Editor's note: this story was translated from the original VOA Ukrainian article.
For the first time ever, the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington hosted the Ukrainian Defense Tech Pavilion. Organized by Fenicks Group, the pavilion brought together 17 Ukrainian companies to showcase their aerial and ground drones, and their communications systems.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine rapidly expanded its drone production and made technical innovations to adapt its Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) to the demands of modern warfare.
The president of North Carolina-based Fenicks Group, Enrique Herrera, said, “The Ukrainian technologies that the United States is really looking for, that we're trying to bring from Ukraine to the United States, is the counter-UAS systems, the unmanned ground systems ... the one-way attack systems.”
One of the pavilion participants, Tencore, a Ukrainian producer of ground drones, known for their evacuation missions at the frontline in Ukraine, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Canadian defense firm Dominion Dynamics during the AUSA conference.
The partnership is part of a larger defense cooperation deal that will include the manufacture of thousands of battle-tested drones and uncrewed systems in the next two years, with one-third earmarked for Ukraine's defense, according to a statement from the two companies.
In his remarks at the AUSA, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth acknowledged that the U.S. has learned a lot from Ukraine, though he noted that Ukraine’s vulnerability is its reliance on Chinese parts.
"We've learned a lot from Ukraine, but you can't use everything that's in Ukraine because of all the Chinese components involved in it," Hegseth said. "So, you've got to be able to ensure that we take the best of that and the lessons learned."
The United States, Ukraine and the EU, are among the countries limiting reliance on Chinese components in defense production. President Donald Trump signed an order in July making it harder to for U.S. weapons producers to purchase supplies from China.
Michael C. Horowitz, senior fellow for technology and innovation program at the Council on Foreign Relations, told VOA that Ukraine still must rely on Chinese components to defend itself. “Very often what is available and cheap are the Chinese components. He remarked that ensuring independence from China is “absolutely existential from the point of view of cybersecurity.”
The Pentagon has noted Ukraine’s progress in limiting purchases of components from China. “Most of the drone companies that you would go to see in Ukraine have brought their supply chains onshore,” said Travis Metz, recently promoted to acting director of the Defense Innovation Unit, told the podcast School of War in September.
Several Ukrainian companies have participated in the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance competition, which is aimed at purchasing small lethal drones and creating a U.S. industrial capability to produce such drones at scale. A Ukrainian company was selected to build a facility in Ohio.
Still, Derek Berlin of the New York-based Palisade Bergschrund company says cooperation could be moving faster, but says “Ukraine is fighting an active conflict, and it's very hard to focus on international markets when you're fighting for your survival. Ukraine would be much better able to share its technologies internationally if we were able to bring peace about in a lasting way for Ukraine,” he told the VOA at the AUSA conference.
Berlin says other factors impeding Ukraine’s access to U.S. markets include Ukraine’s complex export system, especially for intellectual property, and a complicated U.S. procurement program. “The companies that have been working in this market for 50, 100 years — even for some of the defense companies — still need to hire teams of people to figure out how to productively do procurement in the United States.”