Ukraine Military History Institute
The technologies deciding this war were not built for it
Asked what the United States is getting right, Ian Laffey starts with a list rather than a policy. When he looks at the war in Ukraine, he sees three critical pieces of technology, and two of them are American.
The first is the Chinese commercial electronic supply chain. He calls that one obvious, and moves on quickly.
The second is Starlink. Laffey is precise about what kind of thing it is: a US commercial business that exists because, in his phrase, a grandmother in the Philippines wants to watch YouTube on her iPad. His point is explicit. It is not military technology.
The third is AI and AI tools, and specifically how much they have accelerated and proliferated. He describes people using them for everything and calls that really impressive.
Look at the list as a whole. None of the three began as a weapons programme. The war is being decided, in his telling, by consumer components, a consumer internet service and general purpose software, all adapted at the front.
America's advantage is commercial depth, not defence spending
From that list Laffey draws a conclusion about where American strength actually sits. There is a lot that can be done in the US that is future forward, needs deep investment, and is commercial ultimately.
His example is the very large investment in power generation for AI. Those are investments that also matter a great deal for defence, even though defence is not why they are being made.
He then names a criticism he says a lot of people have made, and which he calls super on the nose. The push to re-industrialise critical industries may be too focused on defence and not focused enough on commercial use cases.
That is a distinctive position for someone in the defence business to take. The claim is not that the US should spend less on defence. It is that the source of advantage is big commercial businesses and the capital they can draw, and that a defence-first industrial policy risks building on the narrow part of the base.
Where the US falls short: building things it does not understand
The second half of his answer is the sharper half. The place the US is falling short, Laffey says, is building things it does not understand.
He spells out what that means. Builders do not understand what the systems are used for, or what they are useful for. He describes a follow the leader mentality: someone sees a system being employed in Ukraine, or existing somewhere, and wants to build it immediately, without understanding the context it came from.
He says he knows this from experience, and he is apologetic about it, because he has friends doing exactly this. But his verdict does not soften: it just does not make sense to build interceptors in the US.
The missing ingredient is repetitions, not hardware
His case against stateside interceptor building is a list of questions, and every one of them is about practice rather than engineering.
How do you get the reps in? How do you test the system? How will you ever teach people to employ it? How will you learn about layered air defence? Where are you going to practise any of it?
The argument is that an interceptor is not a finished product when it leaves the factory. It becomes useful only inside a system of operators, testing and doctrine that is built through repetition against real threats. A team working far from those threats cannot generate that.
Jet powered drones show how fast the target moves
Laffey ties this to what he calls a big news story that everybody knows: jet powered drones.
He describes people building interceptors that are not going to be useful at all, because they are simply too far behind. The threat has moved and the design has not.
Then he makes the more important point. Even if the physical device did catch up, you would still need the ability to employ it. A fast enough interceptor in the hands of a crew that has never trained against the target is still not air defence.
That is why he says it almost does not make sense to build the systems this way at all. The hardware can be overtaken by the threat, and the employment skill was never there to begin with.
His prescription: be there, or supply there
The conclusion follows directly. You need to be in Ukraine, or you need to be supplying into Ukraine, so that you get the feedback.
The final line of his argument is the one worth keeping: it does not make sense to stockpile those things in a vacuum.
Taken together with the first half of his answer, the logic holds. The technologies he ranks highest in this war are commercial products in everyday use. Laffey's complaint about American interceptor building is that it skips the use. A stockpile built without feedback is a guess about a threat that will have changed by the time the stock is needed.
He is also candid about his limits. This is his view from experience and from friends in the industry, not a survey of every programme, and he says outright that the question is a hard one.
What to watch
- Whether US-built interceptors are tested in Ukraine before volume production. Laffey's argument predicts that systems developed without front feedback will be overtaken by the threat, jet powered drones in particular.
- Where US re-industrialisation money lands. He flags the risk that it leans toward defence rather than commercial use cases. The split in new industrial funding is checkable.
- Whether AI power generation investment is counted as defence capacity. He treats it as important for defence already. Watch whether defence planning starts saying the same.