General Christopher Donahue, commander of the US Army in Europe and Africa, has stated that companies wishing to enter into contracts with the US Department of Defense must test their products in Ukraine. In April, we dedicated an episode on our blog to the general’s work in Wiesbaden on planning strikes against the Russian army. There is no doubt about his competence.
It is interesting that the Trump administration has begun reforming the Pentagon, including its procurement system. The experience of combat operations in Ukraine and the tremendous speed of technological change, the primacy of civilian simplicity and cheapness over the traditional approaches of military monopolies, are the most important reasons for these reforms.
Commercial solutions in equipment and software are created in a highly competitive environment and change many times faster than military ones. But the Pentagon’s testing grounds cannot process them so quickly, and officials will drown in approvals of new, untested ideas. It is another matter when weapons are submitted for consideration with proven combat experience. That is, in the fighting in Ukraine.
General Donahue’s message is addressed precisely to medium and even small civilian companies: “There you find yourself in an environment where we really know whether it works or not. It must be adaptable and integrable. It must be inexpensive <…> In combat, as you all know, the situation changes every 60 or 90 days.”
These are historic times. The mass involvement of small and medium-sized civilian businesses in testing products directly in combat is an absolute novelty. However, for the military-industrial complexes of Russia and Ukraine, this is already yesterday’s news.
