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A US Marine veteran who trained with Ukrainians 20 years ago says he already could see the key to their success today

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Troy Smothers, a US Marine veteran sergeant who now runs American Made Freedom, a nonprofit that assists Ukrainian troops with fiber-optic drones. Business Insider verified his military records and deployment to Ukraine with the Department of Defense.

The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.

I was a standard infantry corporal in the Marines when I was sent to Odesa, Ukraine, in 2005.

There were perhaps 100 of us, and our clear role was to teach infantry tactics, such as leap and bound alternating movements, sectors of fire, and calling for artillery fire.

This was NATO doctrine. Because 20 years ago, the Ukrainians were indoctrinated by Soviet tactics that just throw people at their enemy like human meat waves.

The roles are somewhat reversed now. Now the West is trying to learn how Ukrainians are fighting, and how they’ve turned what little they had into formidable weapons.

Even two decades ago, I noticed the same mindset among them that’s been the key to Ukraine’s strength today.

I was only in Ukraine for about three weeks in 2005, but my time training with the soldiers there left a similar impression on me.

We knew that Ukraine’s military budget was, let’s just say, underfunded. Everything they had was Soviet-era equipment comparable to the stuff that the US had decommissioned 20 years earlier.

We asked ourselves what we were doing sitting in their old Russian-made helicopters.

Helicopters commonly leak hydraulic fluid. However, when we boarded the helicopters in Ukraine, there were puddles of fluid in the cracks on the floor of the aircraft.

Definitely, nobody smoked near those things.

Most of the Ukrainians’ equipment was old, but it was a testimony to how they worked with what they had.

‘We’ll make it work’

Since the full-scale war started in 2022, I’ve been traveling to Ukraine for months at a time, showing new fiber optic spools to drone manufacturers so they can build and improve unjammable drones. We’re testing out designs that are used on the battlefield today.

You see that same “this is all that we have, so we’ll make it work” determination in Ukraine now. The Ukrainians are getting some great kit from Europe and the US, but it clearly still isn’t enough to win.

Out of necessity, they took toy hobby drones and turned them into cutting-edge military equipment.

We don’t fight that way in the US. If something breaks, we typically order a replacement part or return it.

In Ukraine, they open up the part and repair it. Salaries there are much lower, so their people are more used to repairing electronics or appliances on their own. If a mobile phone breaks, they’ll open it up and start soldering.

Because of this, they had a greater army of people who were electronically knowledgeable, enabling them to bring in an immediate solution in the war.

That isn’t culturally ingrained in the American military or our people. Of course, we would adapt in the same situation, but could we have done it as quickly as the Ukrainians did, transforming toys and parts bought from China’s Alibaba into something that the entire world is now watching today?

Here’s an example of their DIY ingenuity. The Ukrainians have a contraption nicknamed a “mustache” on their first-person-view drones, which is essentially two rigid copper wires protruding in front.

When the drone flies into its target, these wires touch and send a signal to the blasting cap — like turning on a light switch — in the attached explosive to trigger the detonation. The mustache’s safety device is a simple, 3D-printed pin that gets pulled out when you launch the drone.

I’ve bought and used dozens of these while developing fiber-optic drones, and one mustache costs just $12 to $15. In the US, to get a similar piece of equipment, you’d spend $400 to $500, even at scale.

Most of these Ukrainians were just regular people living their lives until they were forced by the invasion to start killing Russians. But if anything, they’ve had an incredible advantage in finding solutions, sometimes because their uncle or friend might have run a repair or electronics business.

We were down there 20 years ago to bring the Ukrainians up to NATO standards. Today, I can see how much they can teach us about innovation. It’s humbling.




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A Facebook veteran took a big career risk that resulted in a ‘giant failure’ — but embracing a ‘J-curve’ career path paid off

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At 25 years old, Molly Graham was thriving in Facebook’s HR department when a senior executive urged her to transfer out of her stable role and help build a mobile phone instead.

She took the risk — and it could have derailed her career.

But Graham, who later became a C-suite executive at some of America’s biggest companies and philanthropies, now views that risky bet as one of the most important moves she ever made.

“It just felt like falling off a cliff,” Graham, now the founder of Glue Club, said in a recent interview on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast. “Taking risks, accepting the terrible fall and that experience of falling has been more than worth it.”

Graham described the experience as part of what she calls the “J-curve” — a career trajectory where a risky move leads to an initial drop before eventually producing outsized gains. Visually, she describes it as standing on a ledge, stepping off, sinking briefly, and then rising far higher than where you started — just like the shape of the letter J.

The concept, which she has also written about in her Lessons Substack, challenges the idea of a steady career ladder that steadily moves up and to the right.

Instead of climbing rung by rung with promotions every two to five years, Graham argues that some of the most valuable professional growth comes from jumping into roles you aren’t ready for and surviving any setbacks.

Graham’s own J-curve began when billionaire investor and “All-in” podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya, then Facebook’s vice president of growth, recruited her to help develop a smartphone, encouraging her to make the move by sketching out the J-shaped trajectory on a whiteboard.

He brought her on despite her having no experience in product development, dropping her into rooms filled with engineers and phone specialists with deep subject matter expertise. She recalled feeling like an “idiot” for much of her first six months.


Headshot of Molly Graham, the former Facebook and Google executive, and writer of the Lessons Substack

Molly Graham, the former Facebook and Google executive and writer of the Lessons Substack.

Molly Graham



At her midyear review, Palihapitiya delivered what Graham called the worst performance evaluation she had ever received. But the new experience eventually expanded her expertise.

“Slowly, I remember I had been doing all these trips to Taiwan because we were actually working on hardware and I, at some point, came back from Taiwan and I like drew on a whiteboard for him the layout of a mobile phone, trying to explain to him kind of like why something he wanted to do was not possible,” Graham said. “And I so vividly remember walking out of that meeting being like, ‘Oh like I actually know things.’ And slowly then over the following three years I became an expert in mobile.”

Palihapitiya did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

“The phone itself was a giant failure — a massive, costly failure for Facebook,” Graham told Rachitsky on the podcast. “But it was not a failure for me.”

She credits the experience with teaching her that she could operate far outside her comfort zone — a lesson that later helped her take on senior leadership roles, including serving as COO of Quip, which Salesforce acquired for $750 million, and overseeing operations at the $7.4 billion Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The J-curve, Graham said, is especially common at fast-moving companies like Meta, Alphabet, Nvidia, and SpaceX, where leaders value employees who are willing to take big risks early and learn quickly. In those environments, proving adaptability can matter more than checking every qualification box.

Not everyone supported Graham’s decision at the time. She said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, then the number two at the tech giant, advised against the move — as did her father.

“When wiser, more experienced people questioned the job offer, it definitely made me pause,” Graham told Business Insider in a follow-up email. “But my gut felt really strongly that I needed to take the risk.”

That instinct, she said, ultimately helped her discover what kind of work she didn’t want to do, and where her strengths lay. She didn’t want to sift through mock ups of hardware design and argue about a button’s placement. Instead, she sharpened her management skills and prepared to help lead large organizations.

“The much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs,” Graham told Rachitsky. “They can take you to places that you never could have imagined.”




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