Successful combat missions require an ecosystem; one drone is not enough.
Kyiv • UNN
Iryna Terekh believes that the strength of Ukraine’s defense industry lies in its personnel, systems engineering, and combat experience—not merely in drones or documentation. Foreign partners seek to acquire this experience.
Ukraine should focus not only on protecting individual defense technologies and intellectual property, but above all on preserving the unique expertise and systemic approaches acquired by Ukrainian manufacturers during the full-scale war. Design documentation or a drone alone is not enough to reproduce the capabilities of Ukraine’s defense industry. This was stated by Iryna Terekh, CEO and CTO of the Ukrainian long-range weapons manufacturer Fire Point, UNN reports.
Why are personnel more important than individual technologies?
I have an opinion that may not be entirely pleasing to everyone or may not be super popular on this subject, but I believe that the fear of losing control over IP is exaggerated in the sense that it needs to be used properly to our advantage
According to her, concerns about losing control over intellectual property are partly justified, since Ukrainian defense technologies were acquired at an extraordinarily high cost. At the same time, an excessive focus on protecting every individual technological solution may limit Ukraine’s opportunities.
Iryna Terekh noted that Russia, Iran, and China exchange data obtained on the battlefield, analyze it, and use it to improve their own weapons.
At the same time, she said, a modern defense product is not merely a specific drone, missile, software, or set of design documentation. It involves an entire ecosystem encompassing production, training, logistics, planning, and ensuring the resilience of an enterprise.
Using the example of a drone, I believe that it is exclusively the ecosystem that works. What most manufacturers, including Fire Point and some of our colleagues, are doing now is not operating as product companies, but as service companies that, in principle, provide the army with a service involving a certain capability
In her view, systems engineering itself is one of the key areas of expertise that Ukraine needs to develop, control, and invest in.
I swear, you could take all of Fire Point’s design documentation right now and put it on someone’s desk, and no one would make the same thing in four years, because it requires specific approaches to planning everything from production to logistics
Iryna Terekh recalled that one of the results of the work of Ukraine’s defense-industrial complex during the war has also been the ability to build production capable of continuing to operate under constant Russian attacks and amid a shortage of personnel. According to her, production processes must be organized so that the loss of a single location does not lead to the shutdown of production.
That is why I would protect those approaches and areas of expertise that we acquired during this war more than one specific technology or firmware, or anything else, because it needs to be constantly updated
Foreign partners want to obtain Ukraine’s experience
A serviceman from the First Separate Center of the Unmanned Systems Forces, using the call sign "Kasper," agreed that the main value of Ukraine’s defense sector lies not only in the weapons themselves, but also in the accumulated experience of their combat use.
According to him, foreign partners are interested in Ukraine’s experience, but simply transferring a finished drone or another technology does not automatically provide the corresponding combat capability.
The most important thing we have now is that accumulated experience. One can perhaps learn how to launch a drone. But to properly plan a mission so that it is successful, how to carry out various kinds of strikes correctly… They also want there to be some kind of pill: here, we’ll put a drone on the table for them now, press a button — but it doesn’t work that way. It simply doesn’t work at all. There is a system
Fire Point CEO discusses plans to expand production abroad 25.08.26, 10:38 • 15700 views