THE NEXT WAR

Is the U.S. ready for the future of combat?

- BY DEXTER FILKINS

Late this spring, I was led into a car in Kyiv, blindfolded, and driven to a secret factory in western Ukraine. The facility belongs to TAF Drones, founded three years ago by Oleksandr Yakovenko, a young Ukrainian businessman who wanted to help fend off the Russian invasion. When the war started, Yakovenko was busy running a logistics company in Odesa, but his country needed all the help it could get. Ukraine was overmatched—fighting a larger, wealthier adversary with a bigger army and more sophisticated weapons.

“The government said to me, ‘We need you to make drones,’” Yakovenko told me. “So I said to my guys, ‘You have four hours to make up your minds. Leave or stay—and, if you stay, promise me that you'll do your best to help our military.”

Yakovenko’s task was to set up factories to mass-produce unmanned vehicles, designed to overwhelm whatever Russia sent across the border. When I visited his fab, as the plants are called, more than a hundred employees, many of them women, were working intently in a setting that seemed more college campus than munitions factory. With techno music humming in the background, they tended to 3-D printers, assembled carbon-fibre components, carried out flight simulations, adjusted video cameras and radio transmitters. “It’s quite meditative,” one of the women told me.