Private Air Defense for Businesses—Problems and How to Solve Them

What the Ukrainian model is missing

In November 2025, by Resolution No. 1506, Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers effectively allowed Ukrainian businesses to set up air defense units of their own. In March 2026, the mechanism was widened: on a separate decision by the Air Force command, certain air defense equipment and ammunition can now be transferred to enterprises on a temporary basis. Corporate units are not autonomous little armies, however: they operate within the overall air defense system—their areas of operation, their tasks and so on are set in coordination with the Air Force.

The idea itself is unquestionably sound. With the Defense Forces short of manpower and Russia able to launch hundreds of aerial targets in a single night, any model that brings additional resources, technology and people into the defense of the rear deserves support.

As of mid-July 2026, 62 enterprises had applied to join the pilot project, 51 had been granted authorized status, and units at four enterprises were already carrying out combat missions and had shot down more than 50 Shahed and reconnaissance drones.

Yet those same figures also point to a problem. Between the tens of thousands of enterprises in active operation, the 51 that have won the right to set up air defense and the four that have actually brought it to combat duty, there is quite a distance. And the reason, it seems, is not bureaucracy alone.

The resolution gave business the right to shoot at Shaheds. But the business model of how this is meant to work at the scale of an economy was largely left out of the equation.

Air defense as a corporate cost center

Let’s begin with the basic design.

Under the resolution, an air defense unit is a structural subdivision of the enterprise itself, created, among other things, to protect that enterprise’s real estate and other property. The enterprise finances the unit, staffs it from its own employees, arranges training, purchases equipment and provides for its storage and maintenance.

From a military point of view, this all looks very simple. From a business standpoint, not so much.

For an ordinary enterprise, an air defense unit is a pure cost center. It produces no goods, supplies no services and generates no revenue; what it does require is spending on wages, equipment, premises, transport, maintenance and the rest.

And if a site has to be covered around the clock, one crew is not enough. You need shifts, a reserve to cover illness and leave, command, equipment servicing. Depending on the particular air defense system, a modest combat capability very quickly turns into a separate staffing line of a dozen employees or more.

For a large energy or industrial holding, this is still imaginable. For a mid-sized enterprise, it is already far harder. For a small business, it is close to impossible.

And the modern economy adds another problem: the site, the business and the property that need protecting very often do not belong to the same legal entity.

A typical large warehouse may belong to the owner of a logistics park, be run by a logistics operator, be partly leased to a single client, and hold inside it goods belonging to dozens of other companies. Shopping centers, production sites, port terminals and a great deal of modern logistics work the same way.

So who is supposed to set up the air defense? The owner of the building? The operator? The tenant? The owners of the goods?

If every large client sets up a unit of its own, a single site can end up with several parallel air defense units while the site next door has none at all. If the property owner sets it up, another question arises: why should it invest substantial money in a capability whose necessity depends on a mix of tenants that may change tomorrow?

The implementing rules, incidentally, do not prohibit covering different sites in a single joint decision, and among the preconditions for obtaining authorized-enterprise status is even a license for security services. So a certain window for a specialized model already exists. The problem lies elsewhere: the resolution does not expressly construct a model in which one specialized company supplies an air defense service to third parties, moves its crews between sites and is paid for doing so. The legal architecture is still built around “an enterprise defending itself” rather than around an operator whose professional business is defending others.

Training an air defender

The second problem is more interesting still. Members of corporate air defense units remain civilian employees of the enterprise. True, they undergo special training, have to meet health requirements, obtain the necessary clearances and learn to handle weapons and to work in coordination with military command. And for the state this is a practically ideal mobilization pool.

An obvious conflict between two state interests arises. On the one hand, the state tells the enterprise: find physically fit people, pay for their training, teach them to work with air defense equipment, organize combat duty and plug into the Air Force system. On the other, the mere fact of a person’s inclusion in a private air defense unit confers no special deferment or reserved status.

The Ministry of Defense itself explains the design quite frankly: such units often draw on people who are not liable to mobilization in any case, and taking part in private air defense does not by itself create reserved status.

If an enterprise has the right to reserve employees under the general mechanism, the problem can be partly solved that way. But then corporate air defense begins competing for the same limited pool of personnel with the dispatchers, engineers, repair crews, power engineers and other workers without whom the enterprise itself will not run.

For business, this is a poor investment proposition. It puts money into training a scarce worker but gets no special guarantee that tomorrow that worker will still be performing the very defense function he was trained for.

So the model in effect pushes business to staff such units with veterans, women, people with lawful grounds for deferment and other categories that do not form part of the mobilization pool.

Who pays for the debris?

The question most unwelcome to any corporate lawyer is liability. Following virtually every mass attack, after all, we read reports of houses, cars and other property damaged by debris from downed aerial targets.

And corporate air defense units are meant to operate precisely where a business’s sites are located—which often means inside or beside populated areas.

Picture an entirely realistic situation: on a signal from the Air Force, the operator of a private air defense unit launches an interceptor and destroys a Shahed, but the debris falls on a private house. Or the interceptor, through a technical fault, damages a car by itself. In the worst case, someone is injured or killed.

Who is liable? The state, because the weapon was used within the overall air defense system and with the permission of military command? The enterprise, whose employee actually fired it? The operator himself? Or nobody, because the root cause was a Russian attack?

Criminal and civil liability are not clear-cut either. Article 43-1 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code affords fairly broad protection to people who cause harm while repelling armed aggression under martial law, and could in theory extend to members of private air defense units as well. But there is simply no settled practice of applying it in situations of this kind.

The Civil Code of Ukraine, for its part, imposes as a general rule an obligation on a legal entity to make good harm caused by its employee in the course of his employment duties. Government Resolution No. 1506 creates no special mechanism for compensating third parties, for allocating liability between the state and the enterprise or for compulsory insurance against such a risk.

A similar question arises with the members of the unit themselves. If an employee is killed or seriously wounded on duty, he remains a civilian employee. The mechanisms of labor law and social insurance will apply, but the resolution creates for him no special package of state guarantees of the kind that exists for military personnel.

Does a company need air defense of its own?

And why should a food producer, a retailer, a logistics operator or an agricultural holding become an expert in air defense at all? It has no fire engines of its own—it uses the professional fire service. It does not build its own telecommunications network—it buys connectivity. It does not set up a bank to make payments. It does not train its security guards to repair transformers.

Specialization exists for a reason.

So a more scalable model might be not corporate air defense but a specialized licensed company that maintains the crews, trains the people, buys and services the equipment and integrates into the Air Force system. The enterprise, for its part, buys from that company the protection of a particular site or group of sites.

A single operator could protect a logistics park with twenty tenants instead of twenty small corporate air defense units being set up. An industrial zone could pay jointly for several professional units. The resource could be shifted around as the threat, the density of sites and the Air Force’s needs change.

And it is not only the shooting part of air defense that lends itself to being a service. Detection scales naturally as a service too: a single operator can deploy a network of sensors around an industrial zone or a logistics hub, run the monitoring centrally and pass the data to several protected sites and air defense units at once.

A separate market may thus well emerge, in which business buys not an antenna and a staff of operators but guaranteed early warning of a threat.

Even insurers could become part of this model: certified protection of a site lowers expected losses and can therefore feed into the insurance rate and partly finance the cost of air defense.

Some proof that the idea of specialization works already exists in the Night Hornets, a unit of the company Wild Hornets. This is a specialized private unit for which drones, training and the interception of aerial targets are the core competence rather than a sideline of a warehouse or a factory. According to figures from the company itself and from published accounts of its work, the unit already has dozens of aerial targets destroyed to its name and at the same time trains operators for the Defense Forces.

It is more logical to have dozens of such professional operators than to require thousands of enterprises each to invent a small air force of its own.

The dreaded acronym—PMC

That, however, calls for a legislative framework for private companies that supply defense and security services professionally. They can be called private military companies, international defense companies, special security operators or anything else. The substance does not change.

Regulation of that kind could resolve several problems of the current experiment at once.

First, grant certified personnel a special deferment from mobilization tied not to the enterprise as a whole but to the specific defense function and to the person’s actual place in a combat crew.

Second, establish a separate liability regime: compulsory professional and civil liability insurance, a state mechanism for compensating harm to third parties, limits on the operator’s liability for lawful action under Air Force control, and a clear relationship between that regime and Article 43-1 of the Criminal Code and combat immunity.

Third, establish normal market rules: licensing, certification of personnel, vetting of owners, capital requirements, weapons accounting, cybersecurity, insurance, auditing of combat use, and retention of telemetry and decision logs.

And, crucially, allow such companies to earn money legally from that defense competence itself. This does not mean allowing private companies to wage wars of their own. Corporate air defense already demonstrates one workable design today: the weapons and the people are private, while decisions on areas of operation, on aerial targets and on the conduct of combat work remain part of a single state system.

And this debate is no longer theoretical. In May, the president announced that the government, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the military and other bodies were preparing a legislative basis for the activity of private military companies, and that the corresponding law should be ready for adoption this year. Among the stated aims was, explicitly, the chance to turn Ukrainian military experience into a legal export of security and into business opportunities for veterans.

Meanwhile, two bills are already before the Verkhovna Rada: the older draft law No. 3005 on military consulting and draft law No. 11214 on international defense companies.

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Perhaps private air defense is a good place to finally begin this conversation with an entirely practical question: how can the private sector professionally perform a clearly defined defense function under state control?

After the war, hundreds of thousands of people will remain in Ukraine with skills that are extremely valuable, extremely specific and in great demand around the world. It would be sensible for the state to build a legal Ukrainian market for them before far less scrupulous employers offer one of their own.