Ukraine's defense industry is urging the West to abandon its longtime fixation on high-end, expensive weaponry in favor of cheaper, mass-produced arms, the kind needed to survive and win a grinding war of attrition against an adversary like Russia.

Serhiy Goncharov, the CEO of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries — which represents about 100 Ukrainian companies — told that the West's long-standing focus on fielding limited numbers of cutting-edge systems could be a serious disadvantage in a protracted conflict. Those systems are good to have, but mass is key.

The war in Ukraine shows that instead of a handful of ultraprecise, expensive weapons, countries need a massive supply of good enough firepower, Goncharov said.

He said the expensive weapons such as the US military's M982 Excalibur guided munition (each shell costs $100,000) "don't work" when the other side has electronic warfare systems and the kind of traditional artillery rounds that are 30 times cheaper in tremendous supply.

Goncharov pointed to the M107, a self-propelled gun that was first fielded by the US in the 1960s, as an example of inexpensive firepower that can be effective in large numbers.

"You don't need 10 Archers from the Swedish that are probably one of the best artillery systems in the world," he said, referring to the artillery system made by BAE Systems that was given to Ukraine by Sweden. Instead, you need 200 cheap howitzers, such as the Bohdana one that Ukraine makes.

The significant rate of ammo and equipment attrition in a fight such as this means a constant supply of weaponry is needed to keep fighting, especially when there isn't any guarantee the high-end weapons will be the game changers promised.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been marked by extensive use of artillery and tremendous ammunition expenditure. The war in some ways resembles the huge, destructive battles of World War I and World War II, with high numbers of injuries and deaths and substantial equipment losses.

Russia has one of the world's largest militaries, backed by a large population. The country has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to pursue an attritional style of warfare, committing a lot of troops and weaponry to a fight to slowly wear down its foe.

Russia's invasion has chewed through equipment. The UK Ministry of Defense said in December that Russia had lost more than 3,600 main battle tanks and almost 8,000 armored vehicles since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.

The Russians have the mass to absorb those losses. Ukraine has struggled with weapon and ammo shortages, as well as deficiencies in manpower. Ukraine turned to small, cheap drones as an asymmetric warfare alternative; Russia has employed uncrewed systems in battle as well.

China, another concern in the West, has built a similar kind of force, one with the mass to take losses.

The West, on the other hand, has spent the past two decades and change fighting lower-level adversaries where its forces can win the day with superior capabilities.

Goncharov's warning is one that has been echoed by other Western defense officials and companies.

Countries have been keen to learn lessons about fighting Russia from the conflict in Ukraine, particularly in Europe, where many countries warn Russia could pursue further aggression in the future, and defense spending is growing rapidly.

Gabrielius Landsbergis, the former defense minister of Lithuania, a NATO ally bordering Russia, previously described the war as one of "high quantities."

He said that while the West had largely focused on new and expensive weaponry that takes a long time to manufacture, Russia had been "building something that's cheap, that's expendable, that's fast."

He said the West had "been preparing for a different kind of war" than what it would face in one against Russia, focusing on impressive equipment that is "very expensive.

Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defense minister, previously told BI that "one of the lessons" from Ukraine was that the West needed far greater quantities of inexpensive weaponry to meet the threats posed by Russia and China.

The head of NATO, Mark Rutte, urged countries to take similar learnings earlier this year, saying the alliance was too slow at developing weapons. He said the alliance was working toward perfect, "but it doesn't have to be perfect."

He said Ukraine would go ahead with equipment that was a "6 to 7" out of 10, while NATO militaries insisted on reaching "9 or 10."

He said it wasn't about getting rid of the expensive weaponry completely but about finding a balance: It's about "getting speed and enough quality done in the right conjunction."

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow and the director of research in the foreign-policy program at the Brookings Institution, said the West's approach needed to change. The American military, for instance, is far more used to wars where "the whole point is you're not going to be slogging it out for months and years on end," he said.

But he also said that didn't mean the West needed to completely abandon the development of advanced systems. "Those things have not become unimportant just because we realized that other things are also important," he said.

The UK's armed forces minister also warned last month that the war showed the West needs to change how it procures weaponry. Luke Pollard said Ukraine's fight showed NATO "the way we have run our militaries, the way we have run our defense, is outdated."

He said NATO militaries "build and procure really expensive high-end bits of kit," adding: "It will take you five, 10 years: five years to run a procurement challenge, another 10 years to build it."

Kuldar Väärsi, the CEO of Milrem Robotics, an autonomous uncrewed ground vehicle company in the NATO ally Estonia, told BI in May that "we need to learn from Ukraine, and we need to get more pragmatic about what kind of equipment we buy."

He said Europe needed to learn that "having a hundred more simple pieces of equipment is better than having 10 very sophisticated pieces of equipment."

He said countries needed to start buying less sophisticated pieces of weaponry en masse so industry could adjust. "Industry has to manufacture what the customer is buying. And if the customer is still buying only a few very sophisticated items, then the industry just aligns with that," he said. And the reality is that may not work.

An acrid smell hangs over the town of Rodynske, Ukraine. A 250kg glide bomb has ripped through the town's main administrative building, and taken down three residential blocks...visiting a day after the bomb struck, but parts of the wreckage are still smoking. From the edges of the town we hear the sound of artillery fire, and of gunshots – Ukrainian soldiers shooting down drones.

Rodynske is about 15km (9 miles) north of the embattled city of Pokrovsk. Russia has been trying to capture it from the south since the autumn of last year, but Ukrainian forces have so far managed to stop Russian soldiers from marching in.

So Russia has changed tactics, moving instead to encircle the city, cutting off supply routes.

In the past two weeks, as hectic diplomatic efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine have failed, Russia has intensified its push, making its most significant advances since January.

You can find proof of that in Rodynske.

Within minutes of arriving in town, you can hear a Russian drone above us. Our team runs to the closest cover available – a tree.

We press up against it so the drone won't see us. Then there's the sound of a loud explosion – it's a second drone making impact nearby. The drone above us is still hovering. For a few more minutes, we hear the terrifying whirring sound of what's become the deadliest weapon of this war.

When we can't hear it any more we take the chance to run to hard cover in an abandoned building 100ft away.

From the shelter, we hear the drone again. It's possible it returned after seeing our movement.

That Rodynske is being swarmed by Russian drones is evidence that the attacks are coming from positions much closer than known Russian positions to the south of Pokrovsk. They were most likely coming from newly captured territory on a key road running from the east of Pokrovsk to Kostyantynivka.

After half an hour of waiting in the shelter, when we can't hear the drone anymore, we move quickly to our car parked under tree cover, and speed out of Rodynske. By the side of the highway we see smoke billowing and something burning – it's most likely a downed drone.

We drive to Bilytske, further away from the frontline. We see a row of houses destroyed by a missile strike overnight. One of them was Svitlana's home.

"It's getting worse and worse. Earlier, we could hear distant explosions, they were far away. But now our town is getting targeted – we're experiencing it ourselves," says the 61-year-old, as she picks up a few belongings from the wreckage of her home. Luckily Svitlana wasn't at home when the attack occurred.

"Go into the centre of the town, you'll see so much that is destroyed there. And the bakery and zoo have been destroyed too," she says.

At a safehouse just out of reach of drones, we meet soldiers of the artillery unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.

"You can feel the intensity of Russian assaults increasing. Rockets, mortars, drones, they're using everything they have to cut off supply routes going into the city," says Serhii.

His unit has been waiting for three days to deploy to their positions, waiting for cloud cover or high-speed winds to give them protection from drones.

In an ever-evolving conflict, soldiers have had to rapidly adapt to new threats posed by changing technology. And the latest threat comes from fibre optic drones. A spool of tens of kilometres of cable is fitted to the bottom of a drone and the physical fibre optic cord is attached to the controller held by the pilot.

"The video and control signal is transmitted to and from the drone through the cable, not through radio frequencies. This means it can't be jammed by electronic interceptors," says a soldier with the call sign Moderator, a drone engineer with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.

When drones began to be used in this war in a big way, both militaries fitted their vehicles with electronic warfare systems, which could neutralise drones. That protection has evaporated with the arrival of fibre optic drones, and in the deployment of these devices, Russia currently has the edge. Ukraine is trying to ramp up production.

"Russia started using fibre optic drones much before us, while we were still testing them. These drones can be used in places where we have to go lower than usual drones. We can even enter houses and look for targets inside," says Venia, a drone pilot with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.

"We've started joking that maybe we should carry scissors to cut the cord," says Serhii, the artillery man.

Fibre optic drones do have drawbacks – they are slower and the cable could get entangled in trees. But at the moment, their widespread use by Russia means that transporting soldiers to and from their positions can often be deadlier than the battlefield itself.

"When you enter a position, you don't know whether you've been spotted or not. And if you have been spotted, then you may already be living the last hours of your life," says Oles, Chief Sergeant of the reconnaissance unit of the 5th Assault Brigade.

This threat means that soldiers are spending longer and longer in their positions.

Oles and his men are in the infantry, serving in the trenches right at the very front of Ukraine's defence. It's rare for journalists these days to speak to infantrymen, as it's become too risky to go to these trenches. We meet Oles and Maksym in a rural home converted into a makeshift base, where the soldiers come to rest when they're not on deployment.

"The longest I spent at the position was 31 days, but I do know guys who have spent 90 and even 120 days there. Back before the drones arrived, the rotations could have been between 3 or 7 days at the position," says Maksym.

"War is blood, death, wet mud and a chill that spreads from head to toe. And this is how you spend every day. I remember one instance when we didn't sleep for three days, alert every minute. The Russians kept coming at us wave after wave. Even a minor lapse would have meant we were dead."
Oles says Russia's infantry has changed its tactics. "Earlier they attacked in groups. Now they only send one or two people at times. They also use motorcycles and in a few instances, quad bikes. Sometimes they slip through."

What this means is that the front lines in some parts are no longer conventional lines with the Ukrainians on one side and the Russians on the other, but more like pieces on a chessboard during play, where positions can be intertwined.

This also makes it harder to see advances made by either side.

Despite Russia's recent gains, it will not be quick or easy for it to take the whole of the Donetsk region, where Pokrovsk lies.

Ukraine has pushed back hard, but it needs a steady supply of weapons and ammunition to sustain the fight.

And as the war enters a fourth summer, Ukraine's manpower issues against a much bigger Russian army are also evident. Most of the soldiers we meet joined the military after the war began. They've had a few months of training, but have had to learn a lot on the job in the middle of a raging war.
Maksym worked for a drinks company before he joined the military. I asked how his family copes with his job.

"It's hard, it's really hard. My family really supports me. But I have a two-year-old son, and I don't get to see him much. I do video call him though, so everything is as fine as it could be under the circumstances," he trails off, eyes welling up with tears.

Maksym is a soldier fighting for his country, but he's also just a father missing his two-year-old boy.