The Ukrainian Drone Temptation Meets the Generating Force’s Clock

The Operating Force—the units that deploy and fight—has demonstrated it can adapt at the speed of technology. In recent operations against Iran, U.S. forces used AI-enabled targeting tools such as the Maven Smart System, fused with large language models, to compress the kill chain from identification through weaponeering and draft legal review into a matter of clicks. Strike tempos reached thousands of targets in the opening phases of Operation Epic Fury. Operators iterated tactics in real time. That is the Operating Force at work: mission-focused, willing to accept calculated risk under commander’s intent, and responsive to the fight.

The Generating Force is organized for an entirely different purpose. It mans, trains, equips, sustains, and institutionalizes under Title 10 of the United States Code. Its product is not a successful tactical operation; it is a weapon system certified as safe, suitable, and supportable that can be issued at scale, trained to standard across the active and reserve components, maintained for years, and employed under peacetime safety and legal standards. For a new kinetic munition or explosive-carrying drone, Full Materiel Release is the formal gate. The path runs through an interlocking set of independent reviews whose cumulative effect is measured in years, not months.

Safety and environmental qualification alone demand system safety risk assessments, health hazard assessments, explosive ordnance disposal supportability statements, environmental documentation, and Hazards of Electromagnetic Radiation to Ordnance certification. Residual risks require formal acceptance at the appropriate level. Fuze and safe-and-arm designs face the Army Fuze Safety Review Board, an independent panel of technical experts applying MIL-STD-1316 and joint guidelines such as JOTP-052. Sequential environmental testing, mechanical abuse tests, performance verification, and electromagnetic environmental effects evaluations are baseline standards. Joint processes involving the Navy’s Weapon System Explosives Safety Review Board add further layers when multi-service use is contemplated. These requirements exist for good reasons—munitions that function in one environment can fail catastrophically in another—but they are executed through sequential, documentation-heavy processes that treat every new energetic or arming concept as a potential novelty requiring exhaustive re-validation.

Airworthiness for drone-delivered systems triggers Army Regulation 70-62 criteria and Aviation Engineering Directorate assessments. Systems that rely on GPS for navigation or terminal guidance must also meet Department of Defense mandates for M-Code military GPS receivers to ensure anti-jam and anti-spoof resilience in contested electromagnetic environments—requirements that the commercial or battlefield-expedient receivers common to Ukrainian designs almost never satisfy without hardware and software redesign, additional testing, and recertification. Operator qualification and currency for weapons release go well beyond civilian remote pilot standards and must be institutionalized in training pipelines. Logistical supportability requires transportability approvals, explosives-compatible packaging, supply-chain validation (complicated by restrictions on certain foreign components), technical manuals, training devices, and demilitarization planning. The Joint Technical Coordinating Group for Munitions Effectiveness (JTCG/ME) must eventually incorporate empirical data into standardized weaponeering tools and Joint Munitions Effectiveness Manuals so the system can be planned against by the joint force. Without that data it remains outside the formal targeting enterprise. Legal review under the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), governed by Army Regulation 27-53 and DoD policy, examines whether the weapon is calculated to cause superfluous injury, is inherently indiscriminate, or falls into any prohibited category. Doctrinal integration—updates to field manuals, tactics, techniques and procedures, and force structure—follows.

For systems incorporating autonomy or AI assistance—for targeting, terminal guidance, or engagement decisions—the required legal and technical analysis grows substantially more complex. Determining whether a Ukrainian design is “semi-autonomous” or crosses into fully “autonomous” territory is ambiguous and fact-intensive. That classification alone triggers senior-level DoDD 3000.09 reviews before development and fielding, involving the Under Secretaries for Policy, Research and Engineering, and Acquisition and Sustainment, alongside the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Even for semi-autonomous systems, reviewers must verify human-machine transparency, rigorous verification-and-validation testing, and compliance with the Department’s AI ethical principles. Because Ukrainian systems are iterated rapidly in combat using commercial sensors, open-source software, and informal documentation, reconstructing the required evidence trail routinely adds months or years to an already protracted Full Materiel Release—eroding the system's relevance before institutional certification is complete.

System software safety certification further compounds the delay. U.S. airworthiness and autonomous-system standards require independent review of safety-critical source code to verify logic, assess cyber vulnerabilities, and prevent unintended engagements. Ukrainian designs—built under wartime urgency with commercial components, open-source libraries, and continuous field modifications—rarely arrive with complete or accessible source code. Without it, independent verification is impossible, forcing programs to either reverse-engineer the code or rewrite it entirely to U.S. standards. Both paths trigger extensive redesign, retesting, and recertification, guaranteeing the original combat-proven software configuration is obsolete by the time release is granted.

Specialized acquisition pathways like Middle Tier Acquisition (MTA) or Urgent Operational Needs (UON) may successfully accelerate the front end of this equation—expediting requirements definition and prototyping authority. But they do not waive or compress the underlying safety, airworthiness, legal, and supportability certifications required for a formal Materiel Release. They allow the Operating Force to sample a solution faster but leave the Generating Force facing the exact same sequential wall when trying to convert that capability into a scalable, sustainable system.

Each element of the Materiel Release process has its own functional authority that must sign or concur. Shortfalls produce “get-well plans.” Conditional or urgent Materiel Releases can accelerate limited issue, but Full Materiel Release for broad, sustained use remains the institutional gold standard. Recent reforms that shift decision authority to Portfolio Acquisition Executives and introduce a more risk-informed requirements library are genuine attempts to reduce pure administrative burden. They do not, however, eliminate the underlying technical work or the cultural posture that treats every deviation from legacy processes as a threat to be managed rather than an opportunity to be accelerated.

Here is the core problem. Ukrainian FPV and loitering systems evolve on timelines measured in weeks and months under the pressure of survival. Commercial components are swapped, software is updated in the field, and production lines retool continuously. By the time a specific Ukrainian design completes U.S. fuze qualification, full safety and environmental boards, airworthiness releases, operator training pipelines, logistical certification, LOAC review, JTCG/ME data integration, and doctrinal absorption under traditional Full Materiel Release processes, the original system is already two or three generations obsolete. The capability that excited observers in 2025 or 2026 arrives, if it arrives at all, as a historical artifact. The Generating Force’s archaic sequentialism, combined with a culture that defaults to resistance against anything that does not fit established templates, effectively negates the relevance of the very systems the Operating Force is watching succeed in real time.

This is not an argument that safety, legality, or supportability should be discarded. It is an argument that the current combination of process rigidity and cultural inertia has become a strategic liability. The Operating Force can experiment and adapt. The Generating Force, charged with turning experiments into institutional capability, still operates on industrial-age tempos and risk postures that treat speed itself as suspect. To close the gap, the Generating Force must deliberately adapt and institutionalize modern tools that compress timelines without sacrificing rigor: AI-powered analysis engines capable of rapidly parsing test reports, standards, and safety data; model-based systems engineering and digital twins that enable high-fidelity comparative modeling against already-qualified systems; advanced modeling-and-simulation suites that substitute or dramatically reduce physical testing for airworthiness, fuze performance, and software behaviors; and formal methods or large-language-model-assisted static analysis that can partially reconstruct or verify critical software logic even when complete source code is unavailable. Concrete precedents already exist—Army digital twins of ammunition production lines that identify bottlenecks and forecast throughput in hours rather than months, AI prototypes that turn multi-week Acquisition Requirements Packages into hours or minutes of work, digital airworthiness frameworks that leverage computational fluid dynamics and integrated simulation to accelerate weapon-store integration, and emerging AI-in-Model-Based-Systems Engineering tools that automatically extract and map safety requirements from military standards and test reports. These approaches must be forced into routine use through updated reference libraries, mandatory workforce training, and performance metrics that reward rapid yet defensible risk acceptance rather than sequential perfection. Only then can the Generating Force equip the Operating Force at a pace that preserves both technological relevance and operational relevance, so that combat-proven Ukrainian systems—or their American derivatives—reach units while the threat they were designed to counter is still the same one on the battlefield. Until that cultural and procedural mismatch is confronted directly, the excitement over Ukrainian drone technology will continue to produce headlines and pilot purchases while the mass of the force waits for a Full Materiel Release that arrives too late to matter.

Stephen D. Cook is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. A combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor, he is the author of the field manuals When We’re Finished and Choose the Heavier Ruck, and the techno-thriller precision-strike trilogy leading with In the Shadows of the Sky. His work explores the intersection of elite military decision-making, intuition, and disruptive leadership. He is based in St. Augustine, Florida.

image: U.S. Soldiers from various units across Europe use a drone to check visibility before launching a Switchblade 600 during Loitering Munitions Training at the Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, Nov. 5, 2024. This was the first time U.S. Soldiers launched Switchblade 600s, a loitering munition system, in Europe. (U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Cody Nelson)