🇺🇦 Industry at War: Field Notes from Ukraine
Ashwin Lalendran (US) and Thiemo Fetzer (Germany, UK) just returned from Ukraine.
The question was how a country under attack builds industrial capacity faster than the countries funding it.
Wartime secrecy hides the evidence of traction that investors and procurement offices use to make decisions. So the public picture of Ukrainian industry is wrong about which companies an allied arsenal depends on, and why.
The manufacturers that matter most do not look like those in America, Germany, or the UK.
Sixty minutes on what they heard from drone manufacturers, munitions producers, commanders back from the front, and diplomats:
Hardware. Integrating equipment and forces from a dozen countries on one battlefield.
Firms. The economics of Ukraine's defense-technology firms, and what a ceasefire does to them.
People. How manufacturers in a country at war train new workers and reorganize to keep shipping.
Capital. Why Western capital that wants to go in still cannot, and where the legal blockage sits.
Society. What a society at war looks like up close, including what it deliberately chooses not to display.
Ashwin Lalendran is co-founder of IndustriousAF, a nonprofit working on the workforce, institutions, and alliances of American and allied industrial renewal.
Thiemo Fetzer is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick and Bonn and a Fellow at CEPR.
System-level observations and commentary. No facility locations, production figures, or named individuals.
Some of what can be said depends on knowing who is in the room. Registration is reviewed, and will be confirmed by email.
11:30am San Francisco / 2:30pm Washington DC // 7:30pm London // 8:30pm Berlin / 9:30pm Kyiv
(Mural by Noyna and Gide1)