Drones and AI: Transforming Warfare in Ukraine

The use of drones and advanced technology like AI has drastically changed warfare in Ukraine. The conflict has seen both sides rapidly adapting and deploying new technologies, with innovations often being fielded within weeks. The intense use of drones underscores the critical role of technology in modern conflicts, while also highlighting a need for quick adaptation by Western defense systems.

For a special operation, it looked extremely limited – scarcely the evolving future of a new face of warfare.

A short video posted Wednesday on the Telegram social media channel of Ukraine's Special Operations Headquarters showed what appears to be a Russian Zala 41-16E unmanned aerial vehicle flying high above Ukraine's contested Kherson region as a smaller Ukrainian UAV repeatedly attacked it with an attached wooden stick. What kind of UAV the Ukrainians were using remains unclear – the footage was filmed directly from a camera on the drone, which was itself therefore out of shot. All that was directly visible was the forward-pointing wooden pole which the Ukrainian drone pilot attempted to ram through the Russian UAV propeller, eventually appearing to send both crashing to the earth.

Against the colossal scale of the conflict in Ukraine, particularly since Vladimir Putin's 2022 full-scale invasion, that engagement on its own is not of any great significance. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian drones have gone into battle since the war began, with ever more each month – a battle which looks to be as critical as any other to the outcome of the war.

Many of the individual drones may look low-tech – the Russian Zala 41-16E is based on a type first displayed at a Russian arms fair in 2012, and is reported to have entered service three years later. The wider confrontation around their use, however, has become one of the most important arenas of the Ukraine conflict – one in which a war-winning system one week can be rendered swiftly obsolete.

The scale of the change this has wrought on Ukraine's battlefield is hard to overstate. While drones have been used throughout the war, the volume and intensity of their use - and the tit-for-tat technological race to keep them in the air and striking targets while rendering the enemy drones unusable – continues to accelerate.

U.S. officials have publicly acknowledged holding back some ultra-secret drones and associated technology from Ukraine to avoid losing its secrets ahead of a potential even larger war – such as one sparked by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Increasingly, however, the sheer tempo of fighting within Ukraine means technology being used there is developing at a pace far faster than elsewhere in the world.

Those who watched the conflict say both sides are now taking technologies from concept to battlefield often within weeks, very different to traditional defence multi-year procurement timelines. While Ukrainian troops continue to be pushed back slowly by numerically superior Russian forces on the ground, long-range missiles supplied by the U.S., Britain and France continue to reach deep into Russian territory, destroying much of the Russian Black Sea fleet and forcing it out of Crimea.

Meanwhile, drones have made it almost impossible to fight either side to amass significant forces for an offensive. Many of the drones themselves are built by small or medium-sized Ukrainian firms. As it has run short of both soldiers and ammunition, and realising that the U.S. and its European allies would fall well short of pledges to provide more than two million artillery shells by now, Ukraine has set itself the target of making a million drones a year to fill the gap.

The technology behind them, though, is backed up by some giant and growing tech firms that see the conflict as a testbed for new technology in general and artificial intelligence in particular. U.S. AI firm Palantir – which also supplies the Pentagon – has been active in Ukraine since 2022, while German counterpart Helsing signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kyiv government in February.

Another AI firm on a publicity blitz this week is Anduril, named for a sword in Lord of the Rings and founded by U.S. tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, 31, a billionaire from his twenties after founding the virtual reality headset company Oculus. Luckey's firm says it has also been in Ukraine since the first period of the war, and is also refining AI drones and submarines for the Pentagon.

CELLPHONE TOWER MICROPHONES DETECT DRONES Ukraine continues to have a tough time not just on the ground – Russian drones and missiles continue to pound Ukrainian critical infrastructure, especially its electricity grid.

Again, however, this has not prevented sometimes striking innovation. Over the past week, U.S. Air Force General James Hecker, who commands U.S. and NATO air forces in Europe and Africa, and Lieutenant General Stephen Gainey, who leads U.S. Army air and space operations, have both praised a Ukrainian system that uses microphones on cellphone towers to detect drones by their noise.

Based on much more primitive Allied systems during World War Two, data from the direction-sensitive microphones can be used to triangulate the location of Russian drones, allowing them to be engaged by gunfire, jamming or, in theory at least, rammed by another drone with a stick. Hecker told an audience at the Royal International Air Tattoo this week that the system had been designed and built by two Ukrainian engineers in their garage, and rolled out quickly and cheaply.

The trick, officials say, is getting other major Western nations – especially the U.S. – to develop new systems with the same urgency and effectiveness, rather than taking years or decades. A report this week by the U.S. Defense Innovation Board – an official body staffed by ex-top officials - warns that the pace of technological change particularly in unmanned vehicles and artificial intelligence risks leaving behind the world's pre-eminent superpower.

It described the Pentagon procurement system as a "plodding leviathan with a systemic aversion to risk and a lack of urgency that has led to a culture of sustaining the status quo ... Success in related innovation is neither measured nor awarded, and failures are always admonished." Some steps forward are bearing fruit – but they often involve bypassing more sclerotic official systems rather than reforming them. Last year, the Pentagon unveiled a project known as "Replicator" designed to deliver very large numbers of drones quickly for any future China war.

'HELLSCAPE', DRONE SHIELDS Officials say some of those drones - "switchblade" loitering munitions - have already been delivered.

According to commanders at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. military leaders hope to use a plethora of unmanned weaponry to deny the Taiwan Strait to China in the event Beijing tries to invade Taiwan itself, a project known as "HELLSCAPE". Drones potentially operating autonomously and feeding back sensor information into a vast network are also at the heart of emerging multi-million-dollar border protection plans from Poland, the Baltic and Nordic states.

These plans are described sometimes as a "drone shield" and their intent is to field tens of thousands of unmanned vehicles along the borders of exposed eastern European countries to counter any Russian attack. This week at the British army's annual conference in London, Britain's new army chief General Sir Roland Walker put unmanned systems at the heart of a reform package he said would make his force at least twice as lethal by 2027 - the date by which U.S. officials say China may be prepared to invade Taiwan.

Growing numbers of U.S. and European officials fear any such attack would be accompanied simultaneously by a war in Europe, overstretching the U.S. and its European allies. The threat is now so close, Walker told the conference, that much of the military equipment Britain had purchased for the coming years might not have arrived by the time any conflict erupted. That would deepen the need to invest quickly in drone and artificial intelligence technology to be ready.

In both Europe and the Pacific, there are clearly hopes this new form of fighting might help defeat any Russian or Chinese attack with relatively small numbers of friendly casualties. The Ukrainian experience, however, has been anything but bloodless. Thousands of videos show both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers hunted down in dugouts, buildings or open ground by "first-person-view" drones being piloted by other soldiers sometimes only a few miles away.

Giving the drones more ability to select their own targets – essentially by doing the computing and target identification within the drone with or without direction from a human operator – will not make that conflict any friendlier. The lesson of Ukraine is that technology can evolve at amazing speed, but the visceral nature of war remains as vicious and unpleasant as ever. (Editing by Mark Heinrich)

(With inputs from agencies.)