{"id":3219,"date":"2026-06-08T16:15:06","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T16:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/3219\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T16:15:06","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T16:15:06","slug":"us-must-learn-lessons-from-ukraine-innovate-faster-and-cheaper-anduril-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/3219\/","title":{"rendered":"US must learn lessons from Ukraine, innovate faster and cheaper: Anduril president"},"content":{"rendered":"

The U.S. needs to ramp up focus on building a variety of cheaper weapons systems at scale to ensure sufficient supply for future fights, according to Anduril\u2019s president and chief strategy officer.<\/p>\n

U.S. industry became complacent and got \u201cambushed by the future,\u201d said Christian Brose, who was on hand last week at the Washington Post\u2019s inaugural Building America Summit<\/a> to discuss defense industry developments. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere was just no way of thinking that this formidable capability institution could be disrupted, and I think that there was a failure of imagination,\u201d Brose said. <\/p>\n

Brose added that the nation has been \u201csystematically failing\u201d at making necessary changes to project a stronger footing in the U.S.-China competition. He pointed to lessons from the Ukraine war and Operation Epic Fury, adding that Tehran has been evolving technologically and ramping up asymmetric capabilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re struggling right now with a regional power of Iran that isn\u2019t even close to what China would present to us,\u201d Brose said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re struggling to some extent because we haven\u2019t necessarily learned our own lessons of Ukraine and other recent events.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anduril recently opened<\/a> a new 5-million-square-foot facility in Columbus, Ohio, where the company produces a range of munitions destined for the U.S. military. <\/p>\n

Brose pointed to the new facility as evidence of Anduril meeting the military\u2019s demands \u2014 under one roof \u2014 for mass produced, quickly built weapons that cost a fraction of a munition like a PAC-3 interceptor or Tomahawk missile.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point is not that the government should stop buying the exquisite weapons and instead just buy ours,\u201d Brose said. \u201cIt\u2019s that if all you have in a fight is a Tomahawk, that\u2019s all you\u2019re going to use, which is why in the first opening weeks of Epic Fury, we shot eight to 10 years of Tomahawk production in a few weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brose added that once the military puts significant dents in stockpiles of munitions that are \u201cartisanally built and incredibly expensive,\u201d it can take years to replenish that production capacity. <\/p>\n

He said that Anduril is instead building systems that can be completed by workers with minimal training and simple tools, much like how the country built weapons during World War II.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was Rosie the Riveter, not like Martha, the master welder, who took 14 years to become proficient at every craft,\u201d Brose said, noting that to quickly build at scale, the nation has to take advantage of the country\u2019s industrial workforce.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a whole different approach to the manufacturing philosophy, and it enables you to scale 10x [or] 20x to get to that order of magnitude … that I think we\u2019re going to need to be able to be relevant in these protracted conflicts,\u201d Brose said.<\/p>\n

America, Brose added, has been too concerned with creating perfect technology, making the process long and failures unacceptable. <\/p>\n

He highlighted the belief of how certain older systems, like the Tomahawk and Patriot, have given the country military advantage for a generation, but the nation needs to be constantly producing, testing and learning from mistakes.<\/p>\n

With the Ukraine war, Brose said that there\u2019s no piece of technology that jumps out at him. Instead, it is the cycle of innovation and rebuilding at scale.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look at the opening days of Epic Fury, obviously the United States and Israel have inflicted an enormous amount of damage on Iranian leadership, government, military, industrial base, but Iran\u2019s still in the fight,\u201d Brose said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re still in the fight because they\u2019re using a lot of these asymmetric capabilities, low-cost drones, different types of systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cristina Stassis is a reporter covering stories surrounding the defense industry, national security, military\/veteran affairs and more. She previously worked as an editorial fellow for Defense News in 2024 where she assisted the newsroom in breaking news across Sightline Media Group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U.S. needs to ramp up focus on building a variety of cheaper weapons systems at scale to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1637,1640,1638,946,660,1644,1639,1643,1645,1642,26,939,1641],"class_list":["post-3219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-anduril","tag-china-competition","tag-christian-brose","tag-circulated-c4isrnet","tag-circulated-defense-news","tag-circulated-military-times","tag-epic-fury","tag-mass-production","tag-military-times","tag-tomahawk","tag-ukraine","tag-unmanned","tag-weapons-systems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}