What Ukraine has that Japan and Taiwan lack
Ukraine’s former defence minister is launching a new venture that could offer more than drone technology. Asia should take notes
Six weeks before Karp’s name entered the picture, Fedorov had been Ukraine’s youngest-ever minister. The day after his July dismissal, Italy’s defence minister invited him to Rome as an adviser. Karp, whose firm is worth US$440 billion, reportedly soon called him to discuss working together. Neither was calling for Ukrainian hardware. What they presumably wanted was harder to manufacture: what Fedorov had learned running the system that produced that hardware.
That system was a loop: battlefield, failure, feedback, redesign, test, back to the battlefield. Brave1, the defence-tech cluster that was essentially Fedorov’s brainchild, is known for fast procurement – more than 500 grants in two years, prototypes certified in weeks. However, speed alone wasn’t the asset. Rather, the asset was the rapid feedback loop of real-world experience, which included soldiers dying when a tactic failed.