In case you missed it, the infamous Erik Prince and Swarmer’s US CEO Alex Fink are betting on “air defense as a service”—and now they’re putting numbers behind their pitch.
This week—just a month after launch—Vectus Air Defense Systems (not to be confused with Prince’s Vectus Global private military and security company) announced plans to buy at least 40 Swarmer-built air defense systems in the first year of production and 80 in the second.
The system will run about $5M to $6M a pop, and Swarmer plans to manufacture them at a new facility in Poland. Worth noting that Swarmer holds a 20 percent stake in Vectus, and that Prince is non-executive chairman of Swarmer.
Tectonic sat down with Prince—the former Navy SEAL who founded private security company Blackwater—and Fink to chat about the deal, what they’re building with Vectus and Swarmer, and the role of private companies in the future of air defense and cUAS.
Read more below.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. This is part one of our interview with Prince. For part two with Fink, click here.
Tectonic: It’s been about a month since Vectus launched. How many customer contracts have you signed?
Erik Prince: We haven’t signed any yet. We are in the process of aggregating the best and brightest of Ukrainian, Israeli, and other European defense tech, particularly in detection, tracking, fire-control solutions, battle-management systems, and effectors, to include interceptors, missiles, and gun systems—all the layers you need.
There are lots of ways that drone technology has changed warfare. Even in the Ukraine fight, you see a big shift now from slow, low-flying drones to much faster, high-flying drones. When the Russians started putting turbine engines on the back of a Shahed or a Geran, it became a real problem for the Ukrainians.
It speaks to how quickly technology is changing the battlespace. If you buy the latest and greatest on January 1, 2026, by January 1, 2027 it’s largely outdated.
That’s why we’ve advocated air defense as a service in the first place, because it’s really the only way you can keep up with the iterations and changes. Effectively, you’re hiring a service as a subscription, and it’s on the solution provider to provide the updated software, updated detection, and updated interception methods. That’s really the only thing standing in the path of protecting billions of dollars of infrastructure.
You’ve said Vectus intends to buy at least 40 Swarmer-built systems in the first year of production. Is that a firm order or a target?
That’s firm. We have a lot of demand, both for our own purposes and from existing and new customers reaching out aggressively.
What we’ve found is that, in every case, accurate gun systems—hard-kill technology at the last edge of protection—are super essential, and that’s not changing.
Why these particular gun systems matter is “P for plenty.” Those put out a high volume of shells. The next iteration will make that even more accurate and capable over distance.
We are confident we’ll even have an effect not just on drones, but on cruise missiles and even ballistic missiles, because of the systems’ integration and their ability to interact with each other—to put up a wall of lead and tungsten in the sky to shred whatever is incoming.
How quickly does an innovation that works on the battlefield in Ukraine become outdated or get countered?
From the initial presence of FPV drones carrying a one-liter bottle or an RPG charge, which was smashing tanks, they would then jam it with lots of different creative electronic warfare—jamming the command link, jamming the navigation.
The next iteration, of course, appeared months later or within a year, which is fiber-optic-controlled.
So there is massive innovation happening at least every six to 12 months. Unless you’re keeping the cost of deployment low and moving fast, the 80 or 90 percent solution is better than what you think is the perfect 110 percent solution that is supposed to last for 30 years, because nothing will last that long.
And you think only private companies can iterate this quickly?
The detect, test, integrate, buy, and deploy model is the fastest in the private sector. Governments cannot move that quickly.
Swarmer owns 20 percent of Vectus. What does Swarmer supply, what does Vectus supply, and which company signs the contract with the customer?
Swarmer, as you know, started as a software company providing AI to help drones—really, to enable pilots to fly and control a lot more assets at the same time.
With the acquisition of Ratel [the Ukrainian ground autonomy company], we feel warfare has fully changed, not just in terms of aerial drones but also ground drones and how the battlefront is supplied, medevaced, and maneuvered. You have large portions of the front lines in Ukraine largely staffed by autonomous systems.
I would argue that in a couple of years, humans in that battlespace will be just reloading batteries and reloading magazines and weapons, and the autonomous systems—the robots—will do the rest.
Swarmer has been focusing on finding the very, very best technology that is battle-proven and bringing it to the rest of the world. Vectus, as a service company, makes sense because it’s just going to do services. It’s going to buy the best and brightest capability and deploy it at the edge to provide a guaranteed outcome to customers.
Is Swarmer’s acquisition of Ratel the start of a broader effort to acquire Ukrainian defense companies?
I don’t know if I can make a forward-looking statement, but, as I said, we’re constantly on the hunt for battle-proven technology from Ukraine, Europe, or wherever.
I can say conclusively that it will not be our last acquisition.
How does Vectus Air Defense scale: Through Vectus Global’s existing personnel and operations, or as a separate company?
Separate, parallel effort.
As I said a bit in my talk last night, the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Gulf has spent, as an example, to protect their bases, their ports, their airports, and everything else—it has proven that the tech they bought from the West has not been so effective.
We want to let them spend money to deliver an outcome.
Look, there are two things a military commander does: Coordinate information and release energy. Fly that airplane. Move that boat. Fire that effector at an incoming threat to take it down.
We’re not going to be like the US Navy, using a $3 million missile to knock down a $20,000 drone. We have to find ways, on behalf of our customer, to lower their cost of defense and still give them a desired outcome that’s sustainable.
Alex Fink, Swarmer’s CEO, told Tectonic he estimates that the last line of defense costs roughly $5,000 to $20,000 per kill. What is the lowest cost at which a Vectus system can stop a drone today?
A seven- to 10-round burst at, maximum, 80 to 100 bucks.
Is that the price for taking down an FPV drone?
No. That’s the cost of some simple bursting rounds—or call it dumb rounds—to shred an incoming [drone].
At a Vectus-protected site, who decides to fire: a Vectus employee or the customer?
Sure, that is customer-specific. Obviously, there’s a lot of negotiation.
It’s one thing if it’s a remote nuclear power site in the middle of the desert somewhere, where it’s pretty simple to put an exclusion zone in a free-fire area. It is an entirely different case if it’s a desalination plant in the middle of a city.
If there is a mistake at one of those locations, who is liable?
Certainly to be negotiated, but there are lots of cases where private companies operate under the umbrella of sovereign immunity for a host government.
Again, the threat has become so real that the cost of a desalination plant going down in August in the Middle East is an extinction event for that society.
Which parts of the Vectus air defense system require human approval?
It depends on what layer you’re talking about.
You have all the methods of detecting an incoming threat. You have radar, you have FLIR, you have acoustic, you have EO/IR, you have SIGINT. They’re listening for any of the emissions coming off the drone.
All those things go into a battle-management system, a brain that says, “There’s a thing that we don’t know what it is, and we think it’s a threat, and it’s coming in.”
Perhaps you have to dispatch an interceptor to look at it, to verify, to put a camera on it and verify if it’s a threat. You have the luxury of doing that if it’s far out.
So, again, it’s impossible to say at what point it’s an automated system versus at what point it’s a human system.
There’s a C-RAM system, which you’ve probably seen. If you’ve been to any guarded spot like Baghdad, on top of an embassy there’s an automated gun system, and they will put it in automatic mode. So if anything flies within two kilometers of that, it’s getting lit up.
What oversight will Vectus operators face when they are authorized to use force? How do you prevent something from going wrong?
It is on a country-by-country basis. It has to ultimately be a partnership between a sovereign government that needs its stuff protected and a firm that’s willing to step up and do that.
