Speech by Zelensky

Speaking at the general debate of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, Ukrainian President Zelensky said that Ukraine decided to open up arms exports, aiming to show partners a modern and reliable weapons system that has been tested in real-world combat.

Zelensky said in a speech: ¡°Ukraine has decided to open up its arms exports and hopes that these powerful systems, tested in real war, will prove their reliability and modernity to partners.

In addition, Zelensky also said in his speech that global rules are needed to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in weapons, prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, restore truly effective international cooperation and strive for peace and security.

Extended reading

U.S. media: U.S. drone race not only lags behind China, not even compared to Ukraine

¡°With just putting explosives on the drone, a drone that costs less than $1,000 can destroy tanks worth millions of dollars.¡±

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict prompted rapid innovations in drone tactics, and the Americans suddenly realized that despite having the ¡°world¡¯s best¡± military-industrial systems, they were far behind China in the production and use of small, low-cost drones, not even the Ukraine.

Picture for media reports.

"Why is the U.S. military caught up in the dilemma of catching up on the modern battlefield?" CNN published an article on September 15 pointing out that U.S. drone companies are facing challenges such as rigid traditional procurement models, high manufacturing costs, and lack of large-scale orders. Even Ukraine has offered to help the United States produce drones, and the U.S. military also needs to use Ukrainian military experience to train soldiers to operate drones.

The advantages of China's drone industry are even more obvious. Some executives of American companies bluntly said that if American parts are used instead of Chinese parts, the cost is sometimes "100 times higher", and the price can only be reduced by mass production, but the current demand is insufficient. In terms of production, the production line with the highest production capacity in the United States produces 2,000 drones per month, while China can produce tens of millions of small drones per year. China's leading position is making the United States feel anxious.

The article describes that the future war looks more like a video game: soldiers put on virtual reality glasses, control the handle with their fingers, and small drones buzz into the air.

Last month, in a military base in Texas, U.S. soldiers were trained to learn how to operate a small quad-winged drone, which now dominates the Ukrainian battlefield and is becoming a preferred weapon for the fighting parties.

However, this technology and tactics are still unfamiliar to American soldiers, and it is also an unavoidable problem for the US military.

U.S. soldiers carry out FPV drone training

The article wrote that Russia and Ukraine have triggered the rapid evolution of drone operations-so fast that the United States, which has "the world's most advanced military and military-industrial system," also appears to be lagging behind. Most U.S. soldiers lack experience in operating with unmanned systems. The United States is good at manufacturing large equipment such as expensive fighter jets, tanks and precision-guided missiles, but it is ill-prepared to quickly produce small, cheap systems.

Pentagon officials are pursuing him urgently.

In July this year, U.S. Defense Secretary Hegel issued a memorandum to senior leadership calling for an acceleration of the application of drones in the U.S. military.

In recent months, the U.S. military has finally started assembling and 3D-printing its own drones, and training soldiers with video game-like simulators to learn how to fly small drones into windows, corners, and even enemy tank cabins.

"It's not a question of tomorrow, it's a question of today," Maj. Gen. Curt Taylor of the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division told CNN at an Army conference in Germany in July. "The first battle of the next war will involve an unprecedented number of drones."

Take to Ukraine.

Although military units are accelerating training, the United States still faces the challenge of productive capacity, which is difficult to compare with China.The key obstacle is that U.S. weapons cannot use Chinese parts because of security considerations, but domestic replacement prices are higher.

Ukraine has expressed its willingness to help the U.S. produce drones to deepen security cooperation between the two countries.While the U.S. has supplied Ukraine with billions of dollars in weapons, Ukraine now sees an opportunity to ¡°return¡± to the U.S.

During a visit to the White House last month, Ukrainian President Zelensky proposed to President Trump a $50 billion cooperation plan to jointly produce drones with the United States.Zelensky told reporters that the potential plan would deliver 10 million unmanned systems within five years.

The Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Digital Transformation said that the drone industry has undergone ¡°fundamental changes¡± in the past six months, noting that international demand has surged, especially for drone attack video data, which is used by countries and military industries to train AI systems.

Fyodorov said that Kiev could take advantage of this innovation in exchange for more funding or material support: ¡°This is a geopolitical card in the hands of the president.

Fyodorov told Reuters last month that Ukraine was exploring ways to share battlefield data with allies, saying the data, which contains drone images and operational patterns, is of great value in military applications and the defense industry, and is seen as one of the ¡°dolls¡± that Ukraine is fighting for western support.

"The data we have is invaluable to any country." At the same time, Fedorov said that Ukraine remains "very cautious" about data sharing at present.

The Ukrainian army released footage of drone operators reconnaissing frontline movements

In July this year, at a conference center in Wiesbaden, Germany, the Ukrainian military bluntly told NATO officials that it must invest more in drones. Burovdi, commander of Ukraine's unmanned systems force, asserted that no tank will survive an FPV drone attack.

Deputy Chief of Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Gorbachev, said that while artillery and anti-tank missiles are crucial, about 80 percent of the Ukrainian military¡¯s successful precision strikes are due to drones, and this is not the future, but our daily combat reality.

Senior officials of the US military have reached the same conclusion. Hegseth's memo became a key document in pushing drones to quickly equip troops. He stressed that commanders should dare to take risks: "With the rapid development of drone technology, the biggest risk is that we avoid risks ourselves."

The U.S. military plans to ensure that every unit is equipped with a drone system by fiscal year 2026, with the goal of allowing soldiers to use drones as sidearms, walkie-talkies, night vision devices or grenades.

In the primary training course, U.S. soldiers first learn to assemble their own drones, master the field maintenance skills; then practice flight through the simulator. Afterwards, they enter the field similar to the "FPV gym", practice in obstacles hanging on tyres and door frames, and even fly into enemy armored carton models made according to physical sizes.

This training will not only take place in Texas, but all U.S. troops in Europe will also undergo serial drone training, including ballistic launch training. A new course in Beninburg, Georgia, will be opened in October to incorporate drone training into the base training of new troops. The 82nd Airborne Division in Prague, North Carolina, has also established a dedicated innovation coalition to continuously adjust the training content using the latest experience from the battlefield from Ukraine.

Kaiser, deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in charge of combat affairs, said that small drones can replace frontline observers, detect improvised explosive devices, ambushes and enemy fire points in advance, and provide soldiers with safer battlefield intelligence.

Michael, head of the Pentagon¡¯s research and engineering office and former Uber executive, said that drones can be used not only in combat but also to transport goods and medical supplies: ¡°We can make more tasks done by machines to maximize the safety of our soldiers.¡±

100 times more costly

Today, most of the drones used in the Ukrainian front are domestically manufactured.In the early days, the United States had supplied Ukraine with 100 "spring knives" to attack drones, but later because the Ukrainian military feedback its anti-electronic warfare capacity is insufficient, so the U.S. ceased to supply.

A drone technology competition was launched between Ukraine and Russia, and whoever can update the technology with the fastest speed, will win the competition."Fyodorov said, "Ukrainian enterprises are on the frontline of the battlefield, can get feedback from soldiers in a timely manner, so they can improve their products, outperform those drone models with poor practical performance."

U.S. drone startups such as Neros and Anduril have sent teams to Kiev to cooperate with the Ukrainian government to send products directly to the front line for testing. Neros won the contract this year to deliver 6,000 FPV attack drones within six months.

The article points out that promoting the development of smaller and cheaper UAV systems means that the U.S. defense industry needs to completely change the traditional thinking mode. In the past, companies could spend years developing or updating a weapon, but now, by the time the weapon is delivered to frontline soldiers, it is likely to be obsolete, and this model will no longer work.

An American soldier is operating a drone.

In an interview with CNN, Anduril Chairman Brooks said that the core of the problem is that the U.S. Department of Defense has always treated drone procurement as equal to other large-scale defense equipment procurement, and for such lower-cost, autonomous drone systems, its procurement pattern should actually be the opposite of our traditional military equipment procurement pattern.

Ukrainian companies often use cheap Chinese parts and chips when producing drones, but such parts are banned in U.S. weapons.Neros CEO Andersson said the company soon discovered that in some cases, the cost of U.S. manufacturing parts is sometimes ¡°100 times higher¡± and bulk production can lower prices, but currently there is insufficient demand.

Since Chinese companies such as Jiangxi have dominated the consumer-grade drone market, U.S. FPV manufacturers rely mainly on contract orders from the U.S. Department of Defense.

The U.S. Department of Defense¡¯s ¡°Replica Plan,¡± launched in 2023, aims to boost the mass production of cheap drone systems for the U.S. military, but the plan sets the goal of producing only 3,000 drones within two years, which is far from enough for the industry.

¡°The U.S. drone industry is pretty bad at the moment,¡± said Anderson, who said Neros produced 2,000 drones a month, which is already the highest U.S. drone production line.

By contrast, the Ukrainian side said the country would produce 4 million drones this year, some of which have a strike capacity of more than 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers).

Ukraine has also established a point reward system to distribute new equipment based on drone combat videos. These videos also become data sets for training AI models by countries. Ukraine plans to open battlefield testing projects to global defense enterprises, attracting more innovative weapons to be verified in real warfare.

Analysts point out that future conflicts in the Indo-Pacific region may present different characteristics, but drone technology will inevitably be applied to them, while China produces tens of millions of small drones annually, a situation that deeply concerns the United States.

"We have to be prepared for this," said Samuel Bendett, a military analyst and consultant at the Center for Naval Analysis. "We have to understand the doorways. At present, this is technological change that cannot be reversed."

On August 27, the long article published by the US "Politics News Network" also pointed out that the United States is far behind in drone development, production, training and operational theory update, and is extremely dependent on Chinese-produced parts.

The article emphasizes that the experience of the Ukrainian battlefield shows that innovation and rapid adaptability are key to modern warfare, and that the U.S. military has not yet fully absorbed these lessons, and there is also a marked deficiency in defense against drone threats, which puts the U.S. in a serious disadvantage in the drone race with China.