By: Dawn Zoldi
Drones on the battlefield have already changed the game for aerial combat. Now, a consortium of American defense technology companies hope to change the game for the Department of War by replacing traditional artillery with fiber-optic-guided, first-person view (FPV) one-way attack drones, produced at scale on domestic soil, as the weapon of choice. On Episode 122 of Dawn of Autonomy, Dr. Ned Tabat, Chief Technology Officer of Meadowlark Aircraft Company, and Dr. Kirill Rivkin, Co-Founder of Genesis Aeronautica, pulled back the curtain on a collaboration founded on engineering ambition and what they believe is a strategic defense imperative.
A Major Pivot, Driven by the Front Lines
For years, Meadowlark Aircraft Company built its reputation on bespoke light Group 3 fixed-wing UAS platforms. The company originally aimed to precision-engineer and manufacture its FH125 Strix family for defense and civilian surveillance missions from its Grand Forks, North Dakota facility. That mission was always elite and exacting. But the world moved fast.
As Tabat put it, the environment demanded a pivot: “A major pivot for us, absolutely.” Defense urgency, visible in the drone-saturated skies over Ukraine, in executive orders pushing for domestic drone dominance and in Pentagon calls for one-way attributable drones at scale, changed the vision and collapsed the action timeline. As a result, Meadowlark pivoted hard toward large FPV attack drones, where viability demands not simply 600 aircraft per year, but several thousand per month.
That pivot brought Tabat back into orbit with a longtime colleague, Kirill Rivkin. The two go back more than 20 years, to when Tabat hired Rivkin at Seagate after Rivkin completed his PhD at Northwestern. They reconnected last October at the UAS Summit in North Dakota. What began as catching up quickly became a conviction. Rivkin had spent three months at the front lines in Ukraine and returned with an engineer’s clarity about what the battlefield actually needs. Tabat had the manufacturing infrastructure and bespoke platform expertise to build it.
“We kind of fell in love with this idea of fiber optic,” Tabat said. “We see an opportunity.” That shared conviction is the foundation on which the new Vespa Alliance now stands.
The Vespa Alliance: A Consortium for Domestic Production
Named for the Latin word for “wasp,” the Vespa Alliance brings together a consortium of specialty companies, each owning a critical subsystem. Alongside Meadowlark and Genesis Aeronautica (Rivkin’s company), the alliance currently includes Sakai Electronics, which handles day, night, and all-weather imaging with a focus on driving down the cost of long-wavelength infrared, plus AeroGear and Anta. Jim Falasco of AeroGear has been a driving force behind the consortium model itself, championing the idea of connecting smaller companies to function as a unified unit. “We banded together to get high-volume products out,” Rivkin said, “and build manufacturing capacity here in the U.S.”
He continued, “Managing the supply chain is going to be very important if you are going to get a low-cost, high-volume product out. You can’t depend on Chinese fiber, or motors or anything like that. You have to actually get all of that lined up.”
The consortium deploys shared Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Six Sigma manufacturing disciplines and designed-for-manufacturing principles to eliminate scrap, compress cost,and achieve what Tabat calls “demand volume elasticity,” the ability to surge production rapidly when contracts materialize, without sacrificing the razor-thin margins that define this market.
Why Fiber Optics Changes Everything
The centerpiece of this consortium revolves around fiber-optic communications, a technology Rivkin described as an outright paradigm shift in tactical drone operations.
The core problem with RF communications, Rivkin explained, is radio shadow: “Beyond 5 kilometers, you start having problems with radio shadow. When you dive into a target, you lose your RF signal.”
That RF limitation was precisely why FPV drone strike efficiency sat at only 5% in early 2022 in Ukraine. By late 2023, due to a combination of better tactics, software and fiber implementation the efficiency climbed to 60-80%, with multi-copter operations beyond 10km choosing to predominantly rely on fiber technology.
Fiber’s advantages go well beyond jamming resistance. A fiber-tethered drone can fly within feet of the ground to navigate urban nets, hug terrain and execute ambushes, while maintaining 3-millisecond bi-directional latency and consuming far less power than RF systems. That low power draw enables the battlefield tactic of pre-positioning.
“You put drones literally 300 feet away from the intended target, and then you wake them up and use them, and then you wake up another line of drones,” Rivkin said. The drone becomes a patient, silent sentry rather than a flying sprint against time.
The fiber itself is nearly invisible. It is 250 microns in diameter, thinner than a fishing line and integrated into the body of the aircraft. When Rivkin asked soldiers what they would do against a fiber drone with no RF signal to detect and no electronic signature to track, the answer was unambiguous: “We are screwed. There’s nothing you can do.”
For ranges under 5 kilometers, RF remains cheap and effective, Rivkin acknowledged. The operational sweet spot for fiber is about 10 to 50 kilometers. “In that range, fiber is the only option. There is no solution that is as viable as fiber,” he explained.
The Platform: Open, Multi-Mission, Battle-Ready
The drone at the center of this effort is a hexacopter optimized for the 20-plus kilometer range. It carries an integrated fiber spool in a conical rear section and built around an open ecosystem philosophy. Operators can swap cameras, LiDAR, communication modules and payloads in the field to reconfigure between reconnaissance, kinetic strike, mixed recon-and-bomber and supply delivery roles without returning to a production facility.
“You have one platform which you reconfigure in the field for your specific purposes,” Tabat noted. “It can be recon, it can be kinetic, it can be mixed, and all of this doesn’t require any kind of frontline production.”
Flight control spans FPV goggles, stabilized optical navigation and AI-assisted GPS-denied modes, all operable from thousands of miles away if required, while keeping a human in the kill chain.
Manufacturing Realities and the Road Ahead
The team was candid about where they stand relative to existing government programs. The Replicator / Drone Dominance program’s Phase 2 pricing targets of $3,500 to $4,500 per aircraft remain aggressive for a fiber-equipped platform that carries additional electronics and a spool. Tabat estimated the consortium’s near-term pricing will run roughly twice those targets. However, he noted that cost parity with even high-volume Ukrainian production is achievable, and that the strategic value of a single pre-positioned fiber drone, which can cover multiple targets over hours of low-power observation, changes the calculus on per-unit cost.
The near-term roadmap focuses on locking down manufacturing, qualifying subsystem partners for volume production, and pursuing initial customers in the DoW or law enforcement already seeking fiber drone solutions.
Both principals will attend the Farnborough Airshow in July to pursue European market opportunities, where Tabat expects fiber adoption to accelerate ahead of the U.S. market. Looking further out, the consortium has its eye on a Group 2 fixed-wing variant for extended-range one-way attack at 50-plus kilometers, where AI-driven target acquisition would fill the gap that fiber cannot.
Genesis Aeronautica is simultaneously expanding its remote FPV pilot training program. According to Rivkin, it is the only such program in the world that offers full flight instruction, drone engineering skills, and tactical mission planning in a completely remote format. The company recognizes that the human operator remains the decisive element, even as autonomy advances.
A New Model for American Airpower
The convergence of battlefield-proven fiber-optic technology, domestic manufacturing discipline and a coalition of specialized firms provides a serious answer to a serious national security challenge. Tabat, Rivkin and their Vespa Alliance are building the drone, the factory and a new model for American defense manufacturing: a distributed, consortium-driven, supply-chain-secure and engineered from the ground up for the production volumes that modern warfare demands. The group continues to actively recruit additional partners in fiber spooling, motors, and batteries, any NDAA-compliant supplier capable of meeting the production velocity this program demands.
“Drones are going to replace most of what is used as ammunition,” Rivkin said. “That’s really a replacement technology. That’s really a new phase of the war.” This consortium plans to prove him right, on American soil and on American terms.
To reach Ned Tabat and Meadowlark Aircraft Company, visit macnd.com or connect on LinkedIn. To reach Dr. Kirill Rivkin and Genesis Aeronautica, visit geneaero.com or connect on LinkedIn.