Risinger, an analyst at the KSE Institute, argue that this cost advantage is not just tactical - it is strategic. If Europe is to be prepared for modern warfare, it will need access to these affordable systems rather than relying solely on expensive Western platforms that cannot keep pace with the volume of expendable threats.
Also read: Why NATO's regulatory barriers slow adoption of cost-effective Ukrainian drone technology.