On September 1, former Ukrainian defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced that Alex Karp, CEO of artificial intelligence and data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, would become the lead investor in a new defence technology company he is building. This confirmed what Fedorov had only gestured at two days earlier in an interview with the Financial Times: that what he was selling investors was never really drones. In that interview, he also suggested he was ready to trade drone-warfare know-how for Patriot interceptors to get Ukraine through winter, essentially exchanging battlefield knowledge for one of the world’s most sophisticated air-defence weapons.
Six weeks before Karp’s name entered the picture, Fedorov had been Ukraine’s youngest-ever minister. The day after his July dismissal, Italy’s defence minister invited him to Rome as an adviser. Karp, whose firm is worth US$440 billion, reportedly soon called him to discuss working together. Neither was calling for Ukrainian hardware. What they presumably wanted was harder to manufacture: what Fedorov had learned running the system that produced that hardware.
That system was a loop: battlefield, failure, feedback, redesign, test, back to the battlefield. Brave1, the defence-tech cluster that was essentially Fedorov’s brainchild, is known for fast procurement – more than 500 grants in two years, prototypes certified in weeks. However, speed alone wasn’t the asset. Rather, the asset was the rapid feedback loop of real-world experience, which included soldiers dying when a tactic failed.
Military theorist John Boyd argued that combat is won by whoever cycles through observing, orienting, deciding and acting faster than the enemy can adapt. Ukraine didn’t just build weapons faster, it closed the loop between failure and correction faster than Russia could exploit the failure.
Covid-19 exposed a civilian version of the same mechanism: emergency conditions compressed vaccine development from years to months by running trials, manufacturing and regulatory review in parallel because immediate human costs were moving faster than ordinary institutions could tolerate.
In Ukraine, that loop was hard to contain within a conventional chain of command. An organisation built for rapid experimentation and discretionary procurement can collide with institutions built for command and accountability, even in a country fighting for survival.