Ukraine Is Kicking the Sh!t Out of Everybody — It's a Profit Opportunity

A 3,500-strong American armored brigade went up against a few dozen guys with joysticks in Germany this spring.

The joysticks won.

According to a Wall Street Journal report that surfaced this week, Ukraine’s 412th “Nemesis” Regiment took part in NATO’s Combined Resolve exercises and picked apart a Texas-based U.S. armored brigade so thoroughly that exercise officials had to keep “regenerating” American vehicles just to keep the drill running.

That’s not a euphemism.

It means the brigade got wiped out, reset, and wiped out again.

And this wasn’t the first time, either.

Back in May, Ukrainian FPV drone pilots played the opposing force in NATO’s Aurora 2026 exercise on Sweden’s Gotland island.

They overwhelmed Swedish Army units so badly the drills had to be halted three separate times.

“If this were real life, they would already be dead,” One 24-year-old Ukrainian pilot said of the Swedish troops, according to Euromaidan Press.

Sweden’s own chief of defense, General Michael Claesson, didn’t argue with him.

“The fastest way to learn is to listen to the Ukrainians,” he said.

The tactics are almost embarrassingly simple. Recon drones track a vehicle by following the dust cloud it kicks up… Bomber and kamikaze drones follow to finish the job… A hovering drone or a close pass counts as a kill.

No tank. No armor plating. No billion-dollar procurement program stops that math.

America’s Response

The U.S. isn’t just watching this from the sidelines.

It’s six months into a live shooting war with Iran, and at least 18 American service members have been killed so far — more than half of them by drones or missiles, according to CENTCOM.

That’s why, on August 13, U.S. Central Command stood up Task Force Falcon Strike — its first-ever multinational attack drone unit.

The task force will fly LUCAS drones, a low-cost attack system the Pentagon reverse-engineered from captured Iranian hardware.

It’ll also deploy Saronic’s Corsair unmanned surface vessels — the same autonomous boats that hit an Iranian naval base back in July.

“Integrating and deploying our new capabilities together will help us rapidly realize new possibilities,” said Admiral Brad Cooper, who’s leading the effort out of Special Operations Command Central.

Translation: The Pentagon just admitted, in public, that it needs a dedicated command structure to fight the kind of war Ukraine has been fighting for four years.

The FY2027 defense budget backs that up with cash.

$53.6 billion earmarked for what the Pentagon calls “drone dominance.”

Another $20.6 billion for counter-drone systems — a 424% jump from FY2026.

Add it up and you get a roughly $74 billion pool of money chasing unmanned systems, all in a single budget cycle.

And yet the public companies best positioned to catch that money are, right now, some of the cheapest they’ve been in over a year.

AeroVironment (NASDAQ: AVAV) is down 43% year to date even after posting 133% revenue growth last quarter.

Kratos Defense (NASDAQ: KTOS) is down 41% from its January high despite a 1.6-to-1 book-to-bill ratio — meaning it’s booking new orders faster than it can fill them.

Red Cat Holdings (NASDAQ: RCAT), whose Black Widow drone just won an Army reconnaissance contract, grew revenue 849% year over year and is still down 30% on the month.

That’s not a sector in decline.

That’s a sector where the fundamentals and the stock charts are telling two completely different stories.

I know because I’ve spent 20 years tracking exactly this kind of gap — where government spending and classified technology quietly reshape an entire industry before Wall Street catches on.

It’s the whole thesis behind my own research service, Secret Stock Files, where I track the pipeline of defense technology moving from the black budget into public markets.

Drone warfare is the clearest example of that pipeline I’ve seen in years, and I’ve got specific names lined up that go well beyond the three tickers above.

But that’s not all.

I’ve also got the inside scoop on a little-known photonics play that’s enabling the Pentagon’s rapidly proliferating quantum computing initiatives. 

Make no mistake, Washington is building the budget, the programs, and the doctrine to catch up to bleeding-edge tech.

The only question left is whether your portfolio catches up with it too.