Robot Wars: How technology is shaping Ukraine conflict

Decades-old weapons and cutting-edge technology have made the war in Ukraine a testing ground for how the old can work with the new.

The buzz of AI powered drones from a new era fly above the trench warfare, Soviet-era tanks and artillery bombardments that form much of the imagery of the Russian invasion.

Moscow has reportedly used the Kalashnikov Kub and Lancet Kamikaze drones, while Ukraine has relied on the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 that boasts “laser guided smart ammunition.”

Russia’s use of Iranian supplied Shahed-136 UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), also known as “kamikaze drones,” which reportedly cost as little as $20,000 each, has given Moscow a cheap but effective way to hit Ukrainian energy infrastructure and terrorize the population. Tehran denies it has supplied the drones.

The U.S. has also committed to supplying Ukraine with Switchblade kamikaze drones and “Phoenix Ghosts” that use GPS-tracking and object recognition software.

“I think we’re experiencing the first cyber AI war,” said David Cipoletta, co-founder and chief technical officer of Pison, which is supplying Ukraine’s armed forces with wearable wrist bands that use what is called Neural Control technology.

Worn on the right wrist, the kit allows faster interaction with drones, gestures sending them to a detonator point without the need to use a joystick. Pison will supply this technology to the Ukrainian Armed Forces early in 2023, possibly part of U.S. and U.K. security aid packages.

Cipoletta has met engineers in Ukraine who are building and shipping equipment to the front line.

“The amount of technology innovation in the last few months has been crazy, but there’s so many innovations,” he told Newsweek. “They will draw a new design every two weeks for their drone attachment, for this UGV [unmanned ground vehicle] capability just to help with the armed forces in the front line. They are very united about providing newer capability.

“I think that’s the first time we’re seeing a lot of these drones being used in a military way, as opposed to an insurgent way.”

Cameron Chell, CEO of Draganfly, a drone-tech company founded in 1998, said that the war in Ukraine has meant drastic changes in warfare that have not been seen “maybe since the advent of the tank in World War I.”

His company has provided Ukraine with humanitarian relief drones to transport medicines and detect landmines. It has also delivered reconnaissance drones to DEF-C, a Ukrainian-based defense services company supplying Kyiv’s war effort.

Chell told Newsweek that the deployment of military technology can take years because of regulations but the urgency of getting it on the battlefield has sped up the adoption process.

“When you’re put into a situation like Ukraine has just been put into, they’re just innovating,” he said. This is driven by an attitude that “we may as well try it because we don’t have another option, or we don’t have a better option.”

Regarding the use of drones, “they just threw them into action.” He said his company provides drones that map out the areas that need to be de-mined immediately in a process that is far quicker than “poking and prodding with sticks.”

Air dominance

Chell said that technology has upended the traditional factor of air superiority in determining the outcome of a conflict.

“Air dominance has traditionally been dominated by those who can afford to dominate it,” he said. “What we’ve seen in the Ukraine war is the air dominance from 10,000 feet down. It doesn’t matter how big your system is, doesn’t matter how much money you spend, air dominance 10,000 feet down has been demonstrated to be small UASs [unmanned aerial systems].

“That completely changes the strategy and the tactics of what you do in a particular conflict for theater.”

For use on the ground, Milrem Robotics and the German defense company Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) said they would deliver 14 THeMIS unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) to Ukraine, half of which will evacuate casualties.

Ukrainian robotics company Temerland has released a weaponized reconnaissance robotic platform called GNOM, designed as an anti-mine vehicle, Coda Story reported.

However, Daniel Fiott, professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a research university in Brussels, said that for all the talk of new technology, “what the Ukrainians are actually doing is using well-known tech such as satellites and drones to increase their battlefield edge.

“For the most part, Ukrainian armed forces are dealing with hard steel, mud and blood rather than AI-inspired future battle landscapes of movies,” he told Newsweek.

However, he said that Ukraine’s military has been highly adaptive in procuring commercial off-the-shelf drones and drawn on shrewd techniques, such as monitoring personal apps through geo-location, to help locate Russian forces.

“We have also seen how Ukraine has been able to exploit Russia’s naivety on the battlefield by using AI-enabled systems to intercept Russian communications,” said Fiott, who is also a fellow at the Real Elcano Institute in Madrid.

AI-enabled technologies have also helped defend Ukrainian infrastructure, although there is a limit to this because no amount of cyber defense can protect a power grid when it is hit by a missile.

“We can see some new tech features emerge during this war, but in my view it is not revolutionary,” he added.

The prospect that a new generation of autonomous machines, colloquially known as “killer robots,” could also change modern warfare raises other concerns.

Mark Gubrud, a physicist who proposes banning autonomous weapons, said that he did not believe such equipment was being used without supervision on the battlefield in Ukraine just yet.

However, he told Newsweek: “There should be firm requirements for humans to be in accountable human control of all weapons, particularly those, such as drones, remotely operated systems that look like they might be operating autonomously.

“The danger with autonomous weapons is that they lead to autonomous war more out of human control.”