When San Diego-based Shield AI employees arrived in Ukraine initially, their aircraft flew for an hour in the wrong direction. 

“We’re chasing this thing over highways and through cornfields,” said Ryan Tseng, the company’s CEO, likening it to the scene from “Interstellar.” He shared the story during the recent Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium in Aurora. Tseng was among the experts on a panel discussing the lessons learned in Ukraine, where drones are responsible for 70% to 80% of the casualties, according to recent New York Times reporting. The aircraft themselves face intense electromagnetic defense aimed at disrupting their flight.   

The Shield AI drone took off in the wrong direction because the company engineers had been told they would have GPS up to 200 feet. But the drone lost GPS at 3 feet because the Ukrainians were jamming GPS signals to protect themselves, Tseng said. 

Once the problem was understood, he said, the company was able to develop software to fix the problem in 24 hours so the drone would not rely on GPS. 

“The idea of pushing software from nothing to combat operations in 24 hours is something that really breaks the way a lot of programs operate in the United States,” Tseng said. “We need to think about how we achieve that level of agility in software to be competitive in environments that might be similar to Ukraine.”

In a March 6 memo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth acknowledged that the slow acquisitions process for software is a problem and directed the military to use the Software Acquisition Pathway, which was set up during the first Trump administration to obtain software in a more expedited fashion.

“The Department of Defense has been slow to recognize that software-defined warfare is not a future construct, but the reality we find ourselves operating in today,” the memo said. 

A defense official said in a news release the acquisitions pathway will shorten the process to less than a year from allocation of funds to minimum viable product. 

When it comes to drones, better software could help keep far more of them on the battlefield, Tseng said, and help cut down on the number that need to be built. 

“You put the right software on these vehicles, your attrition rate can be cut by a factor of 10,” he said.

Investing in software can also help companies stand apart, Tseng said. 

“Those companies that disrupted the incumbents, were the ones that over invested in software compared to the hardware,” he said. 

The company said in a news release that during January it was training with Ukrainian forces to operate its V-BAT, a 9-foot-long surveillance drone that can take off and land vertically. It’s also opened an office in Kyiv. 

The high cost of purchasing drones for the U.S. military was also a point of discussion with panel moderator, retired Maj. Gen. Charles Corcoran, pointing out the Army plans to pay $260 million for 11,000 short-range reconnaissance drones. The drones are $20,000 each, Corcoran said, while Ukraine has manufactured similar drones for a fraction — 1/120th — of the price. 

Purchasing drones in higher volumes and lowering the overhead costs of production could help bring down costs, the experts said, in addition to diversifying the market. 

“I think that competitiveness will eventually drive down the cost,” said panel member Kyle Woo, counter-unmanned aerial systems program manager for Zone 5 Technologies.