Paul Schwennesen and Olena Kryzhanivska
“Yes, we build them ourselves. We have no other choice.” Three of us—all American veterans—stood spellbound inside a repurposed potato shed as an elite Ukrainian drone team explained how they hand-make their own explosive payloads for the drones that have been instrumental in forcing the Russian war machine into a grinding slog.
A lanky soldier with dirty fatigues and a curled mustachio grins and explains: “We usually take apart Soviet antitank mines and boil out the explosives. We 3D print our own casings, fill them with explosive charges and shrapnel, then arm them with our own handmade detonators.” He lightheartedly tosses a brick of raw explosive our direction. We cringe and shake our heads.
As American warfighters, we’ve been brought up within a culture of war that views combat operations through a combined arms lens that leans heavily on air supremacy and a logistics system of unparalleled proportions. The idea of frontline units literally building their own weapons is as foreign to us as Cyrillic.
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