In three years Ukraine went from about ten drone manufacturers to roughly five hundred, with state grants flowing not through procurement bureaucracies but through a public marketplace.
Ukrainian FPV production went from a few thousand units in 2022 to more than two million in 2024, four million in 2025, and a stated target of seven million for 2026. By the start of 2026, ninety-five per cent of the drones Ukrainian forces fly were made at home.
The institutional engine behind this growth is Brave1, the government defence-tech cluster launched in April of 2023. By late 2025 it had connected over fifteen hundred defence companies, awarded more than five hundred grants totalling roughly fifty million dollars, and stood up a "Brave1 Market" through which frontline units order directly from certified manufacturers. The state's parallel programme — Army of Drones — adds a gamified bonus system that pays units for video-confirmed kills.
For a reader who has lived through the procurement reform debates of the last two decades, the architecture is the surprise. Grants flow in weeks, not years. Frontline units file feedback through Telegram. A unit can order what it wants from a public catalogue. Cottage workshops run alongside large state contractors. The whole apparatus runs, in effect, as a parallel procurement system — gamified, market-driven, agile — alongside the slow traditional one.
It is the most consequential operating-model innovation in defence since DARPA. Whether NATO bureaucracies can adopt it is a question Sheet XIV returns to.
Two-and-a-half years from a few thousand units to four million. The 2026 bar is the projection on which the seven-million-unit budget rests.