Ten years ago, I deployed to a small Soviet-era training base in western Ukraine. My unit was there to train the Ukrainian Armed Forces on NATO doctrine and introduce them to American weapons systems and intelligence assets. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion was still six years away, but the Ukrainians knew something was coming.
They were already rotating battalions east to fight in what they called the Anti-Terrorist Operation, defending their country against separatists whom Russia funded, trained, and, at times, fought beside.
They weren’t impressed by the somewhat outdated platoon-level surveillance drones we showed them. And frankly, neither was I.
The Ukrainians were flying commercial drones, many of them bought off the shelf by volunteers and crowdfunding campaigns. They were cheaper and, in their view, more useful than anything we brought that day.
As a young lieutenant, I wondered how the greatest military on Earth could be stuck with expensive, unreliable systems while our Ukrainian counterparts found a way to get better equipment faster and at a fraction of the price. Our acquisition process took years to put a new system in the hands of our troops.
But 10 years later, change is finally here. Pentagon reforms are speeding up acquisition and cutting through the bureaucracy that stands between American innovation and our troops.
American defense startups are moving from prototype to production at a speed the Pentagon hasn’t seen in generations. Buying power has been pushed down to the commanders who actually use the equipment. And in the war with Iran, American lives are being saved because we can now field equipment that works, hear from the troops using it, and keep improving it.
In fact, over the summer, when Iran shot down an Army Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz, two American pilots were stranded in the water. The boat that came to save them didn’t have a single human being on board.
It was a Corsair, a 24-foot autonomous vessel built by Texas-based Saronic, which can travel 1,000 nautical miles on its own. The Corsair reached the downed pilots within two hours, took them aboard, and carried them to a spot where a helicopter hoisted them to safety. It was the first rescue of its kind in U.S. military history.
The Corsair has gone on offense, too. In July, three of them struck a submarine and ship maintenance facility at Iran’s Bandar Abbas naval base. It was the first time American forces had used sea drones in combat.
Remarkably, the Corsair went from prototype to production in under a year, and Saronic has since delivered more than 300 of them.
Our military is finally focused on fielding a new generation of autonomous systems that are cheaper and faster to build. And when one is destroyed, we lose a machine instead of a service member.
On land, we now have autonomous systems such as Merops interceptors, which protect soldiers from drone attacks. Throughout the conflict, Iran has used Shahed attack drones to target U.S. forces and our Gulf partners. Originally deployed by Ukrainian forces to defend against Russian-launched drones, Merops interceptors cost less than half as much as the Shaheds they destroy. Even more remarkably, when the conflict with Iran began, the Army acquired 13,000 Merops interceptors in just eight days.
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But what has changed isn’t just the technology. It’s the urgency inside the Department of War to get things done. You don’t have to agree with the war to recognize what our military has achieved, not just in developing new technology, but in testing it and getting it to forward units at the speed of war.
America has always been a land of innovation. But our service members only reap the rewards when our processes move at the same pace.
Jeremy Hunt, a West Point Military Academy graduate, served as a U.S. Army intelligence captain. A former Georgia congressional candidate, Jeremy is now a fellow at Hudson Institute, where he writes on national security, politics, and American life.