US Army leader in Europe wants industry to test equipment with Ukrainians

A top Army general in Europe told companies that if they want to get on contract, they need to be testing their gear with Ukraine.

“The other very first question I ask you is, have you asked the Ukrainians to test this yet? If the answer is no, I’ll say, why? Because that’s where you get into an environment where we actually know does it work or does it not,” Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, said Wednesday at an AUSA event. “It has to be able to adapt and integrate. It has to be cheap. The scale and the scope of this stuff, it has to be cheaper … In combat, as you all know, it changes every 60 or 90 days. Air, ground, water — we don’t care. It’s going to change the whole time. So how can you modify your platforms?”

The full-scale Ukraine-Russia war, which kicked off in 2022, has proved to be a global lesson for how future wars could be fought, with the U.S. and other nations — to include China, which reportedly hacked into Russian systems to gain insights — taking valuable observations. 

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has called Ukraine the Silicon Valley of warfare. 

The Army, maybe more so than any other service, has sought to transform based on observations in Ukraine to include large investments in commercial systems such as drones and counter-drone technology. The organization is trying to go commercial as much as possible, based largely on insights from the battlefield where technology and countermeasures change almost daily. 

The antiquated acquisition system of the past, geared more toward large platforms that take years to develop and field, is now considered by leadership as unsuitable. 

“We’ve seen this over the last couple of years that everybody talks about [Program Objective Memorandum] cycles and everybody talks about program of record. I think that’s just old thinking,” Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army, said earlier this month.

As such, Donahue said the Army also needs to change its contracting approach. 

“On our side, we have to be able to write contracts differently. This is one of Gen. George and Secretary Driscoll’s big efforts — is not only all the obvious stuff that I’m talking about, it’s also contracting. How do you … do all that?” he said. “You have to be able to change your contracts, turn on, turn them off, go to a different vendor, based off of which what you have to hang off the whatever the robot is, air, ground or sea.”

Donahue has extensive experience aiding Ukraine. Prior to his current role, he was the commander of XVIII Airborne Corps and was instrumental in the early days of the conflict helping Kyiv’s military with tactics and strategy.