Ukraine War Tech Lessons
Hello, I’m Ylli Bajraktari, CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project. In this edition of 2-2-2, SCSP Senior Advisor Greg Grant discusses how technology is driving a revolution in future warfare.
There is no greater catalyst for military innovation than warfare. Once the shooting starts, the imperative of battlefield innovation and adaptation very quickly becomes existential – innovate or die, quite literally, is the operative case. This is particularly true regarding technology and how it is employed on the battlefield, as witnessed daily in the Ukraine war. That conflict has become a technological arms race, said Andrey Liscovich, CEO of the Ukraine Defense Fund, as both sides struggle to gain an advantage over the other in a continuous, dynamic contest of action and reaction. “What worked yesterday may stop working today; what worked today may not work tomorrow,” he said, “Both sides must constantly adapt.”
While there is no discounting Ukrainian morale and will to defeat Russia’s unprovoked aggression, the Ukrainian military’s battlefield performance has been boosted by impressive innovation at all echelons. When the war began, many expected the Russian military to steamroll over the smaller Ukrainian military in a matter of days. Now, some 18 months into Europe’s largest land war since World War II, the outmanned and outgunned Ukrainian military has proven impressively adept at innovation and leveraging technology for military advantage. There is a reason for this. Amidst the brutal and tragic fighting, Ukraine has emerged as an example of what a highly tech-savvy population can do when mobilized, resourced, and dedicated to the assistance of its government and military in the defense of its homeland.
Ukraine’s military is, at its heart, a grassroots fighting force with a significant number of software engineers distributed throughout its ranks. As one journalist described, Ukraine’s military fights like a partisan army with a Silicon Valley arm attached. Some of the very best Ukrainian-born Silicon Valley tech workers returned home to fight the invaders, joining the ranks of the “technoguerrillas,” the Ukrainian tech workers who had spent years battling Russian hackers and were skilled at repelling Russian cyberattacks. They worked to provide the Ukrainian military with the digital applications needed on the frontlines as Russian armored columns poured across their borders. As Palantir’s Chief Technology Officer, Shyam Sankar, said, “Ukraine is learning what happens when you conscript 300,000 of the world’s most capable software engineers and send them into battle.”
Before the war, Ukraine had built a system called Diia, an e-government solution to expedite government and banking services, including passports, driver’s licenses, and paying taxes. This same digital public infrastructure platform became crucial after the invasion as menus were added so Ukraine’s citizens could report enemy targets as well as casualties. The application taps into an encrypted messaging service to pass along information to the military, including pictures that are then scanned automatically to locate targets. This led to the development of a so-called “Uber for artillery,” where citizens and soldiers alike have multiple paths to transmit Russian activity to Ukrainian artillery units. Ukraine continued to refine the system and developed an app called Delta, described as a real-time battle command application. Delta not only uses information fed into it from Ukrainians but can also draw data from NATO systems, providing access to both commercial and classified intelligence.
Ukraine’s software-savvy fighters work with world-class engineers to speed innovative solutions to the battlefield and provide its fighters with the tools to best the Russian invader on the relentless and costly front lines. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the Ukrainian tech army began waging “algorithmic warfare.” The term was coined by former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, who was convinced that if our military systems learn and adapt faster than the enemy’s, we’re more likely to win battles. Work stood up Project Maven as the initial algorithmic warfare pathfinder project, which developed machine learning algorithms for object detection, classification, and alerts for imagery in support of the counter-ISIS campaign. Today, Ukrainians are working with U.S. companies using AI to sift through multiple data streams to identify targets. This capability is particularly important as, lacking warehouses full of spare ammunition, the Ukrainians must hit the largest number of enemy targets with the smallest number of munitions.
The Ukrainian military has deployed a Project Maven-like approach to observing the battlefield and rapid targeting at a massive scale and operational impact – it has operationalized algorithmic warfare, the first military in the world to do so. The ability of a military organization to generate algorithms at the very edge of battle may be the most significant lesson coming out of the Ukraine war, said a U.S. Army leader from the XVIII Airborne Corps, who has been closely observing the fighting, allowing them to mass effects at decisive points and make decisions faster than the Russians. A European tech company engineer working with the Ukrainians said they “absolutely get how to make AI operational.” They’re able to “get our software to run right on the edge, meaning on tiny little computer chips on the back of a rusty old vehicle, or in the backpack of a soldier, or on the payload of a drone.”
Ukraine as Battle Lab and the Drone War
The rapid transfer of battlefield knowledge and experience to adapt and customize weapons systems has made Ukraine a critical proving ground for new military technologies and a crucible of innovation. World militaries are observing closely to glean lessons on new ways of employing weapons and technology in combination and how those lessons should shape future force and capability development. Western-built weapons systems are daily being operationally tested against the most advanced Russian systems that were not unveiled until the shooting started, providing valuable insight into vulnerabilities in Russian “war reserve” capabilities, particularly their electronic warfare systems. To this point, a Ukrainian arms buyer said weapons must first be tested in Ukraine in actual combat as Russian electronic warfare countermeasures are so effective. “If you bring something new, the first question from our military guy is like 'okay, I like it.” He said, “But bring it here in Ukraine and I will test it,” and then send it back to the producer.
Perhaps the most visible battlefield innovation has been the enormous number of drones employed by both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries. Drone use in warfare is not new, of course. Yet, drones have never been deployed at this scale in a conflict of any kind. As a recent RUSI report notes, it is common for “there to be between 25 and 50 UAVs from both sides operating over the contested area… at any given time for each 10 kilometers of frontage.” Both sides have employed massive attack drone swarms to overwhelm the enemy’s air defenses which are challenged to detect, let alone target, large numbers of small, fast-moving objects. For the Ukrainian military, drones have replaced aircraft on the battlefield as the primary means of air delivered strike.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the indispensable value of small drones at every unit level as a critical intelligence, surveillance, targeting, and strike element. It foreshadows an impending future of combat operations characterized by an intense “recon battle” – a fight for tactical information. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said at the recent SCSP-organized Ash Carter Exchange, this ability to see the battlefield is driving fundamental changes in warfare. As soldiers from the frontlines have noted, tactical drones are akin to “flying binoculars” that unmask targets and make artillery fire observable and instantly correctable. The use of drones for artillery spotting has enabled tactical-level kill chains to operate extremely rapidly and with unprecedented precision. The reconnaissance strike complex arms race is taking place at the smallest unit levels, where drones provide the ability to rapidly close the targeting cycle.
A drone arms race is ongoing between Ukraine and Russia as both sides try to buy and customize drones at scale that can be plugged into the battlefront as quickly as possible. It’s an arms race where Russia has been operating at a disadvantage, bested by the bottom-up, grassroots innovation of the Ukrainian military. That approach contrasts with Russia's military-industrial complex's overly bureaucratized and centralized planning. Russia’s system still operates in a manner akin to the Soviet era and is inhospitable to the kind of bottom-up innovation demonstrated by the Ukrainian military. Russia was slow to buy off-the-shelf drones or train its troops how to operate them, according to a recent report, and has been forced to import thousands of drones from Iran. Where Ukraine has pushed tens of thousands of small drones out to its units in the field and trains its troops to operate in a distributed fashion, Russian social media is replete with troops complaining about the lack of drones that puts them at a decided disadvantage.
For its part, the Ukrainian government said it had recently trained 10,000 drone operators. In March, it announced the formation of 60 new drone strike companies (a company is typically 100-200 troops). But drone attrition on the battlefield has been exceedingly high. In fact, a report from RUSI said Ukraine is losing an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 drones a month – which equates to over 160 a day. Most are downed by Russian jamming that causes the operators to lose the radio control signal or scramble their GPS signal. In the bitter fighting for Bakhmut, the Russian EW operations were so intense that drones could fly only a few hundred yards from their operators before they lost the link.
The high drone attrition has resulted in shortages among front-line units. Cheaper drones in huge quantities would be enormously beneficial to Ukrainian troops, who are reportedly forced to spend their own money to buy drones as government funds are scarce. As one drone manufacturer that is scaling up production of cheap, disposable drones said, “I don’t want to sell one drone for a million dollars, I just want to sell a million for one dollar.” Meanwhile, Ukrainian developers are working to build winged drones that are better protected against EW attacks and can operate far behind the enemy’s frontlines. Some companies are working to develop drones that operate in stealthy modes without relying on radio frequency control to improve survivability.
As CNA’s Sam Bendett, a noted expert on unmanned systems and warfare, pointed out, Ukraine is advantaged by tech-savvy volunteers who operate their own workshops and factories, able to build and deploy systems far more quickly than traditional military institutions. Workshops have sprouted up around the country that not only build drones but the software to use them. Ukraine claims the number of indigenous companies building drones has tripled, going from 30 to more than 90, since the war began. It’s a streamlined process that works directly with the military with little bureaucracy to test and deploy new weapons. Some Ukrainian drones are being crowdfunded, gifted by Ukraine’s partners, and then mass-produced by Ukrainian private companies. As one American company executive noted: “Ukrainian officials continue to see value in funding multiple overlapping efforts. They are willing to trade bureaucratic orderliness for increased innovation, lethality, and capability on the battlefield.”
These cheaper, mass-produced drones are dispatched ahead of more exquisite weapons to find exploitable gaps in the enemy’s defenses for follow-on attack waves. Even customized hobby drones have become incredibly lethal in their own right through extensive “drone bombing,” flying above soldiers in trenches or vehicles and dropping grenades, mortar rounds, or other explosives, even chasing down those trying to flee. Russian bloggers have gone so far as to post video courses providing survival tips for troops being hunted by Ukrainian drones. Overhead cover is absolutely vital, they say, as an open hole becomes a grave as the drone drops high explosives. Another said: “The main factor by which you can be seen from the air is movement! Constantly move, it can only aim at a fixed target.”
What is certain is that Ukraine needs more drones, tens of thousands more. Ukrainian troops report many times more targets than available drones to strike them. Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Development has been moving to accelerate the production of first-person-view (FPV) drones, invented for the sport of drone racing, which have emerged as the most lethal drones as they are fast, accurate, and highly maneuverable. That means FPV drones are able to chase down fleeing targets – opening entirely new precision strike capabilities against moving targets. Ukraine’s Army of Drones organization has stepped in to try and accelerate procurement of FPV drones: “Ukrainian FPV developers do not need to worry about going through all the bureaucracy - we are always ready to help you get contracts faster and scale up production. I am sure that together we will make a revolution in the development of FPV drones."
The effectiveness of Ukraine’s drones has made their operators a priority target for the Russians: “We are drone operators, we are target number one, high priority for the Russians. So as soon as we are detected, they will shoot everything into our location.” A Ukrainian reporter discussed the community of engineers and the advantage of a heterogeneous bottom-up approach to building many independent systems using completely different protocols. That approach provides an advantage in the more rapid development cycles and in terms of creating a more diverse drone ecosystem, making it harder for Russia to counter the many different types of drones being rapidly developed and fielded.
Recent reports from the frontlines in Ukraine indicate that Russia has greatly increased the number of drones it employs, including Lancet strike drones and large numbers of Chinese-built drones. Russia has stepped up drone production to counter Ukraine’s battlefield advantage. It already imports large numbers of drones and loitering munitions from Iran and is building a massive new drone manufacturing plant, according to U.S. intelligence. And Russian-backed forces also announced the launch of large-scale FPV drone production.
There is little question that the battlefield deployment of drones at scale is a disruptive capability and challenges traditional concepts of air-delivered precision strike being delivered by today’s logistics heavy, high-end platforms. As one military analyst said, “Big centralized western air forces and artillery organizations now have a combat relevance problem… as drones provide some of the big platforms firepower capabilities very cheaply.” The war in Ukraine has made it clear that the battlefield employment of drones in huge numbers will forever change land warfare.
The U.S. military may be missing a revolution in battlefield operations unfolding in Ukraine as the Pentagon remains focused primarily on big, costly, exquisite platforms designed to perform a wide range of missions. Instead, as former Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) Director Mike Brown said, DoD should speed the adoption of small, unmanned, many, and smart weapons to pose multiple dilemmas to an adversary. The head of a drone production company based in California said that over the last decade they had built some 5,000 loitering munitions for the U.S. military. The company claimed that it could easily make 16,000 in a single year if the orders from the Pentagon were there.