Ukraine now makes more drones than any democracy in the world, and wealthy nations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East are lining up to buy them. But when I asked the CEO of Rheinmetall what that could mean for his business model, he bristled. “Who is the biggest drone producer in Ukraine?” Papperger demanded. I listed the ones that I had visited in Kyiv two weeks earlier, Fire Point and Skyfall, which make hundreds of thousands of drones a month for the Ukrainian armed forces. “It’s Ukrainian housewives,” Papperger said of their factories. “They have 3-D printers in the kitchen, and they produce parts for drones,” he said. “This is not innovation.”

As one of the biggest gunsmiths in the world, Papperger knows a lot about the state of the art in defense. His empire encompasses 180 factories (including eight in the United States) producing not only tanks and artillery but warships, missiles, high-end drones, anti-aircraft batteries, and fuselages for fighter jets such as the F-35. The company that he leads plays such an outsize role in the defense of NATO and Ukraine that the Russians put Papperger on a target list for assassination in 2024.

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Most drones are too cheap to move the needle toward NATO’s gargantuan spending targets.

Among the few exceptions is the $20 billion contract that the Pentagon signed this month with Anduril, an American defense-technology company founded in 2017. That amount of money “could probably buy all the drones Ukraine produces,” Oleksandr Kamyshin, the official who oversees Ukraine’s weapons industry, told me. But as a general rule, Western militaries tend to give the biggest contracts to established manufacturers.

With the start of the war in Iran, Rheinmetall told investors that it expects sales to grow this year by at least 40 percent. Its market value now stands at roughly $80 billion, far higher than Germany’s biggest carmakers, including Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz. Last month, the company was already in talks to sell weapons worth 80 billion euros, adding to a backlog of orders that is expected to top 135 billion euros by the end of 2026. “This would be the highest order intake ever,” Papperger said. “But everybody knows that this is not enough. We need at the end of the day 400, 500, or more—600 billion!”