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© Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images


© Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images


A Ukrainian jamming-systems maker went to a US Army base to do to candidate drones what Russia does to Ukraine's: flood them with electronic warfare (EW) and see which survives. Unwave company has tested four of its EW systems at Fort Carson in Colorado as part of the Pentagon's Drone Dominance program and has been asked to continue supporting it.
The Pentagon is using Drone Dominance to choose the drones it will buy at scale, more than 200,000 by 2027, and it needs to know they work under jamming, the condition that decides most drone fights in Ukraine.
So it brought in a Ukrainian electronic-warfare maker to supply that jamming, turning Ukraine's hard-won counter-drone experience into the test bench for American hardware. It follows a pattern in which US defense efforts adopt Ukrainian battlefield models.
Ukraine brings the jamming
From 24 August to 2 September, Unwave's team worked at the base, running scenarios that pitted its jammers against drones tasked with protecting fixed positions, moving vehicles, and infrastructure.
The crews operated from three separate positionsat short and long range to compare how drones from different manufacturers held up.
"Our mission was to create conditions as close to the real battlefield as possible," the company said, adding that it judged the tasks successfully completed but could not detail the scenarios for security reasons.
In all, 14 drone makers and three electronic-warfare firms took part.
Four systems on show
Unwave brought four:
Its participation was organized by Revenant Technologies, a US firm that specializes in bringing combat-proven defense tech to the American market, and helped design the scenarios using its ties to Ukraine and frontline experience.
A foothold in the US market
For Unwave, the value is a door into the alliance's security architecture. The event showed the importance of Ukrainian, American, and European specialists testing together, the company said, and "such interaction will help integrate Ukrainian technologies into the security architecture of our allies."