The war in Ukraine shows how technology is changing the battlefield Analysis by Shashank Joshi

 

Information is everywhere. Ukraine’s access to Starlink, a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, an American firm, means that the lowliest soldiers have connectivity and intelligence that might once have been confined to brigade commanders. No complex equipment is required. In the corner of a smart Kyiv restaurant, a Ukrainian soldier flips open a Macbook and shows this correspondent a live feed of the battlefield, complete with Russian jets on the move.

 

The Delta app, developed by tech-savvy volunteers, combines everything from drone feeds to information gleaned from Russian social media. It is integrated with America’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, so users can pull up images from commercial satellites (though not the most sensitive ones). This allows data streams to be combined in clever ways. A battalion might use American radio-frequency satellites to detect emissions from a Russian radar in a general area, and then send a cheap Chinese-made drone on a one-way mission to pinpoint its location.

 

At the tactical level, Russia has waged a form of networked warfare. After a sluggish start, it now uses computerised command and control to knit together drones and artillery batteries. It also has good human intelligence (ie, spies) and satellites of its own. But the war has shown that intelligence is not enough: you also have to use it well. Russia’s air force failed to pick off Ukraine’s air defences in the first days of fighting not just because of poor training and preparation, but because it took two days, and sometimes longer, for Russian military intelligence to send target information to a command centre in Moscow and onwards to warplanes. The targets were typically long gone by then. Even now, 16 months on, the Russian army struggles to find and strike moving targets.

 

Ukrainian planners, in contrast, waged “data-driven combat” at a level of “speed and precision that nato has not yet achieved”, concludes a report by Nico Lange, a former chief of staff at Germany’s defence ministry. Sometimes that has been down to tools like Kropyva and Delta. Firms such as Palantir, an American tech company, have used cutting-edge ai to help Ukraine find high-value targets. But data-driven warfare can be quietly prosaic, too. A Ukrainian police officer explains that last year his units were locating Russian troops simply by intercepting 1,000 conversations a day (the figure is now higher). If they found a general, the details were shared in an ad hoc WhatsApp group. “We were connected to the people who were literally bombing.”

 

This speed and precision has consequences for tactics. “We’re going to fight under constant observation and in constant contact,” says General James Rainey, head of the us Army’s Futures Command. “There is no break. There is no sanctuary.” One response is to resort to century-old methods. Trenches and fortifications run for hundreds of kilometres across eastern Ukraine. Camouflage is another tactic, though it is getting harder as sensors are combined: a thermal blanket might confound an infrared camera, but radar satellites will pick up subtle tyre tracks leading to a concealed position. The best way of surviving, says rusi, is simply to disperse and move more quickly than the enemy can spot you. Even Ukrainian special forces operating in small teams can be found by Russian drones if they stay in one place for too long.

 

This jeopardy is reflected in a curiously sparse battlefield. In Ukraine some 350,000 Russian troops are arrayed on a front line stretching 1,200km (750 miles)—around 300 men per km and, at times last year, less than half that. That is around a tenth of the average for the same area in the second world war, notes Christopher Lawrence, head of the Dupuy Institute, which collects such data. Battalions of several hundred men fill areas that would once have been covered by brigades of a few thousand.

 

In theory, says Mr Lawrence, this seems a ripe environment for attackers. Thin front lines are easier to break through. And new sensors, more accurate munitions and better digital networks make it easier to find and strike targets. The catch is that attackers must concentrate their forces to pierce well-defended front lines, as Ukraine is now trying to do with its counter-offensive. And such concentrations can be detected and struck—not always, but more often than in the past. “At this time,” concludes Frank Hoffman of the National Defence University in Washington, “a shift in favour of the defender is evident in ground warfare just as it was in the days of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, when the firepower revolution of the late 19th century made massed formations and manoeuvre prohibitively difficult.”

 

The result is a paradox. Precision warfare can counter some advantages of mass: Ukraine was outnumbered 12 to one north of Kyiv. It can also complement mass. Software-based targeting saves around 15-30% in shells, according to sources familiar with the data. But what precision cannot do, says Michael Kofman of the Centre for Naval Analyses (CNA), a think-tank, is a substitute for mass. The idea behind the Soviet reconnaissance-strike complex or America’s RMA was to win by paralysing the enemy, not wearing him down. But there seems to be no escape from attrition. War on the cheap is an illusion. Many people expected Russia’s invasion to be “a second Desert Storm”, says Andrew Krepinevich, an American defence official who pioneered the idea of the RMA in the 1990s. “What we got was a second Iran-Iraq war.”

 

This special report focuses on the military lessons, especially for the West, from the war. These include logistics, civil defence and naval warfare. Russia, too, is learning lessons. The place to begin, however, is with a technology that threatens to blunt some of the advantages of drones and precision: electronic warfare.