Ukraine sells Europe the only thing that cannot be purchased for its own defense belatedly—time. This was stated ahead of the start of the international defense exhibition DALO Industry Days in Denmark by Irina Terekh, CEO and CTO of the Ukrainian defense company Fire Point, reports UNN.
"Ukraine once sold Europe grain and software. What we are selling you now is time. Your own intelligence services estimate the restoration of Russia's capabilities sometime closer to the end of this decade. This figure measures how long Ukrainians are standing in the way. We produce it (time—Ed.) on an industrial scale," Irina Terekh said.
She emphasized that time is the only resource that cannot be bought belatedly.
"Everything else in defense can be bought late and bought quickly—with a markup, in a panic. This cannot," Terekh believes.
According to her, measuring defense in terms of money and mass—that is, by budgets, brigades, or tonnage—does not describe how quickly a country turns a new fact into a response in someone's hands. According to Terekh, what currently distinguishes Ukraine is cycle time.
"European engineering is better than ours, and I say this as a customer. Your metallurgy, your machine tools, your optics, the culture of quality inside your factories: we buy all of this and would like to buy more. What Europe has not solved is the interval between the moment something is detected and the moment a response ends up in someone's hands. In Ukraine, this interval is measured in weeks. In most of Europe, it is measured in budget cycles—and a budget cycle is not a measure of time. It is a measure of permission," Terekh emphasized.
The CEO of Fire Point emphasized the importance of the conversion ratio—that is, how much of the resources spent become capabilities within 12 months.
Irina Terekh outlined five principles that Europeans can learn from the Ukrainian experience.
"Speed beats correctness. A system that is eighty percent ready and in flight this quarter defeats a perfect one delivered eighteen months later—because the enemy rewrites the requirements every six weeks. Perfection is a purchase made with peacetime and the most expensive item on any menu," she believes.
Also, according to Terekh, arithmetic decides this war.
"If your interceptor costs three million and its drone costs one hundred thousand, you are not repelling this attack. You are financing it," Terekh emphasized.
Another principle is that the operator is also the designer.
"The distance between the person who fires and the engineer who makes changes is one phone call made that same day. Doctrine written afterward is history. Doctrine written during the process is engineering," she explained.
Another important point, according to her, is designing solutions around the existing supply chain, rather than the one we would like to have.
"Every elegant system dependent on one supplier, one port, or one chemical is a vulnerability with a product passport attached. We learned this the slow way—three separate times," Irina Terekh said.
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She also emphasized the need to disperse production, since "there is no bunker that a hundred cheap drones will not eventually open."
According to her, this logic itself enabled Fire Point, in a short period of time, to go "from the drawing board to serial production of the FP-1, then the Flamingo, then the FP-7 family, and now FREYJA."
She emphasized that the FREYJA project is being created precisely according to the arithmetic relevant to the modern defense sector.
"At seven hundred thousand dollars per interception versus three million eight hundred thousand for the closest alternative, the defender ceases to be the one who goes bankrupt first," Terekh emphasized.